Performance Research 

About: Performance Research is an academic journal published by Routledge. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Dance & Performative utterance. It has an ISSN identifier of 1352-8165. Over the lifetime, 1784 publications have been published receiving 6033 citations.

Practice-as-research and the Problem of Knowledge

Abstract: Knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided. (Lyotard 1979: 8–9) The ‘problem of knowledge’ has been a topic...

Ugly Feelings

Abstract: At the height of the pandemic, the concept of care and the moral imperative to take care of one another rapidly entered public discourse. Yet while the UK government sought to assure us that we were ‘all in this together’, a very different picture soon emerged as a lack of protective personal equipment meant that NHS staff found themselves at a greater risk of dying of Covid-19. This risk was also disproportionately distributed as many Black and Global Majority NHS staff, who were in front line services, were more at risk than their white colleagues. This article examines three digital monologue performances that were streamed at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and which engage with the negative feelings of anxiety, fear and risk taking which framed contexts of racialised care at this time. Tales from the front line … and other stories-Part 2: NHS Mental Health Worker, was a verbatim performance produced by Talawa Theatre, while Rivers by Meera Syal and First, Do No Harm by Bernadine Evaristo were both commissioned by the Old Vic Theatre and screened as part of The Greatest Wealth project, commemorating the foundation of the NHS. In different ways, these performances explore care giving, but do so by foregrounding the experiences of Black and Global Majority NHS staff. Focusing on the fear and risks of caring for others, these performances explore what, borrowing from Sianne Nagi (2005), I will describe as the ‘ugly feelings’ of care. Instead of depicting the aesthetics of care-giving, these monologues expose the riskiness of caring and the ugliness of racism endured by Black and Global Majority NHS carers while attending to the needs of others. Through an examination of the moments of discrimination and disempowerment experienced by these NHS carers, these performances transform these ‘ugly feelings’ into sites of critical productivity, generating work that calls upon us to decentre our conceptualisation of care and to consider our own political allegiance in order to demand progressive change.

Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, agency and responsibility in immersive theatre

Abstract: This article identifies a value set shared between the neoliberal ethos and modes of audience participation frequently promoted in immersive theatre: values such as risk-taking, individual freedoms and personal responsibility. The promotion of self-made opportunity, premised either on opportunistic risk-taking, or the savvy attitude that comes with experience and familiarity with immersive theatre participation, will be addressed as valorising another shared value: entrepreneurialism. A participatory mode will be introduced that I call ‘entrepreneurial participation’: a kind of audience participation privileged in much immersive theatre performance identifying the enactment of neoliberal value. While entrepreneurial participation may be deliberately deployed by audiences as a participatory tactic, it will be argued that this particular participatory mode is frequently expected of audiences, or at least privileged as a means of engaging with performance. Work by the British immersive theatre company Punchd...