Research project It takes an entire industry to cultivate artistic leadership
This thesis project has artistic leadership in Swedish institutional theatre as its area of interest. With an aim to challenge a dominant notion of artistic leadership being the subjective concern of a charismatic, individual leader, Carolina Frände will investigate an alternative understanding of leadership in Swedish theatre.
In general, stories are at the core of what theatres do, they tell stories to an audience.
In the same spirit professional knowledge is usually traded orally and often also informally within the theatre organization. Theatre practitioners rely heavily on telling short stories of how things were done in the past, of successes and failures, of good examples and bad ones, of how professions are practiced, and roles should be executed.
Thus, from a (post)structuralist perspective the narratives that tumble around in a theatre organisation carry meaning, no matter how banal they may seem. Methodologically I will therefore pursue my project as a qualitative ethnograpical study and collect a specific kind of informal and narrative data that can be said to characterize theatre organizations, i.e., anecdotes. I will regard anecdotes, usually considered negligible gossip, as potential carriers of knowledge, statements that both shape and are shaped by what they are specifically about, artistic leadership and artistic leaders.
Project description
As main tool in the field work I will use an analogue discussion-based boardgame, specifically developed for the purpose of my project. Professor in Game Design Doris Rusch at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland is collaborating with me to build the actual structure and plot of the game. In a playful way the game will invite artistic as well as technical and administrative staff at institutional theatres to – in smaller groups of five-six players - share their ideas, perceptions, and assumptions of artistic leadership.
Participants will face challenges that trigger and encourage them to share anecdotes based on their experiences of artistic leaders and artistic leadership. They will be asked to envision how the artistic leader would act or behave in certain situations, all related to everyday life in a theatre. It is a collaborative processual game, where the collective level is essential rather than the individual contributions. I will document every game-session in ways that will make a wide range of qualities in the anecdotal practice – use of language, bodily expressions and impressions, performative dimensions - available for reflection and analysis. The participating research-players will be encouraged to base their anecdotes on memories and experiences as well as notions and fantasies. As there is no objective claim of truth in the project, it does not matter if the anecdotes shared are accurate or inaccurate, true or false.
The theoretical framing and the research context is only preliminary as I will need to conduct the fieldwork before deciding on how to approach the material. My research question is posed from a (post)stucturalist perspective, and I will situate my study in the broad field of Critical Leadership Studies. Narrative theory is also a field I most probably will draw from as well as some perspectives from (critical) discourse theory.
Hopefully, this in-depth study will rather contribute to how and in what senses artistic leadership in theatre can be understood as a collectively constructed phenomenon.