Addressing real-world challenges through performance research
We collaborate internationally with organisations, policymakers, and cultural leaders to develop responses to complex situations and decisions, drawing on findings, methods, and practices from performance research.
Why performance research?
Performance isn’t only what happens on a stage.
It’s how organisations hold meetings, make decisions, communicate, collaborate, plan and respond. Performances can be extraordinary events, but they can also be the everyday practices that shape outcomes.
By researching these organizational performances, and by recommending tailored activities and interventions, we can:
- clarify assumptions
- attend to what is happening in the room
- understand how people, place, practice, and policy interact
- reveal opportunities for alignment, connection and collaboration
- support teams to work with complexity rather than around it
The more we understand the performance practices of a team, network, community, or collaboration, the more we can devise, rehearse, and grow those practices.
Performance research helps organisations work with greater clarity, connection and purpose.
Research and consultancy
Research
We undertake internationally-focused, original, interdisciplinary research, contributing to ideas, methods, and practices in performance studies and allied fields. We collaborate with academics and professionals, present and publish internationally, and run programmes of work to ensure our research findings result in real world impact.
Consultancy
Building creative, strategic organisational practices through performance research
We work with clients to identify key areas for development, then employ methods, tools, and practices from our research to develop new approaches to professional practice.
Whether we are delivering a workshop series or more bespoke engagement, our approach and practices are directly informed by our most recent research findings.
From seeding creative approaches to emergency planning to finding new ways of engaging in arts management in local contexts, from creating effective contexts to advance national strategy to supporting a local team develop new working practices, we invite organizations to find better ways to work together and creative means of rethinking their responses to contemporary challenges.
Our approach is grounded in creative, and specifically performance‑based, methods that reveal patterns, pressures and possibilities that are easy to miss in day‑to‑day work. From facilitated conversations to site-based workshops and public engagement practices, we bring a range of performance practices to explore new ways of thinking and working.
What our work makes possible
In all of our work, our project partners consistently describe:
- clearer, more robust strategies and priorities
- stronger internal and external relationships
- a renewed understanding of role and purpose
- more confident decision‑making
- practical changes to planning and communication
- space to think differently about complex issues
Interested?
If you’re interested in rethinking familiar ways of working, we’d love to connect.
Performing City Resilience is ‘re-thinking the way that a city system is run’
Sarah Toy, Director, Sarah Toy Consulting, UK