Performance Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Methods for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies

'Performance Research Methods' is the first comprehensive guide to contemporary methodologies in performance studies, offering a clear and structured overview of the tools currently shaping research in theatre, dance, and performance. While many volumes focus on individual methods, this book uniquely surveys a range of approaches, presenting their historical background, analytical potential, practical application, and interdisciplinary relevance.

Designed with clarity and usability in mind, each chapter follows a consistent structure: introduction, contextual framing, practical application, case study demonstration, interdisciplinary expansion, and suggestions for further reading. This format enables readers to compare methods with ease and understand how each can be adapted to real-world research.

Developed by scholars actively teaching these methods in graduate and undergraduate programs, this hands-on volume addresses a key gap in the field: the lack of explicit, accessible discussions of performance research methods. Responding to the societal, technological, and ecological contexts of contemporary performance, the book makes visible the knowledge practices that often remain confined to the classroom.

Accessible to students, researchers, and arts professionals alike, this volume provides an essential resource for anyone looking to engage critically and creatively with performance in the twenty-first century.

Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink is Assistant Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at the Media and Culture Studies department of Utrecht University. She teaches in the MA programme Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy as well as in the RMA Media, Art and Performance and the BA Media and Culture Studies. Her research interests include dramaturgy and scenography, spatial theory, performance ecology & new materialism, and performance philosophy. She is the author of the monograph Nomadic Theatre: Mobilizing Theory and Practice on the European Stage (Bloomsbury 2019), based on her PhD research (Utrecht University 2015, cum laude) on nomadic theatre as a concept for analyzing ambulatory theatre and performance installations. Other publications include contributions to (among others) Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and to the volumes The Routledge Companion to European Theatre and Performance (Routledge 2023), Rancière and Performance (Rowman & Littlefield 2021), Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury 2019), Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances (Routledge 2019), Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere (Routledge 2018) and Mapping Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam University Press 2010). In 2013, she co-founded Platform-Scenography, an open-source platform for scenographers and dramaturgs that seeks to stimulate reflection on scenography. She is also active as a dramaturg and artistic adviser and occasionally teaches at various Universities of the Arts in the Netherlands. Dr. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink - Utrecht University (uu.nl)

Laura Karreman is an Associate Professor in Media and Performance Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She teaches in the MA program Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy and the Research MA Media, Art and Performance Studies (MAPS). She is also the programme coordinator of the MAPS programme. She researches the role of embodied knowledge in dance transmission practices, the role of digitization in performance archives, and epistemological questions that relate to new notions of performance knowledge emerging from developments in the area of AI and Human-Robot interaction. Her PhD dissertation, "The Motion Capture Imaginary: Digital Renderings of Dance Knowledge" (Ghent University, 2017), examined how dancing bodies are reimagined through emerging practices and applications involving motion capture and other digital capturing technologies. Within the research group Transmission in Motion of the Department of Media and Culture Studies (UU), she relates to topics such as dramaturgy, somatechnics and mobilizing the archive. In her current research she continues to investigate the rapid growth of motion capture as a tool for movement research and animation in order to critically evaluate the cultural and ethical implications of such practices, which now often remain invisible. She is co-editor of the volume Performance and Posthumanism: Staging Prototypes of Composite Bodies (Palgrave Macmillan 2021). Other recent publications include the book chapters "Breathing Matters: Breath as Dance Knowledge" in Futures of Dance Studies (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) and "How does motion capture mediate dance?" in Contemporary Choreography: A critical reader (Routledge, 2017), and a chapter on "Cultural Dreams of Datafied Bodies" in the Routledge Companion on Performance and Technology (forthcoming). In 2024, she was conference director of the 9th International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO) at Utrecht University.