A new film showcases Central colleagues’ practice research submissions to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. These boxes were led by Prof David Harradine (Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice) with support from Dr Joe Parslow (Lecturer, Contemporary Performance Practice) and designed by Valle Walkley. The film was led by David Harradine, Prof Kate Elswit (Professor of Performance and Technology) with filmmaker Rich Southgate.
What was the inspiration behind this project?
In the film, David Harradine explains, ‘Many of the researchers at Central, theatremakers, directors, designers, live artists, composers, artists and practitioners working across art forms, use our creative processes as the way to do our research, rather than through academic writing. And the problem that that posed for REF was how to present these research projects which have existed in forms that can’t be delivered to the assessor. So these materials that we created, with a graphic design studio called Valle Walkley – Daniella Valle and Richard Walkley – were our way of re-forming and re-presenting those practice research projects in a format that could be shared.
There’s this incredible journey of learning for how do we do this. How do we celebrate the value of our practice research so that it is as valuable, as tangible, as enduring as research that might appear in the form of a book.’
What’s in a box?
The boxes contain a cover image, a short intro, a booklet telling the research story, a USB drive, and individually-selected ephemera that share the practice research and provide supporting documentation. The full arc is represented as a designed, composed, crafted outcome.
‘It was really important to us that these materials that we produced somehow reflected and represented the material, physical properties of the practices which had been created,’ David Harradine explains in the film.
‘The texture and the smell and the physical work and the craft of doing practice research could also somehow be evoked through the gathering together of very different forms of content, yes sometimes written published content, but also clothing and objects, detritus from these research processes, so that the full arc of a research project could somehow be represented from the very beginning, the sketches, the gathering together of stuff and inspiration right through to a designed, composed, crafted outcome.’
Where can you find the boxes?
They are kept in Central’s library where they are accessible to students, and a full set of the booklets is also in the British Library. The boxes allow us to make our practice research visible, searchable, and available.
As David Harradine sums up at the end of the film, ‘We’re immensely proud of what we’ve produced. To have these physical representations of this body of research really speaks to the importance of practice research generally and its growing significance in our field, but also it really demonstrated how Central values that research, and how important and central it is to the work that we do.’
Watch the film:
