Lecturers at Boston University’s Creative Research presentation Thursday evening showed that though research is often considered a scientific discipline, the arts often cultivate opportunities for creative research projects.
About 100 faculty members and graduate students gathered at the new Joan and Edgar Booth Theatre to hear 10 different faculty members share the details of their own creative arts-based research projects, which explore social trends through media like painting, photography or music.
The lectures were the latest installment in a monthly series called Research on Tap, hosted by Gloria Waters, BU’s vice president and associate provost for research. In each session, faculty members from across the university discussed their research projects through five-minute speeches accompanied by digital visual aids.
BU Arts Initiative Managing Director Ty Furman, and Lynne Allen, the director of BU’s School of Visual Arts, organized this month’s session.
Research isn’t limited to data collection and analysis, Allen said. It can also include more creative and innovative elements.
“This is important for everyone, not only students, to understand that research is not just hypothesis and discovery,” Allen wrote in an email before the presentation, “… Creative arts-based and arts-led research involves imagination, invention, speculation, innovation, and risk-taking.”
Joe DeGolia, a first-year doctoral student in the College of Engineering, said after the session that while he has had previous exposure to creative research, the Research on Tap session taught him things he hadn’t known about it.
“I’m familiar with how creative research works,” Degolia said. “I’ve been around it for a while, but [this program] definitely shed some light on some things that I haven’t thought about before.”
Allen wrote that the Research on Tap series gives members of the BU community the chance to be exposed to many different fields of research.
“It is meant to be a taste of someone’s serious work,” Allen wrote, “and for the audience to be engaged and learn something new, fast and furious.”
Furman said before the presentation that although the public often does not associate art with serious research, BU arts faculty undertake projects comparable to the ones pursued in STEM disciplines.
“People tend to think of artists as not researchers, when, in fact, they do a great deal of research,” Furman said. “It just may not always look like the same kind of research a data scientist uses or the same kind of research a physicist does.”
Matt Gibe, a staff member in the the biomedical engineering department of BU’s Photonics Center who attended the presentation, said afterward that while art has always interested him, he hadn’t considered how it could apply to research.
“There’s a lot more to it than I thought there was,” Gibe said. “Considering that I don’t have an academic background in art, it was surprising to see how much thought and how much real effort goes into making everything.”
Furman said arts-based research brings awareness to the creativity people see in everyday life.
“Artists are often both reflecting society and exploring and challenging society,” Furman said. “For me, I think life is just boring without arts and creativity in it.”
Presenters lectured on their creative research and the social issues they explored through it.
In her lecture, Christine Hamel, a professor of voice, speech, and acting in the College of Fine Arts, discussed a program she started called Femina Shakes, in which an all-female cast performs classic Shakespearean plays to distract from the pressure of gender roles in theater and to highlight the actions and relevance of individual characters instead.
“The creation of dissonance, this deliberate misfitting, has become a means of highlighting the imbalances in the world of the play,” Hamel said. “It invites us to question where power sits, how we treat each other, and how we continue to play out certain roles.”
Hamel said once audiences overcome the initial discomfort with women playing male roles, they see that the humor in the unexpected feminine portrayals actually strengthens the themes behind the play and its characters.
“The actor’s gender tends to evaporate,” Hamel said. “It reveals itself as a performance, as a construct, and the range of the human being inhabiting the role begins to be exposed.”
Iris Olson, a first-year graduate student in the School of Public Health, said after the presentation that she appreciated the opportunity Hamel’s program gives to people of historically oppressed gender identities.
“I really like the idea of giving women, giving femme people, gender nonconforming people, that kind of power dynamic that they normally don’t have the ability to have in the world,” Olsen said. “Creating that power dynamic is super important.”
