Project Description.

We produce scholarly and artistic content about performance, and we do so in a digital format. We want to use the multi-media convergence made possible by web technologies in order to graphically and textually document, discuss, and imagine performances. After all, the practice of "performance" has always been "multi-media."

DeeP Research

Since "performance" is usually "ephemeral," "live," and "on-the-body," it raises particular challenges for allowing one to conceptualize it. How can one document, let alone analyze, an "object" which is constantly fleeing its own objecthood, that constantly escapes a seemingly solid-state certainty as it moves forward in time to the always coming moment? Rather than eschew such conceptualization, we want to embrace it, while also acknowledging its difficulty. By asking performance scholars to bring more graphic material into their research, we hope to bring performance research nearer to the temporal, embodied forms of performance itself. At the same time, we want to allow for some distance between the two (between document and source), because we think that the process of conceptualizing and assessing performances critically is also an important stage in the ongoing production of new kinds of performance. dpResearch projects should be "deep research" in the sense that they entail thick descriptions of performances; scholars working in rehearsal with artists, and not just after a product has been created; artists working with scholars to find a useful critical distance in the process of their own creativity, as well as to obtain good documents of their work; humanists working with technologists to re-imagine what a scholarly work might look like; and so on.

DeePeR e-search

As the internet has grown, the amount of unverifiable, uncreditable, uncited, unsourced information has also grown, with both positive and negative consequences. dpResearch is aimed primarily at performance scholars and professional artists - but also at students and amateurs of performance - with the desire to create an open vehicle for performance research that also carries the authority of diligent, documented intellectual work. In that sense, we hope to provide performance practitioners and thinkers a "deeper" form of electronic search into performance than is currently available.

dpResearch is published three times a year. Initial publication is slated to begin this fall. Current projects include research into the electronic-text installations of Jenny Holzer; the performance techniques and culture of Cantonese Opera in the San Francisco Area; the collaborative and creative techniques of Chicago performance troupe Goat Island; and a project called "Blackness and Beauty" on the relationship between skin color, culture, and choreography in different parts of the Americas.

Core Personnel:

• Rebecca Groves
• Ehren Fordyce
• Harry Elam

Graduate Fellow:

• Ebony Chatman

Undergraduate Assistant:

• Matthew Griffin

dpResearch contact: Kathryn Syssoyeva <syssoyeva @ stanford.edu>

Visit the dpResearch website (in development).