Sarah Scaife is a PhD Researcher in the Department of Communications, Drama, and Film at the University of Exeter. Her enquiry is co-supervised at the University of Bristol.
Cancer is an illness with a long tail. If you are fortunate enough to recover it can still take many months, indeed years, to adjust and rebalance your sense of self and your relationships. This post looks at my recent collaborative practice-based research project which centred on reflective gatherings with people who have lived experience of breast cancer treatment.
The project was a form of laboratory within a lineage of performative drama research, taken out of the theatre and into the field (Brown, 2019). My research asked how such a ‘lab’ might hold rich and honest dialogue about tender matters. In a very recent paper, Freiband points out that “A lab or a studio does not have to describe a place, but in fact describes a ‘set of protocols’” (Freiband, 2024, p.6).
Our laboratory was based in a beautiful garden
The enquiry was made in collaboration with Emma Capper, a professional Nature and Forest Therapy Guide (founder of Creative Journeys in Nature). We set up this field laboratory in a beautiful setting in South Devon from deep winter to late spring, 2024. Over six sessions a small and intimate group of self-selecting participants joined us to explore ways to walk within and beyond spells of illness.
The protocols we developed included a simple, formal method of sound recording, using this lab to document participant reflections on the more-than-human medicine we were testing. This recording protocol created a listening space of care and respect which we used in all of the six sessions. In this way our ‘lab’ generated a type of data which Freiband (2024, p.9) calls relational, ecological, comparative, and in-commoning.
Our sound recording protocol used simple equipment, care and respect to gather rich results
The sessions offered gentle but provocative prompts to create conversation and embodied, live experiences which we hoped would fertilise radical re-imaginings of our future selves. Alongside generating research data for my PhD, there were immediate and direct benefits for the participants who joined in this research. Our approach enabled participants to find connection with nature and each other, to change perspective about their own bodies and to identify some of what they need now to experience wellbeing.
Sound recording was the primary method used to document participant reflections on the medicine of this therapeutic environment and experience. Shared with formal consent, these sound recordings are central to my project record (research data).
Participants spoke positively and eloquently about how they experienced the method and invitations we devised and offered in the sessions. One woman, for example, explained how an encounter with what we all called the ‘Story Tree’ enabled her to reframe her sense of her own post-surgery damaged body. In a powerful and moving statement she describes the relief of at last coming to seeing her own post-surgery body as a mature tree which has survived difficulties and yet remains strong and vigorous in many ways.
This phase of my research is an artistic- rather than clinical- trial to investigate the efficacy of this type of eco-medicine in community. Practice-based research is a rich means to enable and evidence redistributions of agency in narratives of illness. The research collaboration discussed here builds on my first practice project (Scaife, 2021), where I created a prototype walking ‘medicine’, dispensed in the form of podcasts and on community radio.
I am an artist and practice-based PhD candidate in Performance Practice. Activated by my own lived experience of breast cancer treatment, my research explores ‘medicines of uncertainty’. My PhD research seeks to explore and develop new ways of thinking and speaking about spells of illness in a more-than-human world, using polyvocal, practice-based performance methods.
I have already shared some early findings and understandings as my enquiry progresses. In a conference presentation at the University of Worcester with Emma (Scaife and Capper, 2024), I contextualised this project in relation to health geographer, Wilbert Gesler’s notion of ‘therapeutic landscapes’ as embodied-emotional-spiritual-social experiences (Bell et al, 2018).
In a hybrid essay published by The Polyphony, I identify the benefits of sauntering as a particular form of walking for wellbeing (Scaife, 2024). At our departmental start-of -academic-year symposium, I presented on the Collaborative Ecologies panel.
At the time of writing, I am immersed in analysing and synthesising this rich and polyvocal stream of participant expression. Freiband (2024, p.10) mirrors my own thinking when he writes:
It is the ambiguous space of artistic knowing. […] this multiplicity and complexity is a characteristic of undisciplinary knowledge creation: in foregrounding relationships and sharing of disciplinary expertise[…], the knowledge that emerges can be messy, useful, surprising. […] It’s alive and requires care, just like the people who gathered to weave it together.
I would, however, refer to the ambiguous space of artistic uncertainty, rather than artistic knowing. Talking with my supervisors Dr Bryan Brown and Dr Maria Vaccarella is a fertile and productive experience. There is much more to document and understand from this unusual data set and I expect to be working with it for some time to come.
This collaborative research project was made possible by support from the AHRC South, West and & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership Research Support Fund.
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