Theatre Form, ABR & Practice-Led Inquiry
My understanding of research has expanded considerably throughout my doctoral study. I entered the program already accustomed to using artistic practice, embodied experience, and reflection as ways of understanding the world around me, but I had not always understood those practices as forms of inquiry. My earlier scholarship, including my MA thesis in Drama Therapy, Navigating Emotional Terrain: The Impact of Drama Therapy on Actor Well-Being in Stage Performance, relied on theoretical analysis and autoethnographic reflection to examine actor well-being across the performance process. In that work, lived experience functioned alongside theory as a source of scholarly reflection, positioning embodied experience as relevant to inquiry rather than something that needed to be separated from it. What has developed through my doctoral work is a more rigorous understanding of how lived and artistic experience can become research: how questions are constructed, how experience becomes data, how positionality shapes interpretation, and how systematic reflection can generate knowledge rather than simply document experience.
My independent study with Professor Joe Salvatore, How Structure and Framing Within Rehearsal and Performance Processes Shape Performer Experience, became the clearest expression of that development. Conducted alongside my participation in the development and Off-Broadway production of Bigfoot: The Musical, the study allowed me to investigate performer experience from within the artistic process itself. I employed a reflexive arts-based research approach grounded in three related methodological frames: self-study, embodied observation, and practice-as-research. Self-study positioned my own experience as a site of inquiry. Embodied observation attended to what I registered physically and affectively while participating in the process. Practice-as-research allowed the artistic process itself to function as a legitimate site of knowledge production. Together, these frameworks allowed me to move between performer, observer, and researcher without pretending that I could or should separate myself from the environment I was studying.
That methodological shift was significant for me. I have spent much of my professional life inside rehearsal and performance environments, and I have long noticed how pacing, communication, leadership, fatigue, artistic expectations, and production structures affect the people working within them. The independent study required me to move beyond noticing. Beginning before the first rehearsal and continuing through rehearsal, technical rehearsals, previews, and performances, I recorded voice-note reflections around the workday that captured my responses to rehearsal pacing, note delivery, structural transitions, fatigue, ensemble dynamics, and changing production conditions. I then returned to those reflections analytically, working to move beyond immediate emotional response and identify structural patterns across the experience. In this way, reflection became more than recollection. It became a systematic research practice.
The study also complicated my understanding of positionality. As both performer and researcher, I could not occupy a neutral position outside the production, nor did the methodology require me to. My history with the material, my relationship to the production, and my professional identities shaped what I noticed and how I interpreted it. Rather than attempting to eliminate those influences, I learned to identify them and account for them within the research process. This understanding has become increasingly important to my emerging identity as a practitioner-researcher: proximity to the work can produce knowledge, but only when that proximity is accompanied by reflexivity, transparency, and sustained critical examination. [See Appendix: ABR Independent Study]
My coursework in qualitative inquiry expanded this methodological development through a shift in focus, from examining my own experience to interpreting the experience of another person. In Mini Assignment D for RESCH-GE 2140: Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Professor Heddy Lahmann, I analyzed a semi-structured interview with a professional actor and educator using reflexive thematic analysis. Rather than treating frequency as equivalent to significance, I examined patterns of meaning in relation to my research question and developed five themes: institutional normalization of harm, racialized experience in training, the absence of structured well-being support, the distinction between discomfort and harm, and self-medication as coping. The assignment provided practical experience moving from participant language to codes, patterns, themes, and interpretive claims while remaining accountable to what the participant had actually offered.
That work also required a different kind of reflexivity. Because I share significant professional experience with the population I am studying, my familiarity with actor-training environments gives me access to cultural knowledge and language that can deepen my interpretation while simultaneously creating the possibility of over-identification. My positionality work required me to name that tension directly. I recognized that my experiences as an actor, therapist, educator, and researcher influence what I notice, which questions I ask, and which moments I understand as significant. I have therefore come to understand reflexivity not as an attempt to remove myself from the research, but as an ongoing practice of making my relationship to the research visible. Mini Assignment D demonstrates my developing ability to work within that tension while maintaining analytical rigor and relational accountability. [See Appendix: Mini Assignment D]
My completion of the CITI Program certification in Social and Behavioral Research in February 2026 further reflects my preparation to conduct research with human participants. As my culminating study will involve semi-structured interviews with actors in higher education training programs, this training provides an important ethical foundation for the research I am preparing to undertake. [See Appendix: CITI Certification]
Theatre form is also integral to the culminating project I am developing. Performing with Care and its first curricular framework, The Ritual of the Run, draw on structures already embedded within theatrical practice, including ritual, embodiment, reflection, ensemble, and the temporal progression of rehearsal and performance. Within the culminating project, these forms constitute the practice-based work that the qualitative study is intended to inform. By centering actors' own accounts of well-being before formally implementing or evaluating the curriculum, I can place my existing practitioner knowledge in conversation with experiences beyond my own. The findings may affirm, complicate, or challenge assumptions embedded within Performing with Care and will inform how the curriculum is subsequently refined. In this way, theatre form is not simply the context surrounding my culminating project, but part of the practice to which the knowledge generated through the research will return. [See Appendix: Performing with Care]
Across these experiences, I have come to understand arts-based research and practice-led inquiry not simply as research that involves art, but as approaches that recognize artistic practice, embodied experience, and reflective engagement as legitimate ways of generating knowledge. At the same time, my qualitative inquiry coursework has strengthened my ability to move between embodied and practice-based knowledge and systematic analysis of participant experience. These are not future aspirations. They are documented capacities that my culminating study will build upon and extend.
The question of how actors in higher education training programs describe and make meaning of their well-being across rehearsal and performance processes requires a methodology capable of attending to experience as embodied, contextual, relational, and interpreted. My work in arts-based research, practice-led inquiry, reflexive thematic analysis, and researcher positionality has begun to provide that methodological foundation. I am no longer approaching the questions that emerged from my artistic life only as a performer who has experienced them. I am developing the tools to investigate them systematically as a practitioner-researcher.