This first issue of Double Dialogues was a initially a print publication only. We have re-published it here for its contents and as a historical marker, with concerns of over what constitutes research in the Arts having a significant beginning in this conference - where papers were performed rather than read.

Looking back now at the debates of 1996 from a 2015 perspective, one wonders indeed whether there has been much advancement; it still reads as cutting edge and of course, if the problematic relationship between creative work and exegetical commentary had advanced, it would not.

Essays in this edition deal with the multiple questions that haunt us about the role of the Arts in the academy: the difficult of receiving research grants from government research funding; examples of Arts research; examples of new methodologies to facilitate the Arts practitioner who must not only create art but also discourse it or, as one contributor noted, ‘not just build a bridge but dance it as well’.

This issue explores all relevant debates with reference to dance; theatre; opera; photography; digital media; paintings, politics and aesthetics.

It includes a rousing address by Jacques Daruelle who argues for the Arts to be kept outside the academy. As he quotes:” No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions” (Rene Char).