This chapter introduces data-driven research methods for theatre and performance. Drawing on two case studies, the chapter demonstrates how to define and identify data, how to collect and organize it, and how to analyse it through computational methods. Careful attention is paid to the tension between a rigorous data model and the uncertainty and ‘messiness’ present in data’s sources. The conclusion promotes data-driven thinking as a way to expand the context and scope of TaPS analyses and to encourage explicit reflection on the mental categories and models within which we understand performance.

In this conversation, Adrian Curtin, Prarthana Purkayastha, and meLê yamomo highlight how their research on sound and dance engages embodied knowledges and vice versa. They account for how archival work challenges presumptions about the research process as well as what the scholar assumes they are looking for in the archive. The research process demands flexibility because studying performance invites interpretation, adaptation, and cultural understanding as intermediaries in understanding archival materials. Each participant emphasizes how, for them, research processes have incorporated creative endeavours because of the embodied and artistic dimensions of performance and historiographic analysis.

This chapter reflects on Awo Mana Asiedu’s approaches to researching audiences in Ghana, a predominantly oral context. It takes as its starting point her motivations for doing this kind of research and then outlines her work to date in this area, particularly with the audiences of Roverman Productions, a major performance group in Accra. It foregrounds the importance of the perspectives of the audiences themselves and how they perceive the impact that performances audiences watch have upon them.

Tracy C. Davis outlines facets of tradecraft in theatre and performance studies (TaPS). Performances based on dramatic texts or social interactions can take into account distinctions between an aesthetic focus, case studies of performance history, and extrinsic cultural factors; each kind of research prioritizes particular kinds of information and has predominant methodologies for analysis. Additionally, Davis explicates the incompleteness and unrecoverability of performances in relation to different methodologies, and the salience of theory to different methodological traditions. Ultimately, combinations are likely in order to address the complexity of TaPS research.

This conversation between Patrick Anderson and Natalie Alvarez focuses on how to do collaborative research, bridge incommensurable differences through understanding, and enjoin researchers’ subjectivity with those with whom they are in conversation. Featured situations for ethical consideration include community–police liaisons and consulting on police training. Considering the tensions between the professional prerogatives of the researcher and the ethics of the participant–observer relationship, one must ask who the research is for, who benefits from it, and how to present, experience, and advocate ethical alignments. Academics’ labour, situatedness, and intersectionality may affect Institutional Review Board (IRB) processes and the stakes of working with communities and academic institutions.

This chapter examines how the research methodology of learning-disabled theatre requires a different consideration of temporality. Tony McCaffrey draws on eighteen years’ work with Different Light Theatre in Christchurch, New Zealand to show how epistemic inequity between non-disabled and disabled participants inflects the outcome-led temporality of ‘inclusion’. He articulates that shifts need to occur from the rush to emulate non-disabled performance towards more speculative practice. The research methods of this practice encompass a more elastic notion of time, allowing for non-verbal, dysfluent rhetoric and a non-linear chronology of development in order to admit the possibility of learning from learning-disabled artists.

Anke Charton takes the backstory of the canario, a baroque court dance, as an example to consider mixed methods in historiographic work. Marginalized knowledges, in particular, benefit from such an approach. Performance practices that have left few conventional traces behind can be explored more thoroughly if those traces are queried from different perspectives: reading archival sources against the grain, drawing on positionality, and engaging multiple temporal frameworks. The case of the canario illustrates the additional challenge – true for much of early modern Western theatre history – of working with a later, superimposed narrative that obscures an earlier, less-documented practice.

Different experiences, archives, and ontologies create complexity that must be addressed in archival (historic) and ethnographic (contemporary) contexts in order to assess and curate data, whether early twentieth-century vocal recordings of Jewish performers, transnational records reflecting colonial Mexico, or African dancers’ performances in Korea. Ruthie Abeliovich, Leo Cabranes-Grant, and Soo Ryon Yoon discuss the ‘messiness’ of research and advocate for an affective ‘listening’ practice that can lead to fresh directions when operating with little or no archival material, working multilingually, and developing reciprocal performance ethnographies. Conceptual shifts can occur that demand rewriting and sometimes starting over, revising foundational research questions, and clarifying approaches.

This chapter addresses the methodological challenges presented by multi-sited, collaborative research design in TaPS, which provides a fruitful space for considering the benefits of mixed methods approaches. Multi-sited, multi-collaborator research projects frequently feature methodological variation. Whereas mixing methods addresses discrepancies between the different sites and cases that such a project brings together, collaborative research ensures that participants’ rationales for selecting and combining methods remain explicit. Emine Fişek illustrates these processes with reference to a hypothetical research project on theatre and performance practices responding to the European migrant crisis of 2015–16.

To ask ‘how do you do what you do?’ is both a technical and personal question. Brandi Wilkins Cantanese, Nicola Mārie Hyland, and Ben Spatz complicate the idea that methods are separable from researchers’ lives, while advocating for decolonizing research. Methods implicate both what and when: they are immanent in everything the scholar does. Exploring methods that gather information in relational and communal ways, the conversants reflect on how using various media in performance research (re-)contextualizes methods and the binary between bodily presence and recorded acts. They conclude that interdisciplinary research should invest in decolonizing methodologies as an ethical practice that both augments and challenges academic training.

Katerina Teaiwa explores the relationship between embodied knowledges, indigenous identity, and place-making in South Pacific dancing. Her studies, training, and experience highlight the issues of how to decolonize something without decolonizing its form. Teaiwa demonstrates how dance is embodied and emplaced for Indigenous people of the Pacific islands: her own Banaban, I-Kiribati, and African American heritage influences her approach, pedagogy, and values rooted in kinship, reciprocity, and a deep connection to land and sea. Methods and means for experiencing this epistemology are shared through exhibition curation.

Maggie B. Gale explores ways of both framing and structuring the beginnings of a research project, and finding what might be called a ‘research niche’. She uses the case study of an emerging research project to articulate different possible approaches to conceptualizing the starting point, direction, and shape of a project, as well as working practices which might be useful in research design and method. The chapter also explores a series of working principles for avoiding the pitfalls of research distractions, without missing out on the serendipitous discoveries which a more unstructured process might allow. Gale’s own research on Elsa Lanchester illustrates the principles.