Getting Out of the Groove: On Calibrating Roles in Collaboratory Artistic Research

This chapter provides an answer to the question of how to do an artistic research collaboration in practice. A diverse team of individuals, affiliated with the Dutch theater company Het Laagland; the Research Center for Arts, Autonomy and the Public Sphere of Zuyd University of Applied Sciences; or University College Maastricht, seeks “accompaniment” in collaboration. Together, they start the collaboratory artistic research project Buren en Bagage without knowing exactly how such collaboration across differences can be done. Hence, all participants deliberately experiment with and reflect upon this question throughout the project. “Getting out of the groove” appears to be necessary to find each other across differences and “become together” heterogeneously. However, this requires specific, situated ways of addressing and reflecting on the messiness and confusion that seem unavoidable between participants. By providing “snippets” of insight into the project via a careful (re)construction of the different voices of the project participants, this chapter unfolds a fragmentary conversation about the practices and processes involved in this process of experimentation. This way, our experiences from Buren en Bagage might inspire specific ways of doing and discussing artistic research collaboration in practice.