Documentar la experiencia cultural: Autoetnografía como narración para proyectos de investigación-creación en artes escénicas

Abstract

Understanding the cultural experience of the community that one studies is one of the foundational objectives of social research. The description of such an experience can take various narrative forms within ethnography. This is the case of autoethnography, narrative for qualitative inquiry, where the researcher, as an active participant, documents and analyzes their own personal experience in response and relation to the studied subject or community. This approach reflects the subjectivity and sensibility of the researcher in their response to their subject and provides a clear account of the politics of engagement. This article frames theoretically and proposes autoethnography as a writing technique to question the position of researcher in both research-creation projects of performing arts: Todas las santas' (2021) and 'Transmigrarts' (2022). Both were held in person, in the middle of the pandemic, in the Spanish cities ofMadrid and Granada, respectively. In this paper, the author explores the embodied and existential tensions that arose in both experiences from his ambivalent position as a researcher-playwright when it comes to creating, prompting and inciting the game, but also when observing and analyzing what happened there.