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The RISE project is designed to engage with speculative questions of enormous, existential consequence and to provide imaginative, embodied settings to deal with them in a multimodal, interdisciplinary, collaborative fashion. RISE's narratives are informed commentaries (not science fiction) on our future survival in light of our realities and collective (a)moral behaviors. It is a speculative research-creation project designed to enrich our knowledge and experience of potential futures by enacting them dramatically.

The creative process simultaneously informs and is informed by inquiries in a cyclical manner; in which various narrative scenarios are trialed in performances during the five-year span of this study, discussed collaboratively among the team of researchers and creators, and adjusted in all the creative aspects of following scenario-enactments. Quarterly collaborative critical-reflection sessions take place to discuss the success of the creative process in addressing the research topics in the enacted scenarios and in raising additional ones. The production and inquiry processes are integrally intertwined, as is common in research-creation projects (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2012).

In this “creation-as-research” form—or stage—the reciprocal relationship between creation and scholarship becomes complex, intertwined, simultaneous, multilayered, and immersive. Knowledge is generated more quickly and directly through creating, analyzing, and reflecting critically; and the researchers become better-equipped to negotiate among different epistemologies, and between the written and tacit forms of knowing. Meanings are generated collectively in a constructionist manner “by, for, and between members of a discursively mediated community" (Hruby, 2001, p. 51).

A collaborative research-creation framework provides the imaginativeness and rigour necessary for speculative research, as it combines creative and inquisitive research for generating knowledge and innovation. A diverse research-creation team (with specialists in digital performance, composition, community music, environmental artivism, artificial intelligence, creative writing, and education), RAs, community musicians, and professional artists enact catastrophic scenarios in 10 mini operas, embodying imagination/speculation through "being in", "experiencing," and "feeling."

Scenario thinking summons our imagination beyond our instinctual beliefs and wishes, and diversifies the data for observation. By imagining, enacting, observing, and reflecting critically and collaboratively on various scenarios, we strengthen the validity of the process of investigation and creation.

RISE's inquiry and dissemination are supported by methodologies from several fields and types of inquiry. We investigate questions in a multimodal research-creation approach through critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Van Dijk, 1993; Weiss & Wodak, 2007) and dramatic/musical enactment. We tap into existing, broad speculative knowledge on these subjects by reviewing and analyzing relevant literature in philosophy, computer sciences, social sciences, environmental health and ecology, and disaster response; and simultaneously embody various potentialities through performances of alternative mini operas, which deliver these issues from the realm of speculation into the realm of experience and tacit knowledge. Arts-based investigation and dissemination, dubbed “scholartistry” by poet/essayist Lori Nielsen (1998), “promotes a direct, embodied engagement with the sensory qualities of the world…[and] reshapes thinking through direct materiality” (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018, p.5).

While CDA helps us to uncover the current sociopolitical states that relate to our topics of inquiry, researching potential futures requires speculation and scenario thinking. To try-out various narrative possibilities, every year we rehearse and produce two mini-operatic scenario enactments—one of which are informal, experimental, creative sessions that allow improvisational content, speculation, and discussion; and a second that is more elaborately produced and designed. These performances simultaneously serve as research-creation outcome, which involves the research team, RAs, performers, and audiences, and as experiential content for further collaborative reflection, leading to more action and investigation.

We believe that operatic enactment can strengthen the impact of the scenario method, as it brings imagined scenarios into the realm of experience and sensation. Through the dramatic forms’ ability to allow the “willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge, 1817/1854, p. 365), we can explore how it feels to be in these scenarios and discover which human emotions emerge from them. We can enrich the speculative, reflexive knowledge of the scenario method with the tacit knowledge that comes from “being in the game” (Barrett, 2010, p. 4).

Cited Works