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'Live Art: Radicalism and Complicity in a Scene of Constraint', Contemporary Theatre Review, 34:3, (2025), pp. 231-250
Get PDFMaking Shit Happen: Queer Utility in Nightlife
No full textBetween 2016-2018, we were both involved in the management of queer venues alongside others where our arms plunged elbow-deep into toilets, grasping through London's sewer networks towards each other. Our roles sustained flows of effluence removal, drinks, patrons, money, performers, and queer effervescence. These labours bonded us as working class, queer academics, leading us to consider how we know queer nightlife through utilities that enact social processes. Our DIY queer nightlife methodology embraces gossip, embodied knowledge, and mess, examining shocks, blocks, and leaks as both material and metaphorical dynamics to trace how use and misuse intertwine in these spaces
Different Times, Same Culture War: Performing Otherness and the War on Woke
Get PDFThe ‘war on woke’ is the latest iteration of a rightwing culture war that has raged for decades. Performance artists and other non-conforming identities find themselves being demonised by political gatekeepers to leverage control of expressions of cultural identity. Performance can provide a new horizon for resistance to assimilationist policies by locating otherness within a relational field not dependent on logocentric modes of expression to be meaningful
'Cronies, Cliques and Lovers: Queer Friendship as Anti-Institutional Practice in UK Live Art Festivals'
Get PDFIn this article, we interrogate the impact of queer friendship on the organisational landscape of the UK Live Art sector. Using our own intimate insider perspectives, we examine two artist-led festivals: Buzzcut in Glasgow (2012-present) and Steakhouse Live in London (2014–2020).Influenced by Michel Foucault’s ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, we contend that the queerness of these friendships extends beyond sexual identities, shaping the artistic, economic, cultural, and social dimensions of Live Art festivals. Queer friendships inform anti-professional and DIY approaches in Live Art and emerge as a vital counterforce to institutional norms, providing an essential resource to experimental art practitioners enduring the precarious conditions of economic austerity in the UK from 2010 onwards. Friendship-led organisational practice holds all the challenges of managing a complex relational world, navigating the balance between the ideals of exchange and equality and the lived reality of difference and inequality. The formation of cliques, which aim for inclusivity and cohesion while potentially fostering exclusion, underscores a paradox inherent in the nature and operation of friendship in these contexts. Our findings emphasise that addressing conflicts and structural inequalities in queer friendship is pivotal, acting as a catalyst for revealing, contesting, and changing exclusions and inequities. We conclude that investing in and supporting organisations founded on queer friendships can potentially foster radical, egalitarian, and politically potent modes of artistic collaboration in the face of normative cultural production and oppressive political circumstances
Revenge is Sweet
No full textA review of REVENGE: AFTER THE LEVOYAH.
In this review, Brian speaks to the dual nature of the audience experience - for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences - while watching REVENGE by splitting the review into two parts
Eurovision as Combinatoire: the complex construction of the lighting and video in the Eurovision Song Contest
No full textThis chapter examines how lighting and video are used in the staging of the Eurovision Song Contest. With a focus on Eurovision 2023 in Liverpool, the first section examines how the lighting and video designers manage the competing demands of multiple creative directors, and use control and communication technologies to coordinate the elements of lighting, video, scenery, cameras and the performers themselves, to create a live broadcast that is, in large part, predetermined. The chapter goes on to examine how lighting and video are used to compose the pictures seen by the viewer. With reference to specific examples, it argues that the visual presentation of Eurovision draws on the conventions of studio-based television light entertainment, music concerts, and pop videos to create a complex, hybrid form – a combinatoire – that challenges our expectations of live music broadcasts
From Ropes to WiFi: the surprising story of stage lighting control
Get PDFAlmost all performances make use of lighting, from those in pub theatres to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic games. Lighting helps shape the audience’s experience and tell stories – it can go un-noticed, or be visually thrilling.
In the court theatres of Renaissance Italy, wood and rope technologies controlled candles and oil lamps to create extraordinary stage transformations to amaze and delight the audiences of the time. Victorian theatres used the latest technologies of limelight and gas flames. The early 20th century saw the introduction of electricity, allowed far greater control of stage lighting, with experimental systems using cinema organ technology, and the early use of vacuum tubes to regulate power. Today, lighting rigs may have hundreds of individual light sources, and thousands of controllable parameters – brightness, colour, direction, texture, beam shape – all changing continuously throughout the performance.
In this talk, I trace the history of the control of light on stage, and the many technologies that have been used. I look at how lighting is controlled now, and suggest some possible future developments, as performance makers seek to do what they have always done: make the most compelling experience for audiences
‘Yes, and’ and ‘No, although’: Inviting dissent and difference towards agency as part of multi-representative practice in actor training
Get PDFUK based actor trainings often emphasise the acceptance of offers from others, ensconced in the common facilitation of ‘yes, and’. Additionally, there is frequently an assumption that trainings will be unquestioningly consumed by students and will benefit their work as performers. But are these assumptions ethical, beneficial, and correct? What happens when actors are invited to dissent to trainings? I argue that the assumption of consent is not always ethical, and that setting up a structure that invites dissent and difference allows for a return to agency in training. As such, this writing seeks to offer ethos of and practices for inviting dissent, difference and consent in actor training towards the recognition of narrative agency. I will analyse the use of these practices in a case study to demonstrate the use and impact of inviting dissent and difference.
These practices are ensconced in the addition of the phrase; ‘no, although’ with ‘yes, and’. ‘No, although’ is the recusal from one thing in lieu of a self-made suggestion. This invites dissent and choice, maintaining both participation and autonomy. Students self-define their roles in the making of work, and make sense of ways to participate, enabling them agency in work together towards a common creative goal. In this is a broader need to dissolve structures of power that may present in the room, which helps invite the freedom to dissent and self-differentiate. As such, I will articulate intersectional feminist practices for community as a framework within which the invitation to dissent and self-differentiate are more easily received
Illness & The One-to-One Encounter (co-authored with Emily Underwood-Lee)
Get PDFWhile the performance encounter of healthcare has been examined from the perspective of bedside manner, and in terms of the training of healthcare practitioners, this chapter looks at the experience of illness through the lens of contemporary one-to-one performance practice. The chapter examines what the world of medicine can learn from one-to-one performances, and what one-to-one arts practitioners might learn from the patient/medicine encounter. One-to-one performance has always had a critical relationship with issues of care, mutuality, shared vulnerability, and encountering the Other. Its proliferation as an art form and area of critical discourse demonstrates an ever-growing area of possibilities, particularly for the Arts/Health agenda. This chapter theorises that by purposefully considering one-to-one performance methods, artists and medical staff may find new possibilities for engaged practice. This article will use the authors’ 2019-2020 project Kicking Up Our Heels, which was created with/for 100 parents and patients at Great Ormond Street Hospital