ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Performance as Research (PAR) project began with a 'formless hunch' rather than the framing of a question. It focuses on the PAR Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research and, in particular, the 'participatory laboratory' that takes place within each conference. The chapter shows that both performance-as-research and transdisciplinary research enable cultural and epistemological transgressions through their focus upon practitioner knowledge, problem solving, and 'failure-as-resistance'. It suggests that any revaluation of failure within PAR should take account of transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. The chapter discusses ways in which PAR enables specific or generic modes of knowing and how that might inform an understanding of inter/trans-cultural practice in a particularly reflexive manner? The notion of 'inter/trans-cultural' as a particular form of interdisciplinarity is now pretty standard – even 'historical' – given its emergence through theatre studies in the 1970–1980s, for instance in the work of Patrice Pavis transdisciplinarity.
