ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on research with street arts performers to address a series of questions about communicative practices in creative contexts. These include how ethnographic approaches to creative practice might enable new understandings of communication, how focusing on the theatre of the street develop rich understandings of how people draw on their communicative repertoires to produce creative work, and how short-term research can be embedded within a longer-term commitment to working with research participants. Over the course of five months professional and aspiring performers worked together to create a production based on a traditional story told by one of the performers. I examine how, in line with theories of dynamic multilingualism including translanguaging, attention might be paid to the multimodal and the material. I also consider the affordances of and possibilities for ethnography in transdisciplinary research in contexts of arts production and performance. By taking the theatre of the street as its central concern, this research focuses on language use in relation to bodies, objects and space. In foregrounding methodology and reflections on significant moments during street arts production processes, the chapter offers insights into ethnography as transdisciplinary dialogue.
