Find a home, lose a home: A research-based theatre journey into Acadian heritage
Keywords:
arts-based research, research-based theatre, applied theatre, butoh, process drama, language portraitAbstract
“Meet me in France to help me encounter my Acadian ancestors.” The Acadians were French settlers who established a unique culture in Atlantic Canada before being forcibly removed by the British in the 18th century. Taking up the invitation, five disparate artist/scholars gathered in France, but all their approaches would fit under the bigger tent of Research-based Theatre (RbT), an arts-based methodology in which embodied performances are created through the systematic research of real-life events and social issues. How does RbT serve to help us navigate the liminal space between research questions and the creation of theatre itself? If RbT is a term that encompasses a variety of approaches, how would grafting disparate artistic techniques transform our understandings of research?
References
Belliveau, G., & Lea, G. (Eds.) (2016). Research-based theatre: An artistic methodology. Intellect.
Belliveau, G. & Sinclair, C. (2018). Touchstones of practice: Consideration from the theatre workshop floor. In P. Duffy, C. Hatton, & R. Sallis (Eds.) Drama Research Methods: Provocations of Practice (pp 3-18). Brill/Sense Publishers.
Boal, A. (2005). Games for actors and non-actors. Routledge.
Kusters, A., & De Meulder, M. (2019). Language portraits: Investigating embodied multilingual and multimodal repertoires. Qualitative Social Research, 20(3), 10.
Shigematsu, T., Lea, G. W., Cook, C., & Belliveau, G. (2022). A spotlight on research-based theatre. LEARNing Landscapes, 15(1), 349-365. https://doi.org/10.36510/learnland.v15i1.1081
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Copyright (c) 2025 McGill Journal of Education / Revue des sciences de l'éducation de McGill

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Copyright (c) 202X McGill Journal of Education / Revue des sciences de l'éducation de McGill
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.