technē Conflux: Performance as Research, What can we do to bring performance and research together better?
8th Nov 2019 10:30am-4:30pm
An invitation from Andy Kesson & E. Mallin Parry:
Andy is a literary and theatre historian, and Mallin a theatre practitioner currently in the midst of a practice-based doctoral research project. Andy has a background working in widening participation in theatre, and is especially interested in the bits of literary and theatre history that have been forgotten and marginalised, as well as the kinds of performers who tend to be marginalised now. Mallin is mostly known for design work but has always had a very cross-disciplinary practice, which has recently expanded to include practice-based doctoral research in performance, queer studies and queer historiography.
Shuttling between the two worlds of performance and academia, it can often feel like we're straddling a strange divide, where ideas and practices which are standard or well-established in one area are alien in the other, and knowledge that would be valuable, perhaps even game-changing if shared between the two worlds instead remains the preserve of only one.
With both performance and research increasingly concerned with exploring new forms, the definitions of what constitutes knowledge creation increasingly elastic, and the need for cross-disciplinary learning and communication increasingly urgent in a world where dialogue and collaboration are as necessary as they are threatened, how can we better connect, learn from each other, learn together, and tell our stories? What can we do within and without the academy to further our practice/research?
If these are some of the issues up for you in your practice/research, join us at this event to share processes, ideas, issues and questions. Working in Open Space format, there is no pre-set agenda – we’ll create our own on the day together, working on what really matters to us. Whether you’re at the very start of your research or decades into it, if you have a well-honed performance practice or can’t see the point of embodied research at all – you are welcome at this day-long event to work together on whatever is important to you.
The event is wheelchair-accessible.