In 2008, I graduated with a PhD in performing arts, closing the metaphorical and actual book on the research that had consumed three and a half years of my life.
It took me 17 years to open it again.
With this distance, I have refreshed energy and perspective to think and write about the experience of doing a creative PhD. This fresh perspective is not just an opportunity to revisit the research outcomes themselves, but also what the process meant as a chapter in my life, and what I learned from it that I’ve carried forward into my life.
My PhD was a research enquiry into the question: “Can performance change attitudes and behaviours?” The output was a thesis, entitled Provocative and Transformative Performance, of around 70,000 words. It presented my argument based on theory, case studies, and a practical performance work. In it, I identified characteristics of performance that both provokes and transforms the attitudes and behaviours of its audience.
Why I chose to do a creative PhD
I’ve never been good at having a long-term plan. I tend to base my choices on gut feeling about the options right in front of me. And while I have a pretty good idea of what I enjoy doing, it’s not always easy to fit that into a preexisting career path. As my studies for my three-year undergraduate BA (Theatre Theory & Practice) degree wrapped up, I realised that I enjoyed both research and performance. So I looked for any opportunities to continue doing that.
When I was in the final stages of my bachelor’s degree, a well-meaning professor suggested that I apply for an Honours year. This degree was called a BA (Hons), Performance Theory & Practice (since starting my undergrad the university changed the “theatre” focus of the degree to “performance,” probably to reflect the broadening scope of performance modes studied outside of traditional theatre). Not having any other prospects, or any real pull in a certain direction, I went for it.
As part of my studies, I produced a short one-woman show, Awaiting Gravity, performed over two nights at my campus’s black box theatre. A creative spark had ignited within me, yet at the end of this one-year degree I was no clearer on the direction I wanted my life to go. I knew that I had enjoyed the Honours project, and that I liked researching and performing theatre. I also knew I still didn’t know what else to do with my life.
Languishing without real direction, a different professor in the theatre department came to my rescue. She suggested I look into applying for a doctoral scholarship.
Since I had an Honours degree, I could go straight into a doctoral program without needing a Masters. And if I was accepted for the scholarship, I would get a stipend for three years to do my doctorate full-time. I could apply for a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) or a DCA (Doctor of Creative Arts, a professional doctorate in which candidates combine a creative work with a written exegesis). I knew that I wanted to do another practical work, as I’d done in my Honours year, so I was leaning towards the DCA. However, after some key conversations I learned that the PhD would be flexible enough to allow practical work. So I went for the PhD, mainly because it looked better on paper and was easier to explain. 🙂
I applied for the scholarship, and was successful.
The creative doctorate process
At first, it was hard to settle into my doctoral candidacy. But, eventually, I found a community both in Sydney and overseas, and my confidence as a performer-researcher grew.
The PhD process at my smaller theatre university department could be a lonely experience. I was the only person in the department doing a PhD, so there was a shortage of colleagues to discuss ideas with, seminars or other events, and just a general lack of buzz around the campus.
There was a dedicated office space at the university for postgrad students (that was usually deserted), but the campus was an hour’s drive from my house, so it was often easier to just work at home. Good training for all the remote work I’ve done since!
I didn’t expect it to take me about a year to even finalise the topic of my research. I wavered between ideas, never quite sure if the one I had landed on had enough meat to take me through the whole project. I had a small but wonderfully supportive group of supervisors, who encouraged me as I found my way through these murky waters.
Towards the end of my candidacy, I attended seminars in the theatre department at Sydney University, as there were several other theatre researchers there. Those connections became very important not just for feedback on my research, but also for the social aspect of meeting like-minded people who were going through the same experience as me.
During my time working on the project, I was fortunate enough to take two overseas trips: one was a round-the-world trip that took me to conferences at the University of Maryland in the US, and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. The other was to a conference and related working group in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, South Africa.
At these conferences, I presented snapshots of my PhD research and experimented with hybrid presentation formats. I was discovering practice-based research, and exploring presenting my work in a mode that intertwined performance and theory.
For example, in Cape Town my presentation at the IFTR Performance as Research working group alternated between delivering a paper, and performing parts of my one-woman show (Bodily). I was starting to push the boundaries of using performance to talk about performance, in academic settings in which most other researchers had more traditional presentation formats. I was starting to find myself as a hybrid performer-researcher.
What always felt like a conflict—this marriage of academia and highly personal performance work—started to feel like a harmony between different parts of me. This is an idea I’ve taken with me beyond the PhD: like every person, I have a unique set of interests, skills, and identities that are most powerful when embraced together.
This weaving together of self was mirrored in the weaving together of multiple strands of research in the thesis. Not only did I need to ground my research in performance theory, I also had to dive into research methodology, alchemy, psychology, and body image discourse.
What I learned
Throughout my research project, I didn’t just learn about my subject matter. I learned research, thinking, and writing skills. I also learned how to balance vulnerability and openness to feedback, and learned how my creativity could open new modes of expression in areas that seem rigid. These skills would become crucial in my life and career, post-graduation.
Through the process of a multi-year, deep research project, I learned how to follow a strand of research and make sense of a meandering path of references. I learned how important it is to give time to thinking, and how the writing process itself can help with processing the material. I received intense training as a researcher and writer—skills I have used countless times in my professional life.
I also learned to be less guarded and more resilient as a writer-performer. My performance work was intensely personal, and it was difficult to get to the necessary place vulnerable enough to share it with others in the rehearsal room. Although the finished product was, of course, performed in front of an audience, that audience is seeing a polished piece. It’s much scarier to open up the material in a rehearsal space, unfinished and raw, and to invite feedback and collaboration from just a handful of other people present. I had to be open to the work being picked apart. I had to fail, again and again. I had to be willing to change very personal things, sometimes radically, so they work.
In this constant mode of exposure, I learned to separate myself from the work, and to grow a thick skin against criticism and feedback. It helped to remember that others wanted this piece to succeed as well, and to trust that their feedback would make it better.
While there are a lot of rules and rigour in the academic world, I also learned that there’s more flexibility and room for creativity than I’d first assumed. My thesis was written in the first person, and it wove in poetry, journals, stories, and alchemy. Despite the dry academic style of most of the work I was reading, I learned that there was actually a lot of myself I could bring into the writing.
I learned to trust my intuition and creativity, and learned that things don’t always need to be done in the same way they always have been. These have been invaluable lessons for expressing myself in the professional world.
How I wrote my creative thesis
Let’s face it, some academic work is very hard to read, especially for the outsider. The words are complex, the sentences are long, and the paragraphs are dense. The rigour required by academia means that most theses are written in a neutral voice, elevated beyond the personal experience of the researcher to appear more impartial.
This approach was always difficult for me. I longed to connect on a more personal level with the work I was reading, to understand the context and inherent biases it was coming from, to feel like I was in conversation with the researcher.
A PhD process can be a creative practice in itself. Since creativity means to take inputs, process them through personal experience, then put them out into the world, that’s exactly what happens in the PhD process. The candidate researches broadly, spending months reading texts that may become just a footnote in the final product. They are in a continual state of filtration, of weeding out the most important bits of what they are reading and consuming. And they must eventually express them as an argument.
Luckily, in the early part of my candidacy I discovered autoethnography, a form of ethnography in which the researcher connects their own experiences to a broader societal context. This spoke to me as a perfect methodology for my work, especially in light of my own highly personal performance piece. There was no use trying to pretend that this work didn’t come from me, so it was fitting to embrace my own experience and write myself into the story of the project.
My thesis, then, became highly personal. I embraced a bricolage approach, weaving poetic metaphors and creative elements into the analytical writing. I balanced subjective experiences with scholarly rigour. I maintained creativity while meeting academic expectations. This was a tightrope walk, but at the time it didn’t feel as though there was any other option. This was the way the story needed to be told.
A doctoral thesis requires an intense level of thoroughness. And while I pushed the limits of the form creatively, I was limited by the norms of academia at the time I wrote it. For example, in much of the first part of the work, I needed to clearly and laboriously set the boundaries of the research project, grounding it in existing discourse.
The paragraphs are lengthy, and there are multiple parts that, reading it again, I now find repetitive. I see opportunities in the thesis to refine the expression, to make it more confident and improve clarity. But this perspective is with the benefit of hindsight. It’s easy to compare the work against the types of writing I’ve done since then, which don’t need to overstate their subjectivity.
The way I wrote it was, of course, part of the necessary academic rigour of a PhD. In retrospect, I can recognise it as training for the type of critical and deep thinking and writing that has served me well in my professional life. While I wish I had taken my creative approach further, I give my 26-year-old self grace.
Was a creative PhD worth it?
For me, yes, doing a creative PhD was worth it. But it’s taken me some time to reach that conclusion. It helps to remember that I was on a scholarship, so my PhD was basically my full-time job for three years. But it’s a unique type of job, and one that gave me many valuable experiences and skills that I’ve used in my career since.
While my thesis was being assessed, I did apply for a few university teaching positions, although it wasn’t something I was deeply interested in pursuing. I wanted to work in the performing arts industry, which felt more exciting to me and less out-of-touch than the “ivory tower” institution.
I had many different types of jobs after I graduated: at a research group in the university, at a television network, in an Apple retail store, and freelancing as a website consultant. Eventually, I landed at Automattic, having found the perfect marriage of my creativity and analytical skills: marketing.
It’s remarkable how many skills from the PhD I’ve carried into my professional life. And how many of these concepts, like bringing creativity into everything I do, still permeate my life. From putting way too much work into slides and zine handouts at conference talks, to dabbling in many different types of arts and crafts, it’s remained important to me to always embrace my creativity. I also still use my title of Doctor, in some contexts.
Completing a PhD is a monumental achievement by anyone’s standards. For me, it was the culmination of a period in which a lot of trust was placed in me to deeply research, spend a lot of time thinking, and to produce something new.
Over the three-and-a-half years of my candidacy, I wrote a thesis of about 70,000 words that was published as a book. I created a performance. I travelled the world and spoke at conferences. I embraced my creativity, pushed the boundaries of academic norms, and made this research project uniquely mine.
And when I emerged on the other side, wearing an old-fashioned doctoral graduation bonnet and robes, and clutching a manuscript that had been judged and deemed worthy, I was exhausted. I never wanted to see it again. I wanted to move on with my life.
And I did, until now.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Steve Jobs,
Stanford University commencement speech, 2005
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