This thesis formulates a practice-based approach to performances of breathlessness on the page. It investigates breathlessness as a subject of creative practice through performance writing, creating different works that function as material object, site as well as score for future performance permutations. These works each examine different aspects of breathlessness, with a focus on the corporeal, affect and between-ness. The relationship of these performance works to the body, affect, time and duration establish the performative possibilities of writing and how this specific form of artistic practice contributes to discourse surrounding live work. My research does not distinguish between the contributions of practice and critical analysis. The outcome of the research is three works, one of which is embedded within this document, and a critical analysis that explores the different ways breathlessness performs on the page. Key to my research is a negotiation of understandings of lessness. Breathless performance writing posits a concept of lessness as other than absence. The ability of the practice-based work to initiate experiences that engage with the body, time and duration also demonstrate forms through which writing can generate as well as directly participate in performance. This research contributes to the field of contemporary performance and theatre practice by defining the live in relation to writing as well as developing a concept of lessness. The distinction between writing and performance leads to unnecessary schisms between the two disciplines. This body of research demonstrates the ways in which performance writing bridges these disciplines to initiate live work. This research disrupts conventional and binary definitions of breathlessness, performance and writing. Performance writing initiates live experiences for audiences of one or many, unbound to any one point in time, capable of generating multiple but unique live encounters with performance.

This doctoral study examines the evolving role of the dramaturg in the British contemporary performance scene from 2000-2015. In 1999, the role was seen in the UK as a luxury, not an essential; now the same companies are working with dramaturgs, often within an academic context, as the funding culture has shifted from Arts Council England to the Academy. This study proceeds through a combination of practice as research and a contextual survey of the role s recent history taken from readings, interviews and a narrative of personal experience. As John Freeman writes, Research is also always re-search: a drawing on one s previous experience and developing this into knowledge . I arrive at new knowledge about the dramaturg s current position in a shifting landscape by inhabiting both the role and the landscape. John Berger suggests that to understand a landscape we have to situate ourselves in it. The doctoral study seeks to do this through practice, research and practice as research. I devised three performances - The Trilogy (2014). Their non-linearity is relevant to the line of investigation I took into the role of the dramaturg today, both inviting and playing the role. The practice as research applies different theoretical models of how a dramaturg operates to a body of theatre work that interrogates the role from different perspectives. The practice asks how dramaturgy might function with or without a dramaturg as an agent for critical feedback or meaning-making by exploring other models such as embedded criticism, work-in-progresses and post-show discussions. The performance work attempts to put the dramaturg onstage and in so doing explores what he / she does as part of the theatre event to make it happen. The project is concerned with making visible the textual trace of dramaturgy within the work. As such, I have written a thesis on the dramaturgy of my practice that questions notions of proximity and distance, objectivity and subjectivity, self and other. The thesis documents how the role has evolved over the last 15 years and argues that it has had a significant, tangible impact on the British contemporary performance scene. Through an understanding of the role, the dramaturg, outside of a traditional writer-director paradigm, becomes an application with which to deconstruct and decode the tropes and contradictions of contemporary performance. I posit that dramaturgs and outside eyes operate in fluid and often undefined spatial territory between writer, deviser, director and dramatist as well as any hyphenated combination thereof - and the doctoral study reflects this fluidity in its style.

In this dissertation, I will be looking at the actor as a craftsperson and artist from both a secular and a theological standpoint in order to determine if the labour of acting can be considered both as work, a “proper job”; and as a calling from God, a vocation. The main questions prompting and shaping this dissertation have arisen out of my own personal experience as an actor struggling both in the performing arts business and with my Christian faith. So, the opening chapter will introduce a personal background approach to the dissertation. It will summarize the experiences that brought me to the place of asking these two questions. It will also serve as an introduction to the life of Dorothy L. Sayers, outlining her own life and demonstrating why she is important to our work as actors. Chapter Two will then cover historical data on Anti-Theatrical Prejudice, laying the foundation for the ongoing discomfort with and misunderstanding regarding the actor's craft. Chapters Three and Four will examine separately our notions of work (Three) and then of vocation (Four) in order to gain a broader view of these two terms. At this point, we will have laid the path to reintroduce Dorothy L. Sayers in Chapters Five, Six and Seven, both as a partner in conversation and as one who held this broader understanding of the terms work and vocation and applied them to creative activities, in particular acting. The final chapter will look at acting as connected to the basic features of life. It, among other things, will revisit some of the anti-theatre argument; pick up on ideas such as the imagination's ability to rehearse life; and will examine some uses of acting as a means of human exploration and social change. Finally, we will explore the artistry, technique, and craft of the actor, to firmly establish the place of acting in society as an important task, a “proper job,” and a Christian vocation.

The research in this thesis (composed of a written element, audio documents and a live performance) focuses on the relationship of the female speaking voice to her own body and others’ bodies within the particular temporality of performance space. Arguing that the female voice can be theorised as a resistant theatre material, which through its volatile nature can escape attempts at control, the work here develops practical strategies and methods for discovering how the voice eludes any easy identification or ownership as part of a feminist agenda. Following Michelle Duncan who writes that ‘voice puts matter into circulation, matter that is more, or other than language,’ the research undertaken investigates how this matter can be manipulated in performance so that the sound material of the voice makes meaning. Concentrating on how a female body might ‘handle’ the voice as matter, with the body in question being both performer of voice, and director/designer of voice, the work develops a methodology of the “auditorcomposer,” the female body who speaks through careful listening to others’ voices. Introducing the model of the auditor-composer through a rethinking of the character of Ophelia, both the practical and textual research undertaken then investigate how bodies compose through longdistance time and space, activating the return of past voices to reverberate in the present. Animating and patterning elements of the theoretical projects of Gina Bloom and Elin Diamond and using Gertrude Stein as a theorist of motion and return, the research argues that the material movement of sound happens in the continuous present, and as such the single voice cites many voices in the action of its live sounding

This thesis examines the performance history of Shakespeare focusing on those productions performed as a period analogue of the nineteen-thirties. It engages with the material in two ways. It first attempts to locate influences that have led to the development of this style of performance, finding correlations with both theatrical and televisual drama. It then examines the productions as performed, focusing on the construction of scenography and actor performances. Throughout the analysis, this thesis engages with shifts in the representation of the historical past on both stage and screen.

The vocal demands on teachers in UK classrooms are explored in this mixed methods research which notes how little voice support teachers receive. The study draws on information from a range of fields: literature on voice problems, voice science, actor training, and the perspectives of teachers themselves. First-hand evidence collected through a survey questionnaire and individual interviews gives information of teachers ' voice problems. The study provides also an exploration of how voice quality is influenced by psychophysical use as defined in the Alexander Technique. The Technique was discovered by F.M. Alexander (1869-1955) and is well-known in the preparation of actors for performance. There are different understandings of what Alexander taught; what I set out in this study is the particular basis he passed on which influences my own use and voice. Detailed exploration taking place in a biomechanical laboratory replicated general vocal demand. Considerable quantitative data emerged with results showing that it is feasible to measure voice quality and other changes occurring when the teacher follows a procedure of the Technique to adjust their stance. The research aims to contribute towards knowledge of the teacher's voice, to inform provision for UK teachers, and to demonstrate further research is warranted.

The PhD examines the web of meanings elicited by and constructed around the act and concept of massacre in English Renaissance drama. The study is underpinned by two contentions. The first is that the enactment of massacre, both on and off-stage, is often predicated upon the same kinds of fictive and imaginative processes inherent to dramatic practice. The second is that the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris was instrumental to conceptualisations of Renaissance massacre. Bartholomew, along with its most flagrant dramatic depiction, Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1593), anchors every part of the study. The thesis is split thematically into three sections, each of which contains two chapters. The first part explores the language of massacre. Chapter 1 examines the denotations and connotations of the word massacre in French and English. Chapter 2 looks at the means through which the rhetoric of massacre reports prompt emotional responses in readers and spectators. Part two investigates the relationship between massacre and the state. Chapter 3 explores massacres committed from ‘above’ by ruling or de facto powers. Chapter 4 considers inverse phenomena – massacres committed from ‘below’ – by usurpers, lesser magistrates, and private individuals. The final part examines the relationship between massacre and warfare. Chapter 5 explores massacres committed by external forces – from ‘without’ – and explores the contribution of massacre to wars of conquest, sieges, and sacks. Chapter 6 addresses massacres committed ‘within’, examining inter-state conflicts and the internal logic of battle. The thesis concludes by gesturing to the continuation of key theorisations of massacres after the closure of the theatres in 1642.

In this PhD thesis I offer an examination of the work of Jesuit Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709), an artist known primarily for his works of perspectival fresco painting. Pozzo's development, his career and his multifaceted practice––which included painting, scenography, architecture, and a two-volume treatise on perspective–– together serve as a prime case study for understanding the relationship of the religious art and architecture of the seventeenth century to the period's culture of ritual and performance. Pozzo's work, I argue, is religious theatre, and the key to reading both his ephemeral scenographies and the permanent works of painting and architecture lies in religious performance. Each of the works, I contend, functions as a work of religious theatre: architectural space, images, narrative, illusion and light are used to communicate messages, to engage the senses and the intellect, to activate the memory and the imagination, and to directly involve the spectator both internally and externally as a performer. In my first two chapters I present an analysis of the environment in which Pozzo emerged, beginning with the religious, intellectual and visual culture of the Jesuits, before turning to the religious theatre of Northern Italy. Here I concentrate on the Counter-Reform culture of religious spectacle, before arriving at Pozzo’s first recorded scenographies. In addition to their ritual function, I demonstrate how these works establish many of the recurring visual themes and techniques we see across Pozzo's work. In the third chapter I study Pozzo's earliest surviving major painting commission: the church of San Francesco Saverio at Mondovì. I present the church as a teatro sacro—a permanent ritual scenography of architecture and painting which evokes the elaborate ritual processions of the time. My fourth chapter focuses on the ephemeral scenographic works of Pozzo’s Roman period. Pozzo’s innovations in scenography and perspectival illusionism in Rome quickly establish his reputation and lead to the major commissions in the church of Sant'Ignazio, which I discuss with several major Roman works in my final chapter. The examination of the Roman projects returns us to the central theme of my thesis: art and architecture as theatre; both a setting for religious ritual and a means of persuasion through intellectual and spiritual engagement of the observer in a ritual performance. In order to pursue this line of argument I have consulted a wide array of sources and secondary literature across a number of fields. Important primary sources studied include Pozzo's two-volume treatise, Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum (1693,1700), Jesuit documents and archived correspondence, eighteenth-century biographies of Pozzo, prints and commemorative publications of festivals, works of classical authors, and theological writings of major figures in the seventeenth century. This project embraces a wide range of topics including painting, perspective, architecture, illusion, theatre and scenography, ritual and spectacle, theology, philosophy, early modern science, Counter-Reform religious culture, and Jesuit history.

This thesis draws the line of a rise and a fall, an ironic pattern whereby the English stage of the long eighteenth century, in its relation to Shakespeare in particular, first acquired powerful influence, and then, through the very effects of that power, lost it. It also shows what contemporary literary criticism might learn from the activities that constitute this arc of evolution. My first chapter interrogates the relationship between text and performance in vernacular writings about acting and editing from the death of Betterton in 1710 to the rise of Garrick in the middle decades of the century. From the status of a distinct tradition, performance comes to rely on text as a basis for the intimate, personal engagement with Shakespeare believed necessary to the work of the sentimental actor. Such a reliance grants the performer new potential as a literary critic, but also prepares a fall. The performer becomes another kind of reader, and so is open to accusations of reading badly. My second chapter analyses the evolving definition of Shakespeare as a dramatic author from Samuel Johnson onwards. An untheatrical definition of the dramatic (Johnson's) is answered by one which recognises the power and vitality of the stage, especially in its representation of sympathetic character (Montagu and Kenrick). Yet that very recognition leads to a set of altered critical priorities in which the theatre is, once more, relegated (Morgann and Richardson). My third and fourth chapters consider the practices and critical implications of theatrical performance of Shakespeare during Garrick's career. I focus on the acting of emotion, the portrayal of what Aaron Hill called 'the very Instant of the changing Passion', and show that performance of this time, attentive to the striking moment and the transitions that power it, required from the actor both attention to the text and preternatural control over his own emotions. In return, it allowed Garrick and others to claim a special affinity with Shakespeare and to capture the public's attention, both in the theatre and outside it. Yet this situation, that of 'twin stars', does not last. French and German responses to English acting, the concern of my last chapter, show its decline particularly well. They also, however, show the power that existed in such a union between page and stage, and equal weight is given in both my third and my fourth chapter to how the theatrical-literary insights of eighteenth-century critical culture might also illuminate modern approaches.

This thesis presents my original contribution to knowledge, a combination of critical media and performance theories to analyse the production and augmentation of postdigital experiential spaces in Punchdrunk Theatre Company. Distributed agency is key to Punchdrunk's work, with makers within the company and audiences both being active participants in meaning-making, across complex and detailed interfaces. In order to investigate the making cultures on ‘both sides' of the interface, I undertook a two-year participant study as a researching designer within the company during the build of the productions The House Where Winter Lives and The Drowned Man in 2011-2014, gathering field data in the form of extensive interviews with members of the company and audience participants, supported by diary notations and photographs. I studied the processes and methods that extend, distribute and regulate agency to both audiences and makers within the company, and identified devices and features of the interaction design of the company that produce the immanent subject-event relationships that support immersion in their work. A core aspect of this research concerns the relationship between immersion and the sublime, and how subject-event relationships (immanent vs. transcendent) contribute to engendering sublime interactive experiences. I have analysed the consequences of this for the modelling of participation in interaction design, and how it influences conditions of possibility within interactive systems across physical, digital and blended media. The conclusion of this research includes the definition of a postdigital sublime, and proposes a delinquent system aesthetic that integrates proxies for gravity through articulation of the ‘shadow side' of interaction design.