Editorial - Writing Theatre: Performing Arts and Ethnography Anna Raisich und Ulf Otto (München) This special issue is concerned with the question of writing. The writing of theatre, not plays, i. e. writing that documents theatre. We would like to tackle this question not in terms of an abstract theory of representation but as a pragmatic exercise in translation and mediation, as our concern with writing is first and foremost practical. It arises from a turn to ethnographical research strategies. Witnessing the daily struggles of making theatre work challenges the ways of making sense of it. Semiotics thought of culture as text. Inspired by phenomenology and post-structuralism, performance theory centred theatre on the event of performance. Hence, the writing of theatre, be it manual or with the help of media, was largely conceived of as some kind of recording. The job was to reproduce an individualized aesthetic experience of an ephemeral event. Hanging out backstage, however, the challenge is who and what to describe, who and what to consider. It turns writing into a pragmatic problem, i. e. how to convey in writing the complexity of theatre as a process and a socio-material assemblage, and how to relate to it in doing so. And it raises the bigger epistemological question: How does our scholarly writing of theatre influence the way theatre matters? The present special issue returns to the question of writing as an epistemic practice rather than a concept within a linguistic framework. It is part of a wider empirical turn in theatre, dance and performance studies that foregrounds the socio-materiality of theatre and performance. Recent research has increasingly become interested in theatre and performances as specific social and material phenomena, and, accordingly, in an empirical perspective. Rehearsal studies, audience research, and institutional approaches 1 are returning to the question of writing in a double sense: on the one hand, writing, and more generally recordings, are increasingly recognized as an integral part of performance instead of as outside of or opposed to it. And at the same time, writing resurfaces as an epistemic practice, as a way of relating, or rather a myriad of ways of relating to the object of research. With a growing interest in social science methods, attention shifts from the artefacts to practices and processes of writing: from media to mediation. 2 Moreover, this empirical turn is part of a broader paradigm shift from post-structuralist to new materialist approaches. In the 1980s, the Writing Culture debate in cultural anthropology 3 drew attention to the linguistic structures and narrative patterns employed by social sciences, arguing, like Hayden White in the field of historiography, 4 against a positivism that had reactionary and authoritarian undertones. Today, these constructivist and de-constructivist perspectives have long been established and can be taken for granted. And at the same time, we are now confronted with a new form of post-truth authoritarianism. It pursues a radically relativist agenda and has largely moved from selling ideology to denying factuality. So, while in the past century it was essential to raise the question of writing to call attention to the contingency of culture and history and to criticize grand narratives, we believe that nowadays we need to return our attention to writing as a safeguard for objectivity, to its merits in securing the institutions that carry democracy, as a Forum Modernes Theater, 36/ 1-2, 71 - 74. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ FMTh-36-0006 way of engaging with the material world and in relation to the ethics of research and politics of care. So, our concern with writing is nothing new, nor is it neutral. By turning to the question of writing from an empirical perspective we - like many others, as the essays assembled here prove - endorse ethnographical research. Engaging with theatre ethnographically has, so we believe, multiple advantages for the study of theatre. One of them is the relief from explanation. 5 Though, luckily, the times are past when professors thought they knew better what actors were doing because they knew Diderot, Lessing, and Brecht, expectations to have a better understanding of and provide a higher meaning to what ’ s going on onstage remain. In contrast, leaving behind (for now) our epistemologically secured position in the audience and moving backstage or elsewhere opens different ways of engaging not only with our object of study - the (music/ dance/ theatre) performance - but with the people who share our concerns with it, who care about it and care for it in various ways. So, the relief from explanation is not as selfish as it may seem; it makes it possible to address various forms of reflexivity and “ matters of concern ” , to use Latour ’ s phrase, 6 and to foster responsible research practices. Secondly, instead of having to know better, working ethnographically allows for exploratory research, not in the problematic sense of ‘ discovering ’ new fields of study for theatre scholars by importing methods from the social sciences. If there is one thing to learn from ethnography about ethnography, it ’ s that it is not a method, but rather a style, a strategy, a commitment. 7 Above all, working ethnographically means leaving behind the privileged position of the knowing subject and entering a relationship with the field, one that is mediated by all sorts of writing techniques and technologies. It also means engaging with the requirements of the field as well as the concepts and categories that one encounters there. This process of translation and mediation entails an epistemically productive uncertainty that not only requires us to reflect on our own position in relation to our object of research, but also to constantly recalibrate our knowledge strategies and research instruments - which can be an exhaustive task at times as it means constantly negotiating familiar concepts and disciplinary boundaries. The third advantage has to do with the notion of the field. Traditionally, the ethnographic researcher leaves their familiar terrain to enter the field as a ‘ stranger ’ to then return ‘ home ’ and report on it. This conception of the field, which was debunked a while ago by ethnologists coming to terms with the colonial past of their discipline, is misleading as it suggests that the field is something ‘ out there ’ waiting to be explored by an ethnographer. In practical terms, it quickly becomes clear that the field has no natural boundaries. Rather, these must be defined in the research process, which is always multilateral. This is particularly evident when it comes to establishing access to the field, which usually requires a great deal of relational work that extends over the entire research process. Failure is always an option. The field thus exerts a certain epistemic pressure on the research; just as the research in turn constitutes the field. Consequently, ethnographic work requires a radical situating of one ’ s research: not in the sense that it is necessary to reflect on the point of view from which one looks at the object, but in the more radical sense that object and research are something different depending on the research situation. Therefore, turning to ethnography and thereby turning theatre from an event into a field not only entails a critical self-reflection of the situatedness of knowledge production; it brings to the fore “ the basic fact that theatre 72 Anna Raisich / Ulf Otto is not one thing ” 8 , as Paul Rae put it, thus bringing us closer not to its one true self but to its reality. The good thing here is, again, that we do not have to know in advance what (good) theatre is and, implicitly, what it is good for. These are some conclusions drawn from a conference that was the starting point for this special issue; a programme that in many ways still remains to be realised. Accordingly, we see this special issue as a starting point, an incomplete inventory of existing approaches and an occasion for further engagement. Back in July 2023, we invited scholars to Munich to share and discuss experiences made with ethnographically inspired ways of writing theatre. 9 Some of them generously agreed to contribute to this special issue. Sending out the call for the conference, we encouraged speakers to share fieldnotes and recordings, as we were curious about the microscopic observations as well as the big questions these new ways of writing raise. These questions include matters of reflexivity, situatedness, positioning, and relationality that are addressed by the authors of the first essay. Informed by disability studies, Elena Backhausen, Mirjam Kreuser, and Benjamin Wihstutz argue that researching disability performance requires foregrounding situated, shifting, and relational forms of positioning rather than fixed identities. Writing theatre emerges through careoriented, reflexive, and collaborative methods that make embodied dynamics between researchers and performers visible. Embodied dynamics are the pivot point of the second essay. Benjamin Hoesch shows that theatre festivals shape how knowledge about performance is produced, making participant observation and reflexive, embodied writing essential to challenge festival logics by tracing how they influence and shape artists, audiences, and research itself. This mutual influence is at the centre of the third essay. A former Forsythe dancer herself, Elizabeth Waterhouse examines how ethnographic methods have been adapted to study William Forsythe ’ s choreography, revealing various forms of researcher-artist entanglement. She advocates for an expanded ethnographic spectrum within theatre and performing arts scholarship to capture the complexity of choreographic working processes and the works themselves. Speaking of the work itself brings up the inevitable question of how to deal with performance analysis as an established strategy of writing theatre. This question is tackled by Stefanie Husel who suggests that performance analysis is already implicitly ethnographic as it relies on situated, reflexive writing. She proposes writing theatre as an embedded practice that follows performance beyond the stage to reveal its socio-cultural entanglements. Lastly, Sebastian Sommer reflects on performance analysis as a method to study far-right protests. He argues that it requires ethnographic reflexivity and fieldbased adaptation for performance analysis to become a situated, multi-perspectival practice that can capture how collective political performances shape identities. One of the things performance analysis and ethnography have in common is that, in their own ways, they both remain a kind of black box. Both largely derive their credibility from the claim to have been ‘ there ’ . What exactly happened there, in the field, and how it became a text, often remains opaque. Anthropologist Jonas Tinius 10 puts it in a nutshell, quoting E. E. Evans-Pritchard ’ s account of Bronis ł aw Malinowski ’ s advice “‘ not to be a bloody fool ’” 11 about it. Even if the times in which novices received nothing but macho advice from the veterans of ethnography are long gone, according to Tinius, “ fieldwork ’ s enigmatic aura remains. ” 12 This is exactly why we were interested in the specificities of doing fieldwork (and performance analysis, for that matter) 73 Editorial - Writing Theatre: Performing Arts and Ethnography and writing as a process and practice. By asking specifically about the details of cases and the associated challenges, our aim was not to find ready-made solutions for generalizable problems, but rather to consider the messiness of ethnographic fieldwork and to contribute to opening up the black boxes, while reflecting on the epistemological repercussions for our discipline(s). We thank the authors for providing insights into their research processes. To conclude by quoting from the call for papers: What happens to theatre when scholars move backstage, and what can we learn from there about our scholarly selves? We are curious to find out. Notes 1 To reference just a few publications: Gay McAuley, Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process, Manchester and New York 2012; Matthew Reason et al. (eds.), Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, London and New York 2022; Christopher Balme and Tony Fisher (eds.), Theatre Institutions in Crisis: European Perspectives, London and New York 2021. 2 Bruno Latour, “ On Technical Mediation ” , Common Knowledge 3 (1994), pp. 29 - 64. 3 James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley 1986. 4 Hayden White: The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore 1987. 5 Cf. Heather Love, “ Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn ” , New Literary History 41 (2010), pp. 371 - 391. 6 Bruno Latour, “ Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern ” , Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), pp. 225 - 248. 7 Jonas Tinius, who has become famous among German theatre scholars as a representative of the anthropological position in theatre research due to his ethnographic study of a German public theatre (see fn. 9), sums it up in his contribution to the German-speaking methodological debate: Jonas Tinius, “ Die Ethnographie als Methode der Theaterwissenschaft? ” , in: Christopher Balme and Berenika Szymanski-Düll (eds.), Neue Methoden der Theaterwissenschaft, Tübingen 2020, pp. 315 - 336. 8 Paul Rae, Real Theatre: Essays in Experience, Cambridge 2019, p. 29. 9 The conference was entitled “ Writing Theater - Qualitative Methods, Situated Knowledge, and the Making of Performance ” and took place from 5 to 7 July 2023, as part of the DFG-project “ The Art of Crafts: A Praxeography of the Theatre Apparatus ” at the Institute of Theatre Studies at LMU Munich. 10 Tinius has published numerous articles on the work of the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim (Germany) and co-edited a book on its co-founder and charismatic leader Roberto Ciulli. His monograph State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge 2023) offers a comprehensive insight into the workings of this particular institution and its position- (ing) within the German public theatre system. It is also the first (as far as we know) large-scale ethnographic study of a German theatre institution. 11 Jonas Tinius, “ Fieldwork as Method in Theatre and Performance Studies ” , in: Tracy C. Davis and Paul Rae (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research in Theatre and Performance Studies, Cambridge 2004, pp. 188 - 210, here p. 188. 12 Ibid. 74 Anna Raisich / Ulf Otto