LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool

Questions, questions, and questions.

What does it mean to make a performance, as a performance artist, about research? How does the creative process change when there is research data at the center of it? Should I try to make more sense of the material? Make sure I am understood? Or can it just be a performance like any other?

From the outside, maybe there is not much difference. But from the inside, from within the creative process, it feels different. The difference is hard to name precisely, but I think it comes down to urgency, and where that urgency comes from.

When I create a performance from my own ideas, the stakes feel personal because it is my voice, and the risk of sharing it feels more personal. In The Optimal Future Professional research project, it is different. In the project, I work from the lived experiences of UXD design students, their expectations, and their negotiations around professionalism. The material is not mine. And yet I am the one deciding how to carry it onto a stage.

How can I make sure that the way I share these student experiences actually speaks for the students, rather than just for me as the person handling the material? Is that question so different from what any researcher faces when choosing how to share findings? Maybe not. But in performance, the questions of representation feel especially present. What do I bring on stage? What do I leave out? What experience am I creating, and for whom? These are interesting and big questions, but also interestingly, I am not looking for answers to them. I feel that they are more of a factor in shaping every creative decision I make.

Which brings me to the question of form itself, which is one reason I wanted to create the performance: what could performance do in a research context? The way I see it, research in its conventional form tends to move from a question to an answer, from the abstract toward something more rational and tangible, something that can be grasped and understood. Performance works differently. It lives in the fine line between clarity and abstraction. Too much abstraction and you lose the audience. Too much clarity and you flatten everything, and you lose the audience just the same. So what does a performance do for research when some things need to be left abstract in order to create meaning?

However, with abstraction, I don’t mean that clarity does not exist in performance. Perhaps ambiguity would be a better word to describe what I mean. In the end, in my thinking, it comes to the role of intention. In performance, the intention has to be clear. Not the meaning — the intention. What I am doing and why I am doing it need to be present and legible. Otherwise, the work becomes blurry. But the meaning that arises from that intention is not mine to fix. It belongs to the person watching. Two people can sit through the same performance and leave carrying entirely different experiences, and both can be completely valid. That openness is not a flaw in the work. It is part of how performance creates meaning.

There also lies the difference between traditional research and performance. More traditional research aims usually to close the gap between what is meant and what is understood, to make findings as transferable and unambiguous as possible. Interpretation is something to be minimised and accounted for, not invited in. There is a good reason for that. But it also means that certain kinds of knowledge, such as the kind that lives in feeling, atmosphere, and personal recognition, get left out, because they cannot survive the journey toward a fixed conclusion.

With this performance, I am trying to hold the researcher’s responsibility to be clear about intention, while trusting the audience to complete the meaning themselves. That tension, between clarity of purpose and openness of experience, is not something to resolve. It is actually the condition that makes the work possible.

That is also where I see the students’ honest and vulnerable lived experiences as the research material lives. Maybe more difficult to capture in a research paper, but very much at home on a stage. What I genuinely believe is that performance can offer something clear and understood, while also leaving room for the kind of abstraction that opens up imagination, feeling, and experience beyond what text alone can carry. Something that is not just understood, but felt.

That is what I am working toward. I would love for you to be part of how it lands!

Save the dates:

July 2nd, 16:00 and 19:00 

July 8th, 13:00 

July 14th, 15:00 and 18:00

Dans en Drama room (OVK29) · De Haagse Hogeschool · Johanna Westerdijkplein 75, 2521 EN Den Haag

Book your spot via this link: https://weeztix.shop/bwjvyr7m