Rehearsals of the Weird: Julia Bardsley’s Almost the Same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of culture)

This article examines the innovative work of British visual and theatre artist Julia Bardsley and more specifically her performance Almost the same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of cultures). Bardsley’s work operates on the cusp of theatre and the gallery and questions the vocabularies and conceptual frameworks available to us to discuss difficult theatrical experiences. While her work seems to render these frameworks obsolete, it also opens up a space for new vocabularies. Using a re-purposed critical language drawing from literary studies, film and science fiction (Mark Fisher on the weird, Eve Oishi on visual perversity and Jack Halberstam on wildness), this article proposes the weird as a fundamental category for unpacking Bardsley’s work. The weird is understood here as a type of aesthetic experience or affect, a space of critical potential for reading and making theatre work as well as a critical trope for articulating what lies beyond normative understandings of sexuality, identity and desire. This article considers the types of unruly and excessive desires that appear as the driving forces in Bardsley’s work and considers articulating the experience it engenders by reaching beyond the threshold of ordinary experience and into the world of the weird

Repeat repeat: returns of performance.

PhDEMBARGOED UNTIL 01/06/2014Repetition – of speech, of movement and in structure – raises questions about the experience of performance. This thesis accounts for certain pleasures experienced in contemporary performance by means of repetition. It uses examples drawn from dance-theatre (Pina Bausch and Rosas), avant-garde theatre (Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett) and contemporary performance and writing (Lone Twin Theatre and Sophie Calle). It examines repetition as constitutive of performance and explores the ways in which repetition structures our experience of performance as well as the representations of this experience. This project investigates the enjoyment that derives from repeating, as an enjoyment that is central to the practices of performing and writing. Writing, as a process during which repetition can be experienced again and again, is significant to this project. Roland Barthes’s notions of plaisir and jouissance are central to this thesis, enabling me to examine the viewer’s experience of repetition. Drawing on critical and literary theory, performance studies, art history and visual studies, I examine examples of performance from modernism and after in order to contribute to thinking about the experience of repetition in contemporary performance. While the first chapter is a survey of historical examples that illustrate specific aspects of this project, the following chapters offer four different answers to the question of pleasure: pleasure may arise in the experiences of repetition as jouissance, in the experience of synchronicity or presence, in the process of returning to performance and the process of repetition’s ending. These four modes are valued as means of (re)experiencing performance in a space within which the desire to repeat is perpetually nurtured, but never fully satisfied. In this space, repetition becomes generative of new modes of watching and making performance

Fermenting Feminism

"Fermenting Feminism brings together artists whose work responds to what it means to bring fermentation and feminism into the same critical space. These are works that approach fermentation through intersectional and trans-inclusive feminist frameworks, and works that approach feminisms through the metaphor and material practice of fermentation. As both a metaphor and a physical process, fermentation embodies bioavailability and accessibility, preservation and transformation, inter-species symbiosis and coevolution, biodiversity and futurity, harm reduction and care." -- p. [1]

On Children

This article weaves together performance and critical writing to consider the heteronormative values that mainstream western family seems to put forward. Considering the compulsion towards reproductive futurity, it argues that women’s desires are multiple, flexible and ever-changing and do not necessarily include having children

Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes

This chapter accounts for the impossible, yet desired ending of returning to re-experience a particular event; as examples of study, it uses T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape as well as Pina Bausch’s Béla Bartók’s Opera: Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in order to account for a simultaneous longing and fear to end the process of returning. Such experience aims to comprehend the uncontainable event, to finish its unfinished business. The unresolved event demands a return to it, in order to be able to say, finally, but not once and for all, farewell to farewell. The following writing argues that endings, like performance itself, escape from us, forming an experience that is not quite yet and that specific uses of repetition in movement, structure or writing invite the spectator to go back to them, again and again, in an attempt to restore or repair the experience, or come to terms with it

Staging Queer Feminisms: Sexuality and Gender in Australian Performance, 2005-2015

Review of Staging Queer Feminisms: Sexuality and Genderin Australian Performance, 2005-2015 by SarahFrench London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 263 pp, ISBN9781137465429 (hardcover