Scholar

I sustain long term commitment to the politics of people, animals, and objects in intercultural settings, having been a member of the University of California Multicampus Research group in Intercultural Performance for many years. I am also committed to related issues through detailed embodied work with actors and actors and audiences, working constantly on how to connect the two.

I recently explored my interest in actor/audience relationality in a collaborative article on the work of the Japanese writer/theatre director Shogo Ota, whose work I have directed. We were exploring strategies that turn technique into technicity onstage, and comparing approaches taken by actors, directors and critics. As with most of my critical writing, this was accompanied by a production of Plastic Rose by Ota.

Through the support of a fellowship at the Interweaving Performance Cultures Institute at the Freie Universitat in Berlin, I have brought together my interests in Shogo Ota’s work with that of Tadeusz Kantor, and have written an article on how he approaches the concerns of body and text as a visual artist.  I’m currently thinking through how, over time, the conditions of a production build a form that brings the actors and audience together enabling change.

The research moves extensively through practice into many areas of theatre and performance, and I focus on practice as research, particularly in intercultural settings that develop ways of attuning oneself to culturally specific needs.  This is the emphasis of my recent essay on working with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center on Midsummer Night’s Dream. Over the last decade I have developed a relationship with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, working with Chinese actors in generating relational strategies for modern spoken drama.

The interface between scholarly work and practice has also led to a co-authored article concerned with looking at the postdramatic in terms of elements that might just as well be considered pre-dramatic in terms of an in-depth dramatic study of an early seventeenth century text, written parallel with a production of a pre-Shakespearean play, Gallathea, by John Lyly.