Touching the Data: Performative Participant Observation and the Craft of Ethnography

Taina Riikonen, Sibelius Academy

After walking around and listening to improvisation in different locations for a while, I am sitting between two musicians, a cellist and a ney flute player. I am sitting very close to them; I am actually sensing their playing more than listening to it. Suddenly I feel that I have to be sonic too, and I generate a long, hissing exhalation. [1]

The experience of observing the improvisation of the London-based collective the Automatic Writing Circle [2] has been haunting me for quite a while. It seems to herald a certain subtle shift from the macro to the micro: from a more distant walking around and listening to playing towards intimate, close observing as sensing the details of the sound making, and culminating in my exigent desire to create sounds, too. It is obvious that in that particular situation I privileged the body as a site of knowing [3], but that vignette also forced me to consider the tricky relationship between the epistemological and the ethical choices of the ethnographer working in the field. I have became awkwardly aware of the complex fragility of observing this particular sound-making interaction: extended beyond visual surveying it included touching, listening, sensing, recording, moving in the sonic/social space and co-playing. Therefore, my observing was immediately particularly charged: it was based on mutual embodied and performative meaning-making.

My aim in this article is to palpate the thought of performative participant observation as a particular tactile craft of doing fieldwork in the context of improvisational sound-making practices. Inspired by Della Pollock’s work on performative writing, I am willing to experiment with her concepts in the realm of participant observation. The reason why I find her theorization fruitful in this context is that – unlike many ethnographers – she does not stick with the assumed ontological rupture between the act and the representation, but builds a fluid counterstrategy of focusing on both the ethics and the poetics of the actual doing during and after the writing. Instead of treating performative writing as a “fixed form or genre”, she understands it more as “a way of describing what some good writing does” (Pollock 1998, 75). Most importantly, this describing process includes the acts of analysing and performing as closely intertwined material practices (ibid., 75). Furthermore, Pollock elaborates her ideas through constantly oscillating between performative writing and writing performatively, which emphasises the liminal nature of both performativity and text production. Correspondingly, I find the acts included in the participant observing very fluctuating and ambiguous. Observing through touching, listening and recording, for example, suggests several debatable, intimate and intrusive elements of acting in the field that are profoundly performative and epistemologically liminal. Aside from the self-evident blurring of the polarisations between subject and object, or performance and representation, both Pollock’s writing on performative writing/writing performatively and participant observation as ethnographic practice neglect the strict separation of the senses, as well as the coherency of space and the linearity of time. Performativity pullulates, both in writing and in participant observing, as a constant flickering between diverse spatialities, temporalities, bodies and sensory experiences.

Entering, part 1

Della Pollock makes six excursions into performative writing that explore its evocative, metonymic, subjective, nervous, citational and consequential potential. In the following I explore my experiences with AWC, and suggest that in its multiple embodied interactions, participant observation can draw from the sensual and material qualities of evocative, metonymic and nervous meaning-making.

According to Pollock, performative writing “evokes worlds that are other-wise intangible, unlocatable: worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect and in-sight” (1998, 80). Evocative writing operates in the borderline territories of critical, creative and potential telling in which “the writer’s and the world’s bodies intertwine” (ibid., 81) in the joint craft of creating the meshwork around the language and experience. Pollock describes such writing as “a liminoid field of possibility”, which draws more from the potential, uncategorized and unpredicted than the (positivist) ontologies of the rational. In this liminoid field the writer’s embodied subject is at the heart of the constantly shaping interaction between the writer and the reader. Correspondingly, the ethnographer’s (assumedly plural) subjectivities have something of a catalyst role in the process of entering into and writing about the lives of “others.” It is easy for me to agree with Brooke Harrington, who claims that the researcher’s own identity is “among the most valuable resources for forming connections with participants” in ethnographic research. When I started collaborating with AWC in 2009 I was in the midst of an epistemological and methodological crisis in my research, which was supposedly focused on the embodied interaction between acoustic instrumentalists and electronics in the context of contemporary ‘art’ music. I had abandoned the idea of interviewing the musicians. Compared to the multi-dimensional setting of making music the interviews just started to feel too far from the actual embodied playing situations, and I had the impression that the knowledge generated in them was perhaps authored too much by the researcher. Additionally, I had recently conducted a fieldwork phase with the Finnish Avanti! Ensemble, and had the experience of being treated – kindly, but determinedly – as a distant outsider with fairly limited access to the interaction situations of the music-making. As an ethnographer-in-crisis I therefore thirsted after an uplifting field experience, but I was also curious about entering a new field and about the emerging negotiations on access, which, according to Harrington is the core activity of ethnography (2003).

Obviously, both my desire for intimate access to the group under investigation and the semi-lost faith in the interviews (as incomparable data in the ethnography) affected how I entered the observation situations with AWC. My primary actions in the first private [4] field session included a curious touching and probing of both acoustic tubes present, the baroque and the ney flutes, and a close listening of the sound-making. I also tried blowing into these instruments, warmly encouraged by the players. In that sense my observer position as a researcher enabled close embodiment with the participants; it broke the assumed unique intimacy between the individual musician and his or her instrument, and it also undermined the strict privatisation of the bodily excretions (the sweat and the saliva on the flutes). In other words, my activity in the field was inherently and pervasively ‘sensory ethnography’ (cf. Pink 2009), meaning that the privilege of the sensory knowledge grew self-evidently from the mutual interaction with the participants. The spontaneous touching of the flutes substituted the introductory questions, and that straightforwardness made the whole situation evocative as such; it became more flexible, negotiable and multi-voiced than it would have been if I had conducted it primarily by myself with an emphasis on (an assumed) textual authority. This kind of entering by touching the instruments of the players could be understood as rhizomic activity. It grew spontaneously from the middle (cf. Hawes 2006, 26), ignoring the ideology of the from-overview-to-details–structure with predetermined preparatory acts, questions and inquiries.

Evocative participant observation prompts, inspires, engenders and lures the forthcoming field activities. It operates on the fragility of the nascent collaboration; it is an ephemeral and smooth space in which the embodied micro-practices (cf. Hawes 2006) of interaction guide the groping of both the ethnographer and the participants. In my entering the field with AWC, the particular evocativeness of my participant observation included constant moving in the space, touching the instruments with the players, preferring speaking to remaining silent and/or writing notes, making comments almost as much as asking questions, and seeking intimate immersion more than correct distance. All these acts entailed intense embodied and multi-sensorial engagement with everything I saw, heard and felt, with everything I sensed. At that very moment I did not separate the live observation and the future representation of that observation, simply because I was overwhelmed to sense the breathing conjunct skin of the AWC musicians and their instruments. I actually had the transient feeling of moving from an epistemological matrix towards an epidemiological stance. I wanted to ask how I could study micro-tactile processes as contamination, in other words, how could the collective embodied sound-making in groups be studied? One way could be to act, at the moment of participant observation, in and as the liminal.

In the context of improvisational sound-making, the interaction is inherently liminal because it is exploratory, evocative and spontaneous embodied expression through the self. It entangles the performative and the linguistic embroidering because it is constantly seeking several intertwining layers - on the micro-contact level with the instrument, and on the more macro level with spatial and collaborative interaction. Therefore, close observation of players’ passionate, even ecstatic [5] sound-making may feel inappropriate – and it forces the ethnographer to articulate the situation in some way. The observation immediately becomes performative and participatory: concealment of one’s own presence and authorial voice is not possible. The ethnographer is always in the process of entering, in the fluidity of relocation, in transition.

Entering, part 2

In the Automatic Writing Circle sound-making séances [6], issues to do with senses, bodies, instrumentalities and technologies overlap through the close sensual interaction between the players. There are two different kinds of instruments, the acoustic – the baroque and ney flutes, daf drums and cello – and the electro-acoustic group instrument, the ouija board. The ouija players look at their hands and the shadows the hands create. At the same time, in very sensible interplay they listen to the sound the hand movements generate, which is partially produced by the acoustic players who touch their instruments to make the sound. If to listen is tender l’oreille – to stretch the ear – as Jean-Luc Nancy suggests in his book Listening (2002), could the stretching the ears of the ouija players be the looking at one’s own moving hands and the shadows generated? Could the listening be intensified looking at visual/aural resonant meanings with shadowy edges? Furthermore, could that looking be touching, precisely because of its intensive contact with the hand that “touches” the sheet through the shadow-making? Generating and interpreting the shadows involve similar tactile sensitiveness as touching: playing through controlling the shadow’s organic spatial variations produces a particular kind of hand-instrument-sound relation. The close interconnection between looking, touching and listening in ouija playing produces very specific continuities between these senses. There is no ‘the’ sense (cf. Derrida 2007, 127-8) of sight or ‘the’ sense of touch or ‘the’ sense of listening: there are rather plural and constantly mutating relations between the senses. The acoustic players, on the other hand, produce the sounds through the delicate interplay between touching and listening. The return movement of the resonance of touch they hear is as much felt as heard: it is the touch that constantly replays the sound. Again, there is not ‘the’ sense of hearing, no singular, fixed senses. There are very particular encountering processes between the finger and the cello string, and between the lips and the blowing hole of the flute. There are plural continuities between hearing and touching, sensing and hearing. In a way, this plural continuity of the senses brings them to the ecstatic (sometimes impossible) limits of making sounds, being with sounds.

The act of stretching beyond the limits resonates very closely with Pollock’s notion of metonymic writing, which fertilizes in the fissure of the linguistic symbol and its assumed meaning (1998, 82-3). It plays dauntlessly with the cultural desire to distinguish between truth and untruth, absence and presence. According to Pollock, one of the characteristics of metonymic writing is the displacing of self, the “unwriting” of self “at the very moment of composition, opening language to what it is not and can never be” (1998, 84). “Writing performed in extremis becomes unwriting” (ibid., 84). Participant observing in extremis becomes unobserving. It becomes irreversibly and totally performing. It rejects the social, spatial and embodied borderlines between observer and observed, maker and made, live and representation, outside and inside.

At some point of our collaboration I was named (first by myself, and then modified by Thomas Gardner) the ‘Official Cheeky Inside Outsider’ (OCIO) of the AWC group. This refers, obviously, to my tendency to comment, ask provocative questions and argue in the field. I may be a cheeky chick as an ethnographer. (In fact, I have understood recently that it is one of my ethnographer roles, and that it has something to do with enthusiasm as well as the trust and acceptance of the participants.) However, it is noteworthy that both becoming named and the name itself are metonymies in the ethnographic process between the AWC and myself. The liminal nature of my role in/with the group demanded a particular, controversial and interaction-based name. There is no term for the interaction between us, or for the authorial positions that were shaping during our collaboration, in handbook(s) of ethnography. The name had to be ambiguous and ludicrous. It had to be that very liminal interaction. Interestingly, my naming emerged at approximately the same time as the name of the group changed – from The Ecosonic Ensemble to the Automatic Writing Circle, in August 2009. The changing sonic-linguistic interaction [7] in the group and the fluid mutation of my being a participant observer in/with it were inseparably intertwined, and that intertwining had to be sensed by renaming, through a new linguistic squeeze, a tactile craft.

Another of my metonymic participant-observation activities concerned the data collection. I had initially planned to record all our interaction on my laptop, but very soon after our first meetings I realised that the AWC members were recording everything, often on several parallel devices. Therefore, in its self-evident and – perhaps not totally but quite – unquestioned existence, the network of the microphones was comprehensive. However, the decision to leave my own recording agency was not conscious. It was more a fluid process of abdicating the powerful act of pressing the record button, mostly for to practical and embodied reasons. I was listening closely, I was moving a lot, I was touching the instruments, and I did not want to restrict my mobility by being wired to the recording system. Therefore, I did not build my ultimate observer staging on the control locus (both material and symbolic) with refined audio-recording facilities. My observing was more immersed, live listening/sensing/witnessing than a presumably hygienic documenting of the situation. I observed through the metonymies, through unobserving. I became the immersed Official Inside Cheeky Outsider in the setting of the sound-making situation. I became absent as present, and present as absent - a performative/performing character as such.

Entering, part 3

The ambiguous balancing between pre-planned structures and more uninhibited interaction – a kind of liminal rite of passage – connects the shifting sonic-linguistic dynamics in the AWC improvisation and my performative participant observation of it. I had some vague plans when I met the group for the first time, but as with the recording politics, I soon noticed that these plans should be understood only as potential forms of interaction. In fact, my “regional behaviour” [8] in the field was instantly messy: during the seminar discussion I was “front stage” (doing some kind of participant observation) and “back stage” (generating some kind of analysis of the interaction) at the same time. In a way, the public, totalized spoken analysis substituted the private, isolated and silent writing of the field notes. My cheekiness was therefore immediately inherently performative: in a public seminar I challenged, instigated and provoked the players to expose themselves and their particular relations to the verbal/sonic interaction, and at the same time I both exposed myself and aimed to legitimate my ethnographic authorial position through this mutual exchange. In a way, our public discussion was an initiation rite of passage to performing the sound-making interaction and the ethnographic research on it simultaneously.

The performativity of this rite emerged from the double ambiguousness: of the group as an improvising collective in the middle of change, and of me as en ethnographer in crisis. It was based on an encountering of certain susceptibilities to the change both in the group and in me, and on change as a nervous necessity. Della Pollock writes that performative writing is nervous when it “anxiously crosses various stories, theories, texts, intertexts, and spheres of practice, unable to settle into a clear, linear course, neither willing nor able to stop moving, restless, transient and transitive, traversing spatial and temporal borders […]” (1998, 91-2). She combines all this with the Foucauldian genealogy of the body, the historicized, recorded, remembered, and replayed body, the body that touches and is touched in return.

In a way, my participant observation with the AWC was and is inherently a nervous activity as such. It started and grew from the middle without structured pre-planning; it bounced anxiously in various directions through speaking, listening, touching and recording; it has crossed the intimate borderlines of sound-making participation; and it vehemently sought ways of being written. It is still searching. This whole text actually replays the old fragments I have contributed to the joint article that the AWC members and I have been planning to write collaboratively. We will do it one day.

There is something explosively nervous in both performative writing and performative participant observation, and I think it is connected to the very pervasive and tactile self-reflection that is present in these practices. Somehow, both writing and ethnographic research seem to invoke the controversial, repressed and subliminal aspects of the writer’s/researcher’s own identity. In the contagion between the AWC and me, my desire to immerse myself in the group as a newly born sound maker with a new instrument (after abandoning the classical flute) is one example of nervous participant observation. After the AWC’s concert and seminar visit to Helsinki I became obsessed with the idea of exceeding the symbolic and material line in actual sound-making; I wanted to step into the white light of the ouija and participate in the playing at a “real” meeting/session/séance. I also wanted to ask permission to join in through the performative act of suggesting collaboration on a joint article in an email I sent to the members of the group. The following excerpt is an unedited fragment of that request:

I want to sense the skin of the sonic interaction in the AWC group. But since I am aware of the unethical and perhaps exploitative dimensions of the unilateral wanting, I wish to suggest a joint risk for us all. This is a public/epidemiologic/provocative submission from OICO: I ask to get in the circle of the white light as a shakuhachi player. The proposition is based on three arguments. One: this was initially Kirsten’s idea; after the seminar session in Helsinki at September 2009, she pointed out that my sonic participation would make a quite stimulating continuation to our collaboration. Therefore, the initial prompt for this proposition comes from the group, but I find it intriguing that it comes from the only female member of the group, as well as from a person who has defined herself as the only non-musician of the group. Two: My being of an extreme novice with shakuhachi flute might allow some unexpected reflections on the issues around cultural embodiment of acoustic/electronic playing in the ouija context. Also, the social and institutional controversies between mastery/command/craft/expertise/attainment borderlines in relation to the instruments are interesting questions considering the insider-outsider negotiations within the group. Three: according to the reciprocal epidemiology of diverse authorships I owe the group the sonic exposing of myself. In order to avoid of becoming a greedy parasite in the frenetic battles of the ethnographic authority of sonic interaction, I think that I have to risk my ambivalent identity as a flautist-researcher with this particular group and through this particular kind of spontaneous interaction. Please… [sound file]

Thus, I actually spoke the request to get to be sonic in the group – I literally, no, tactile-aurally begged to be part of the sound-making. I performed the request to participate through my existing performative participation in the group, and I did it anxiously, almost desperately. My double-perfomative and triple-nervous request was accepted and we had a short joint playing session, although not all the AWC members were present. However, after that experience I had the feeling of being an exploitative researcher [9], and I am not at all sure how much I actually “exposed” myself. Furthermore, I did not find any kind of genuine benefit to the group of the researcher’s personal processing of her identity struggles. On the other hand, this urge to participate the playing as a player could also be understood as an ultimately nervous performativity in my ethnographer activity. To explore radically, to risk properly, to touch the data ecstatically I was seduced to cross the borderline between the sonic and verbal meaning making concretely. Also, in the context of authorial relations between the researcher and the participants, the privileged authority of the knowledge producing had to be situated more in the core activity of the participants (sound making) than the researcher (writing).

One of the most beautiful nervous participant-observation acts between the AWC and me was tangibly collective: the loud reading of my text excerpts about our interaction by members of the group. This was an idea that came from the group: in a discussion about our forthcoming joint article the members spontaneously suggested reading my text aloud in order to make it more tactile and palpable for us all to elaborate on and discuss further. The discussion and the reading were, obviously, recorded. The nervousness in this reading performativity is revealed in the constant fluttering between the close listening to the spoken words, sighs, breaths, pauses, hesitations and emphasises, the visual text in print, and the emerging discussion after the reading. The ways in which the readers performed the text, and the issues they pointed out in the discussion were curiously entangled. The arguments that were performed with hesitation or suspect in the voice were reflected and challenged in the discussion. Furthermore, in the relaying process between the reading and discussing, the negotiation of the meanings in the AWC sound making extended as multi-material and multi-sensory; it was simultaneously written, aural, visual and tactile.

After-resonances

My move to sit down between the cellist and the ney player during the improvisation (described at the beginning of this article) formed a kind of performative act inside a performative practice (the musical séance). In a way, it was a spontaneous leap into the spiral swirling of the sound-making flow. However, in both desiring and fearing the extreme intimacy of being close to embodied improvisation interaction, I also became very aware of my own corporeality (as a woman, as an ethnographer, as a former flautist). Therefore, the idea of these playing male bodies as subjects of my female penetrating gaze made me slightly anxious. In order to get rid of this voyeur-like gaze, or actually the feeling – I was too close to look – I produced a spontaneous loud exhaling. I wanted to re-position my observer-as-female-voyeur body as an observer-as-female-sound-making body. In other words, I re-negotiated and legitimized my position as a female ethnographer close [10] to the players. The craft of improvisatorial performative participant observation had to be tactile in a particular, gender-specific way.

My tendency to make sonic interventions in and responses to the improvisation interaction (by speaking, moving, playing, or otherwise) could be understood as “somatic” exploratory encountering between the players and me. According to Jane Blocker, the “somatic language” (which is not “body language” as some kind of naturalised reduction) is a productive, embodied way to investigate what language (as bodily interaction) does, not just what it means (Blocker 2004, 33). In the context of the ethnographic observation of improvisation interaction, the observing body as an inevitably participating body suggests that the parameters of analysis are created in the interactional and reflective field. I think it is crucial to emphasise that, just as the strict borderlines between “I” and “it” are blurred in the extreme flow of intimacy in playing an instrument, the cumbersome division between fieldwork observation and the actual analysis of the data is blurred in the observation of improvisation interaction. The presumed (rationalised) clarity of distinction between those two activities – gathering data and analysing it at a separate time in a separate location – was just not possible for me when I was studying AWC interaction: the analysis of the improvisation interaction had to be live, conducted in reciprocal real-time interplay with the interaction. The craft of improvisatorial interaction had to be tactile.

I propose a re-definition of ethnographic observing as embodied activity and authority in the context of (free) improvisation interaction: I suggest conceptualising field interaction in terms of performative participant observation, understood as diverse situated, embodied and interpretive encounters between the investigated interaction and the researcher. Through performative participant observation the craft of the researcher is immediately embodied, political and biased. It is first and foremost tactile. The gathering the data is actually creating it; the gathering of the data is actually doing it by touching it.

In my experience with the Automatic Writing Circle, performative participant observation was and is on-going touching and being touched by the improvisational and interactional re-sonances (sounding back, vibrating back, “writing” back) with the players in the sound-making flux. It is evocative, metonymic and nervous acting/performing and co-vibrating with the rhizomatic sound-player-instrument assemblages.

Notes

This text fragment has become nomadic; it has travelled and mutated in several article manuscripts in the joint article project between AWC and myself. I am very thankful of the invaluable comments that the AWC members gave me about this text.
Previously The Ecosonic Ensemble (see http://ecosonic.pbworks.com). At the time of my fieldwork the members of the Automatic Writing Circle were Seth Ayyaz (ney, daf); Peter Coyte (ouija); Kirsten Edwards (ouija); Thomas Gardner (cello) and Stephen Preston (baroque flute). According to its developer, Thomas Gardner, the ouija is a group musical instrument that “acts as a bridge between acousmatic and instrumental/vocal techniques. […] Based on the real-time video analysis of the shadows of a group of people, it reframes many of the conventions of the traditional tactile instrumental control. […] The tactile quality of acoustic instruments is in contrast to this remote, shadowy form of engagement.” See also http://www.automaticwritingcircle.ac.uk).
The whole research data of the AWC collaboration comprises a recording of the rehearsal session on 18th March 2009, three recorded discussions from 18th March 2009, 1st July 2009 and 19th November 2009, a recording of the Helsinki performance on 21st September 2009 and of the Helsinki seminar discussion on 22nd September 2009, and field notes of rehearsals and discussions.
Cf. Conquergood, Dwight, “Rethinking Ethnography. Towards a Critical Cultural Politics”, 352.
The first encountering between the AWC and me was a public seminar at the department of Sonic Arts at London College of Communication, University of Arts, on 18th March 2009. The second meeting was right after the public seminar, and actually the process of definition on the private/public axis started to form after several field sessions.
Cf. Waterman, ‘Naked Intimacy: Eroticism, Improvisation, and Gender’, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Vol.4, No 2 (2008), about the erotics of ecstatic improvisation.
The group has an on-going discussion about what to call the joint playing situations. They have been called rehearsals, meetings, sessions, and seancés. This naming negotiation seems to parallel the changing forms of sound-making interaction.
At the time of our collaboration the group was in the midst of critical discussions about embodied sound making in relation to the authorial positions in the improvisation. Their earlier emphasis on particular, preordained “ecosonic” structures of playing was called into question. Moreover, there was a certain tension between the sounding interaction and the verbal reflection, spanning issues from naming the playing events (rehearsals/sessions/meetings) to defining the authorial roles of the different agencies (with diverse sonic pasts) in the improvisation interaction.
See Goffman Erwin, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959. See also Susan B. Murray’s article “A Spy, a shill, a go-between, or a sociologist: unveiling the ‘observer’ in participant observer”, Qualitative Research 2003, Vol. 3(3), 377–395.
Cf. McClimens, Alex, ”What difference does it make who is speaking?”, Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2004, Vol. 8(1), 72.
Interestingly, in the discussion on 1st July 2009 with some of the AWC players, speaking about this close observation move of mine the ney player remarks that whenever he played the ney he encountered “a spontaneous woman [be]coming that close” solely “in the context of the dancer.” (Listen to the discussion at http://ecosonic.pbworks.com). Usually, in the research context, the separation between observer and observed is created (among other acts) by the physical distance, but in this case, my close (and sonic) observing shaped the situation first and foremost as performative.

References

Blocker, Jane (2004). What the Body Costs. Desire, History, and Performance. Minneapolis, London: University of Minneapolis Press.

Conquergood, Dwight (1991). “Rethinking Ethnography. Towards a Critical Cultural Politics.” Communication Monographs 58/2, 179-194.

Derrida, Jacques ( 2007). On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Transl. by Christine Irizarry. Standford: Standford University Press.

Goffman, Erwin (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Harrington, Brooke (2003). ”The Social Psychology of Access in Ethnographic Research.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32/5, October 2003.

Hawes, Leonard Clyde (2006). “Becoming Other-Wise: Conventional Performance and the Politics of Experience.” Opening Acts. Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Studies. Judith Hamera ed. London: Sage, 23–48.

McClimens, Alex (2004). “What difference does it make who is speaking?” Journal of Learning Disabilities 8/1, 72.

Murray, Susan. B. (2003). “A Spy, a shill, a go-between, or a sociologist: unveiling the ‘observer’ in participant observer.” Qualitative Research 3/3, 377–395.

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2002). Listening. Trans. By Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press.

Pink, Sarah (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage.

Pollock, Della (1998). “Performative Writing.” The Ends of Performance. Peggy Phelan & Jill Lane eds. New York: New York University Press.

Waterman, Sarah (2008). “Naked Intimacy: Eroticism, Improvisation, and Gender.” Critical Studies in Improvisation 4/2, http://www.criticalimprov.com