This submission draws together six publications and a covering document to set out an original contribution to knowledge in the field of learning disabled performance. Critical attention has been relatively scarce in this field, and the publications gathered here offer the only extended study of learning disability and performance that covers a range of artists across the artforms of theatre and music. Following an initial provocation which outlines the emergence of theatre and learning disability, the publications focus mostly on detailed studies of specific artists, exploring their aesthetic practice along with discursive and audience responses to their work. The article on Heavy Load considers how the integrated band, in its negotiation of punk’s anti-aesthetic, reappropriates the image of learning disability already inherent in the form. Two publications on Susan Boyle explore how her successful audition for Britain’s Got Talent contradicts medical and discursive attempts to contain learning disabled people, and also reveals the traditional place of learning disability in what Slavoj Žižek (following Jacques Lacan) calls the symbolic order. A chapter on Mind the Gap critically assesses the company’s various projects and explores the notion of the learning disabled actor. The final article on Back to Back theatre opens up post-Brechtian dialectics operating in key productions by the ensemble. The covering document sets out the core arguments that underpin my publications, forming a cohesive approach to reading learning disabled performance with significance for the social and aesthetic understanding of cognitive impairment. I contest a dominant approach that positions learning disabled people as non-performative and singularly non-dialectical. My original readings draw particularly on Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics and I propose a specific dialectic of stasis and dynamism. In doing so, the combined research generates new possibilities for understanding such performance encounters beyond the historically sedimented constructions of learning disability.

This project examines texts from a body of work which numbers fifteen performed across the country. The accompanying commentary identifies the ways in which 'Be My Baby' and 'The Thrill of Love' tell female-centred stories in a popular dramatic voice which explore aspects of women's lived experience. It engages with feminist theory and practice to identify the diffuse and sometimes contradictory feminisms within the plays. Dramatic structure is considered with close reference to realist and expressionist forms. The exegesis investigates their engagement with popular culture, the importance of music in the narratives and the methods by which they seek to reclaim women's history. The commentary brings together academic mainstream sources to contextualize the study. Playtexts are examined with reference to a broad range of theorists, practitioners and cultural commentators including Eileen Aston and Geraldine Harris, Erin Hurley, Angela McRobbie, Graham Saunders, Lucy O'Brien, Carol Ann Lee and Lyn Gardner. The distinctive aspects of affective solidarity and feeling are identified as unifying elements of the play's personal and political concerns.

This thesis applies Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ to the development of site-specific theatre practice. Focussing on the Arches arts centre in Glasgow, the aim is to suggest ways in which a performance aesthetic can be developed that uses, makes evident and contributes to what Bourriaud describes as the ‘space of relations’ that exists within every site. Employing a practice-as-research methodology in order to develop a ‘relational theatre practice’, the performances that comprise half of this thesis aim to respond to and generate relationships not only between theatre and its ‘audience’, but through a sensitivity to site as historically, geographically, culturally and socially located. Key to this project is an understanding of the boundaries, limitations and exclusions that inevitably come to define theatre practice in a site with as many contradictory and conflicting relationships as a busy arts venue like the Arches. The findings of this research are primarily dependent on three practice-as-research projects at the venue: Underneath the Arches (January 2009), Midland Street (September 2009) and A Work on Progress (April 2010). These projects have focussed respectively on three key areas of relational theatre practice; the performance text, the theatre audience and processes of theatre production. The written part of the thesis provides an exegesis of this practice, critically reflecting on the relationships that developed through the performances. Combining a practical and theoretical approach, this research interrogates Bourriaud’s relational aesthetic model through its application to the development of theatre practice within the specific context of a cultural site. Conversely, it reveals and works with the multiple relationships of the Arches, thereby providing new knowledge about the relational processes through which a cultural site is constituted.

This research project examines the relationship between the female body and technology and analyses how contemporary artists are exploring the creative and political potential of technologies within their performance practice. By interrogating the culturally constructed gendering of technologies and theories of the female body through contemporary feminisms, this study shows how by working against existing patriarchal structures surrounding bodies and technology female artists are developing a technologised feminist praxis. The artists that I focus on throughout this thesis acknowledge, challenge and attempt to subvert dominant and conventional applications of the technologies, and therefore I read their work as feminist. This study analyses a range of types of technology and their applications in contemporary performance practice including: immersive technologies, digital and analogue technologies, the Internet, biotechnologies and cyborg technologised performance. Within each of these chapters the technologies are analysed in relation to the performing female body and I apply critical theory to enable me to read these works as “hybrid” and as illustrative of artists working within a “cyborg consciousness” to explore alternative political modes. This project is informed by the work of cultural critic and feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway whose “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) altered the landscape of feminist discussions surrounding the technologised female body. Her utopian manifesto evokes the cyborg as a creature of social fiction and social reality and calls for a re-coding of bodies and approaches to political thinking. I argue in this thesis that the artists I am investigating attempt a re-coding of female bodies and of existing gender conventions surrounding bodies and technology to develop a new cyborg feminist praxis.

This thesis explores the relationship between postdramatic theatre and écriture féminine using a practice-as-research methodology. Its claim is that Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine is revitalised as a source for feminist theatre studies through the emergence of postdramatic theatre. The project’s practice-led research identified and extracted principles from Cixous’s prose writing that are especially compelling for theatre and explored these through laboratory practice. The primary sources for doing this were Cixous’s novels Inside (1969) and The Book of Promethea (1983), as well as her writing on Clarice Lispector. The exploration of these materials was a creative and transformative activity that identified equivalent strategies between the two media – prose writing and theatre – while at the same time revealing significant differences and tensions. The practice is documented in the thesis via research logs and video evidence. The written reflection draws attention to the specific potentialities that theatre brings to écriture féminine and discusses how the outcomes of the practice-led research resonate with postdramatic aesthetics. While the research findings accumulated strategically across the series of three performances, and the performances built upon each other iteratively, each of the findings chapters focuses in detail on one aspect of the practice: specifically, semiotics, dramaturgy and feminine epistemology. By pinpointing and discussing nodal points at which postdramatic practices and écriture féminine intersect, this thesis aims to show that postdramatic theatre has the potential to be – and thus frequently is – feminine. Indeed, the overall aim of this thesis is to advance the emerging field of study of feminism in postdramatic theatre by exploring the feminine potential of postdramatic theatre and proposing that Cixous’s écriture féminine offers a way of framing the poetics of postdramatic theatre in relation to feminist politics. The findings have potential utility for theatre-makers seeking a feminist method in the postdramatic as well as scholars of postdramatic theatre and feminism.

The central aims of this thesis is to provide a work that may be used to start a serious archive that documents the contemporary theatrical work of Britain's individuals and companies that have an Afro-Caribbean cultural background. Such an archive will allow later writers on aspects of modern British theatre the opportunity to move ahead where past generations have had to spend time reinventing themselves as documented resources have been lacking. The thesis documents and discusses the history and achievements of Talawa Theatre Company. Prior to this discussion the main theories, original research and methodologies used to complete this study are presented in Chapter One. The historical aspect of the work is divided into two sections. The first section is Chapter Two and provides a historical context for Talawa's performance work. This is done by presenting a chronology of Talawa's performance roots that are shown to begin in Africa, develop in Jamaica, and end in England. The second section is Chapter Three and looks at Talawa's history between 1986 and 2001. Analysis includes discussion of definitions of black British theatre, Talawa's mission statement and the company's residency in the West End. Talawa's achievements are discussed in the body of the thesis. The notion of achievement is understood within the contemporary British theatrical context highlighting the originality of Talawa's work, and by extension the company's commitment to its mission statement. To this end aspects of Talawa's performance work are discussed thematically in the following three chapters: Chapter Four: Caribbean Plays; Chapter Five: American Plays; Chapter Six: English Plays. Although Talawa has also performed African plays these performances are not part of the present study. The decision to omit this genre was due to the lack of archival evidence in this area.

Folk plays have been performed in many different cultures all over the world, notwithstanding the level of material development and the distinctive features of the societies in which they are found. In the North-East of Brazil, they have probably been played since the beginning of the country's history in the sixteenth century. This thesis examines the origins, the most relevant characteristics and the contemporary meaning of four of these folk theatre forms which are still performed in the North-East of Brazil, namely, the Bumba-meu-Boi, the Cheganca, the Pastoril and the Mamulengo, stressing the aspects that they have in common with the English Mummers' Plays and other folk theatre forms from Europe and from the East. Folk theatre forms have generally been seen as remnants of ancient religious rituals. However, this relationship is only hypothetical and can no longer be proved. Thus, although recognising that they possibly originate from magico-religious sources in the distant past, and that they still keep some magic characteristics, here they are chiefly seen as an expression of the collective unconscious of mankind and of social and political relationships.

This account of reconstruction in the post-war German theatre analyzes the development of theatre in the Western Zones between 8 May 1945 and 20 June 1948. It establishes a number of previously unknown facts about the types and numbers of theatres which existed, which plays were premiered during the three seasons, as well as reconstructing and investigating the repertoires of twenty selected houses. The findings allow received opinions to be challenged concerning the status of Berlin and other leading theatre centres in relation to provincial houses and the alleged absence of contemporary German drama. They also lead to revisions of data on repertoires, production dates, premieres and so on. An assessment of the difficult and contradictory status of the German theatre at the time illustrates the tensions in cultural and national reconstruction within Germany, and the uniquely significant role played by theatre as a focus for re-establishing national and personal identity in the devastation following the Second World War. The thesis was largely researched at theatres and archives in the Federal Republic of Germany and Berlin since no systematic attempt had previously been undertaken to analyze each of the aspects covered in relation to the three Western Zones individually and comparatively. The three main divisions of the account deal with the context for reconstruction (the roles and ideas of the German theatres and critics and of the Allied authorities; the physical conditions determining reconstruction); a statistical overview of theatres, premieres and repertoires; an investigation of the roles and significance of foreign drama, the German classics, and modern German drama in relation to national and cultural redevelopment illustrated by production reconstructions of selected works: (Anouilh: Antigone; Wilder: Wir sind noch einmal davongekommen; Ardrey: Leuchtfeuer; Goethe: Iphigenie auf Tauris; Lesslng: Nathan der Weise; Borchert: DrauBen vor der TUr; Weisenborn: Die Illegalen; Wolf: Professor Mamlock; Zuckmayer: Des Teufels General).

The purpose of this dissertation is to define the scope of naturalism in British working-class drama with special reference to the plays of D.H. Lawrence, Sean O'Casey and Joe Corrie. To fulfill such a project, I undertook a personal assessment of the theory of naturalism and its practice in the theatre. For the purpose of being more comprehensive, I carried out a comparative study between working-class naturalism and that of the New Drama since the latter preceded the former. Having assessed and evaluated the theory of naturalism, in general, and its manifestation in the works of the new drama exponents and of the working-class dramatists, I defined and discussed the comparative aspects, as concepts, in the plays of three British playwrights. I have also tried to familiarize the reader with the features of the conversational analysis in the light of which I approached the issue of how similar to natural discourse dramatic dialogue may be. The study of the manifestation of naturalism in the plays of Lawrence, Corrie and O'Casey, which covers the last three chapters, is undertaken in the light of the scope of naturalism as I have previously defined it. In other words, an attempt is being made to question the validity of the naturalist theory as advocated by its exponents, and to prove the practicality of the angle from which I approached naturalism by examining certain plays. The study of the plays, therefore, allows me to define the extent to which one can refer to Lawrence, Corrie and O'Casey as naturalist dramatists and to question, if not to correct, some unfounded criticisms of naturalism in general and working-class naturalism in particular.

Academic work on Aboriginality in popular media has, understandably, been largely written in defensive registers. Aware of horrendous histories of Aboriginal murder, dispossession and pitying understanding at the hands of settlers, writers are worried about the effects of raced representation; and are always concerned to identify those texts which might be labelled racist. In order to make such a search meaningful, though, it is necessary to take as axiomatic certain propositions about the functioning of films: that they 'mean' in particular and stable ways, for example; and that sophisticated reading strategies can fully account for the possible ways a film interacts with audiences. These sophisticated readings can then by rendered as ontological statements, prefaced by such nonnegotiable phrases as: 'Jedda is ... .' his thesis suggests that such approaches fail to take account of the work involved in audiences making sense of these texts. Although the possible uses of a film or a television program are not infinite, neither is it possible to make final statements about a text's status. Rather, it is necessary to take account of various limits which are placed on the interpretations of texts, for different audiences at different moments. Moving the focus of attention away from feature films (which have traditionally encouraged the idea of a spectator constructed by the text) to include television programs (which have proven more difficult to write into such a project) facilitates this move to an understanding of Aboriginal representation more concerned with the work involved in its interpretations. This thesis addresses three main areas. Firstly, favoured modes of spectatorship validate particular practices of consumption. These have implications for the readings which will be made of Aboriginality. Secondly, sets of validated intertexts circulated as 'genres' and 'oeuvres'enable meaning to be made in particular ways. Finally, secondary texts(including academic work) which explicitly purport to explicate films and television programs provide frameworks within which interpretation can be made. Each of these limits works to close down the radical polysemy of television and film texts, enabling meaning to be made of them, and of the Aboriginality they purport to represent.