Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration

Martin Blain is a Reader in Music Composition at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a composer and performer and collaborator on the project The Good, The God and The Guillotine. He has published on collaboration, ‘liveness’ in performance, and Practice as Research in a variety of journals and book publications.Helen Julia Minors is School Head of Performing Arts and Associate Professor of Music at Kingston University, London, UK. She has published books including Music, Text and Translation (2012) and Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician (2019), co-edited with Laura Watson. She has recently contributed chapters to The International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research (2016) and Translation and Multimodality: Beyond Words (2019)

“This is a wide-ranging and practically useful contribution to the existing literature on artistic research, and it is welcome to see researchers putting collaborative research under the spotlight, rather than uncritically embracing it as a universally good thing. As well as manifold opportunities, there are challenges, limitations, and risks of undertaking collaborative practice, which the essays gathered in this book do well to address.” (Jacob Thompson-Bell, Leonardo, leonardo.info, August, 2022)

• 1. Chapter One: Introduction: Defining the Territory: Interrogating the Collaborative Processes, Issues and Concepts; Martin Blain and Helen Julia Minors.- 2. Chapter Two: The Place of Artistic Research in Higher Education; Martin Blain and Helen Julia Minors.- 3. Chapter Three: Why collaborate? Towards a Philosophy and Politics of Creative Collaboration; Mine Doğantan-Dack.- 4. Chapter Four: The Aesthetics of Collaboration; Andy Hamilton.- 5. Chapter Five: In The Bee Hive: Valuing Craft in the Cultural Industries; Alice Kettle, Helen Felcey and Amanda Ravetz.- 6. Chapter Six: The Right Thing to Play? Issues of Riff, Groove and Theme in Freely Improvised Ensemble Music: A Case Study; Adam Fairhall.- 7. Chapter Seven: Soundpainting: a Tool for Collaborating during Performance.- Helen Julia Minors.- 8. Chapter Eight: Collaboration and the Practitioner-Researcher; Tom Armstrong.- 9. Chapter Nine: Creative Industries and Copyright: Research into Collaborative Artistic Practices in Dance; Mathilde Pavis and Karen Wood.- 10. Chapter Ten: Romance and Contagion: Notes on a Conversation Between Drawing and Dance; Sally Morfill.- 11. Chapter Eleven: The Good, The God and the Guillotine: Insider/Outsider perspectives; Martin Blain and Jane Turner.- 12. Chapter Twelve: Connecting Silos: The New Arts Organisations and HEI Collaborations; Roger McKinley and Mark Wright.