Entangled Engagement: Getting Started with Lines, Knots and Participatory Theatre

This think-piece reflects on the challenges that I have faced in the early part of my PhD, during which I have spent around 250 hours as a volunteer in the Theatre of Sanctuary programme run by a local theatre. Drawing on the work of Tim Ingold (2007;2015), the paper rejects metaphors that see humans as bounded and separate individuals which might be characterised as blocks or blobs (Ingold, 2015, p.3). Rather I frame what happens at the theatre as an ongoing work of becoming, in which participants, spaces and methods are flowing and ongoing lines (Hayes et al., 2021, p.514), which come together to weave the world from “ever unspooling strands” (Ingold, 2015, p.15). Using illustrations drawn from Ingold’s work and from my experience at the theatre, the paper explores how, by becoming knotted within this ongoing flow of places, practices, and people, I have begun to accept the challenge of mess in my research.