PhD Practice-based Research "Embodying the Eerie: An investigation of the eerie as a dramaturgical concept in the process of directing devised performance".
A practice-based methodology that offers an expanded view of the devising process in post-dramatic performance. I explore my role as a director within a research context that addresses research questions with an ensemble of professional performers. The embodied interdisciplinary practice foregrounds the performer's body in somatic practice, emphasising the internal experience of kinesthetic, sensory-perceptual and intuitive ways of knowing and feeling that relate to subconscious processes.
The practice develops performative elements and techniques through an improvisatory method, facilitating the performers in an emergent process of responding to movement scores.
The visual dramaturgy draws on movement, text, objects and light and sound technologies as key elements composed through juxtapositions, disrupting sequential time and narrative.
The research is framed through Mark Fisher's Hauntology, and the Eerie (2016), offering a unique perspective on creative processes which expand the performer's impulse from the everyday and mundane to beyond the known eerie is concerned with questions of agency, which I explore through a decentering methodology of engaging with 'agential objects' (McKinney, 2015), the eerie materially of place as they are sites of tangible and intangible presence and the spectral agency of place/landscape.
The performer's open state enables them to open to an eerie impulse, which is 'mined' through the directorial process, which observes and singles out impulses that resonate with the eerie and emerge without context or outcome. These are shaped through the dramaturgy that combines images, light and sound technologies to create an eerie theatricality. The performances explore 'what is felt that needs to be said' as it arises through this process in response to place and specific themes that are current.
The current performance, Goat Song (2024-ongoing), will be touring in 2025.
Previous projects as part of the PhD submission
This Is The Land (2022-2023), Dwelling (2019), The Strange Geometry of Time (2018)
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The ensemble of performers includes Leeza Jessie, Alice Buckley, Zov Vélez, Samuel De La Torre, and Xavier De Santos.
Collaborations with musicians Helen Roberts and John Baggott.