Research ethics: Dance, presence, performance and performativity

Abstract

Embracing via Levinas the face as the origin of ethics, I explore here the research ethics of openness. If research is responsive, it will have to face up to the other. Face – as the presence of personal identity, singularity and self – is my theme. Research that sees and acknowledges or ignores and denies the face of the other is at issue. The turn in research to performance tries to make face more visible – not just researched/researchers’ words, but also their gestures, postures and bodies are to be attended to. Performance studies, interwoven with contemporary dance, seem to me to intend the penultimate effort at face by trying to gain entry into shared meaning, emotion, statement and relationship. But can research achieve consciousness-of-face to be identified with the ability to care, experience and know or is research characterized by dissymmetry and inherent inequality? The thought experiment undertaken here is ‘Does the assertion of face, with contemporary dance as exemplar, lead to a research ethic (also, thus, for organizational studies) where the presence of other wins from self-centeredness and/or resignation?’.

Keywords:

• research ethics
• performance studies
• face
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Maurice Béjart
• contemporary dance

Notes

First performed in 2001. The text quoted here is from the best-known performance, which was on 19 May 2005 at Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Béjart died in November 2007, but his dance group in Lausanne continues to perform his works.

Actually Béjart's Ballet Lausanne has continued to perform his dances after his death.

Translations from French to English are my own.

An-Other is written with the capital ‘O’ to emphasize the otherness of the other; it is derived from the philosophical tradition of Levinas (2001).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hugo Letiche

The author is now also affiliated with the University of Leicester, UK.