The present discussion is based on my performance research with Elastic Theatre (originally named Vocal Motions and also known as Vocal Motions Elastic Theatre), a company that I founded and have directed since 2001. A specific focus is placed on the body of work produced between 2005 and 2011, which comprises six performance outputs: Ophelia’s Song (2005-2006), Medea Made Medea (2007), The Magdalene Mysteries (2008), Medousa (2009), The Passion of Saints Sergius and Bacchus (2009) and Baroccata/Baroque Box (2010-2011). These productions have been informed by an overriding ethos, which is presented and reflected upon in the following chapters. I refer to such ethos by using the term elasticity, which I define in the Introduction, contextualising this within the broader spectrum of contemporary tendencies in performance practices, with particular reference to the notion of 'post-dramatic theatre'. This concept of elasticity is presented in relation to three aspects of my productions: respectively, the combination of performance disciplines (Chapter 1), the dramaturgical approach (Chapter 2) and the staging choices made (Chapter 3). Across these chapters, I provide a contextual overview of the aspect treated, a discussion of my methodology in relation to this, and a reflection on my findings, referring to the concept of 'liminality'. My Conclusion draws my reflections together, emphasising the original contribution that my work has represented in the field of contemporary performance. Each of my outputs is documented in the Appendices, through written, photographic and video material. The Appendices also include a chronological overview of the productions discussed, a summary/glossary of my methodological strategies and a brief presentation of the company’s history. Additional details can be found on the website: http://www.elastictheatre.com.

The thesis presents a study of three theatres in Camden: the Bedford Theatre, the Open Space Theatre, and the Round House. Each section contains details of the theatres' histories, their managements and their artistic achievements. The amount of detail varies according to the availability of material and in each case the emphasis is different. In all three sections particular periods have been discussed at length because they represent a significant achievement on the part of the management and artistic directors. At all times the author has stressed the importance of the repertoire which each organisation presented and casebook studies of key productions have been written to illustrate the use made of the available stage space.

The thesis is an attempt to show practically and theoretically how digital image synthesis can be used to help create new ways of making meaning by examining some of the methods that lie at the heart of materialist avant-garde arts practice. In the first instance this involves the technique of montage, especially dialectical montage as developed by Eisenstein, Brecht and Godard in which the shock effect is used to overcome conditioned perceptions and create a critical distance. Secondly it is informed by Benjamin's concept of allegory, a method of using montage to assemble historical fragments or emblems to reveal insights into the world of material social relations. The aim of my thesis is to show that transformation rather than montage has now become the primary aesthetic means in digital media and stands with montage in a new perceptual dialectic of shock and fascination. The main practical component of this thesis submission consists of the film LMX Spiral, a digital film making project based on aspects of British social and cultural history from the eighties to the nineties. The film is used as the main means to illustrate various points about the relation between montage and transformation in the context of allegorical film making. LMX Spiral can be described as both a historical thesis and a dialectical special effects film based on the attempts during the eighties to create an economic utopia of enterprise and opportunity, undermined by the likelihood of human corruption and natural catastrophe. It is an allegory about Britain's transition between the enterprise culture of the eighties and the lottery culture of the nineties. The final chapter attempts to expand the application of Benjamin’s concept of allegory as a cultural form to the level of the technical production of digital media. The necessity for software systems to perform efficiently under a number of different requirements leads to a hybridisation of knowledge bases and a fragmentation of theoretical models that might be similar to the emblematisation and montage of cultural icons. This suggests the possibility that scientific and mathematical models could be used allegorically on a variety of different levels but also points to certain limits in the applicability of this concept of allegory.

This thesis investigated communicational processes of text interaction between the so called novela das oito (lit. eight o’clock soap opera) or the prime-time Brazilian soap opera – also known as telenovela or simply novela – and different groups of viewers, for the purposes of informing communication theory, on the one hand, and critical literacy practices, on the other. The investigated groups of viewers continually consumed this highly popular genre of serialised fiction, whilst also participating in online communities about novelas from a pioneering social network service called Orkut. Selected social theories of language and communication were used to investigate the primary text genre (i.e. the prime-time Brazilian telenovela) and the context where it originates, in relation the secondary communicational genres (i.e. selected Orkut communities about telenovelas) and the respective context where they emerged out of these intertextual interactions. To conduct this investigation, specific notions of text and genre were established in terms of their affordances and limitations, as discussed in Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) and in Kress (2003, 2010) with respect to textual modes of representation, and as developed in English (2011) with respect to genre itself. As such, novelas and online discussions about novelas were analysed here in terms of the specific ways in which genre afforded as well as it limited not only the design, the production and the distribution of both primary and secondary texts, but also their reception (i.e. consumption). For this, an adapted version of English’s analytical framework (ibid.) was developed and employed, with these multimodal texts and genres found to be oriented in specific terms with regard to their social aspects (contextually and discursively), on the one hand, and their material aspects (thematically and semiotically), on the other hand. As a result, a detailed understanding was provided, not only in terms of the specific ways in which these popular texts and genres oriented interactions, but also in terms of the specific ways in which these interactions oriented these texts and genres in turn. As these crucial points were carefully laid out, this research was able to suggest that the secondary texts and genres arising in the form of spontaneous interactions with widely popular television programmes, such as novelas, appeared to demonstrate, in practical terms, their potential to foster critical literacy practices – defined here as the progressive ability to interact with and make sense of different texts and contexts, discourses and genres, and their representational modes used through the means of different media. The research is therefore original at two levels. Firstly, by providing a detailed exploration of the prime-time Brazilian telenovela in relation to some dimensions of its reception – at the same time also seen as dimensions of (re)design and (re)production of secondary texts and genres from a multimodal social semiotic perspective – it offers a multidisciplinary approach through an attempt at combining Media and Communications with Applied Language Studies. It is in this sense that the extension and subsequent employment of a multimodal analytical framework inform and contribute to communication theory. Secondly, by considering the implications of this empirical study in terms of how we learn and improve our abilities to communicate more effectively for a multitude of purposes, this research promotes a wider notion of literacy in practical terms. This is also seen as representing an original contribution towards critical approaches to pedagogy in specific terms.

This document provides an elaboration of the critical, contextual and methodological rationale for a practice‐based PhD research project undertaken at London Metropolitan University 2009-2013. This four‐year project was an exploration in identity, space and location. It looks at the transitions, journeys and stories of migrant women. Specifically this exploration has been developed through the language of the cultural practices of Iban women. The Iban are an indigenous group of people from Borneo, predominantly living within the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Significantly the Iban practices have migrated from the jungle, to urban areas, and globally, and inevitably the identity of these practices has developed as the locations have changed, much like the women performing them. My father is Iban and my mother white New Zealander, and I grew up in both Sarawak and New Zealand before coming to live in the UK in my 20s. My performance training has been within a Western context, both in New Zealand and the UK. This project has been a personal exploration, which has wider consequences in developing performance practice and understanding the discourses of home, belonging, migration and identity. This has led to questions around migrating Iban performance and cultural practices to a western contemporary context. These questions have been investigated through the cultural practices of the Iban pantun (chapter three), the Iban ngajat (chapter two), Iban weaving (chapter four) and the use of space in the Iban longhouse (chapter one). This project was an interdisciplinary investigation; in each chapter I pull together performance theory from western practitioners and post‐colonial feminist literature with the Iban performance practice. This project has asked the question: "Can Iban cultural and performance practices be ‘migrated’ to a contemporary western performance context in order to explore experiences of women’s migration?" My research question was central to the practice‐based research I conducted, the methodologies developed through practice as research, and are central to all the work covered in this thesis. Within this context the practice is submitted as an outcome alongside this written narrative. Additional details can be found on the website: www.fromthejungle.co.uk.

In the following thesis I argue that from within a postmodern framework the ‘realist narrative mode’ finds its position as the narratological form of choice for communicating historical and biographical ‘truth’ under question. Furthermore, as the formal distinctions between ‘fictional’ and ‘factual’ writing become less clear, I propose that the writer’s approach to his/her craft must also be redefined. Under such conditions I argue that each individual text defines and legitimises its own particular terms of reference and narrative form. The act of writing within a postmodern framework therefore, is not only a craft, but also a philosophical activity and as such requires the writer to enter the world of theoretical fiction. Sculpting in Ice is the product of one such text entering into this process. This thesis demonstrates in action the process by which the play text for Sculpting in Ice develops its own theory of fiction through the writing of that fiction. The primary focus of the thesis is, therefore, to explore the relationship between writing and theory and to render explicit the particular ‘theory of fiction’ created during the writing of Sculpting in Ice.