This performance-as-research project documents, both through linguistic and non-linguistic texts, an investigation of the materiality of performative knowledges and analyses Music Theatre as an ecstatic and hyper-erotic creator of these knowledges. By actively engaging in a performative translation of an historical Music Theatre work, this research investigates how ecstatic inscription creates materiality within the performative knowledges of Music Theatre, and aims to provide further substance to the discourse surrounding performative knowledges and their relation to the epistemology and methodology of performance-as-research.

Since 1950s, the concept of Kongwu (空無, Emptiness, Nothingness) has migrated into American-European experimental performances, including those of John Cage and Cage-influenced artists who developed Happenings, Fluxus, and intermedia practices. This research-through-practice investigates how the concept of kongwu, an intercultural synthesis of Chinese Daoism and Indian Buddhism, may shape the principles underlying performance making and how performance may, in turn, elucidate Kongwu way of making sense the world. The installation-performance, Poem without Language contemplates Kongwu’s distrust of language by undermining the communicative purpose of writing and responds to Nam June Paik’s approach to media language. The research practice, One Street, Three Persons, Different Narratives, and Different Memories responds to John Cage’s use of silence to revise time and measurement, and exposes the habit, how we experience the ‘present’ as accumulations of the past, and how we order experiences as a linear continuity, which we call ‘time’. My performance, … is Present suggests different definitions of the ‘meditative mind’ and ‘being-here-and-now’ and critiques the relationship between embodiment and identity in Marina Abramović’s construction of ‘suchness’. Three works offer one response to the poetics and politics of intercultural encounters in the context of Chan/Zen in intermedia performance. My research-through-practice sheds light on Kongwu way of experiencing, particularly Kongwu’s attitude towards language, time, and self.

Practising Shadow Theatre in the West today means to subvert the predominantly negative view of shadow in the Western psyche, to transcend the faintly racist notion of shadow theatre as the quaint practice of traditional people of the East and to contend with the dominant influences of the electronic media on this once powerful and popular art form. This research is through creative practice in the form of the production, Cactus. This performance investigates the use of the screen in contemporary Shadow Theatre and the optimisation of the live theatrical experience. The performance also seeks to integrate mediatized and non-mediatized performance through the combination of live performance and projected images. My research is a social constructivist process to creative practice as research using a pluralistic approach including elements of action research and autobiography. The literature included for review in this study includes work by Brook, Grotowski, Auslander, Sontag, and Schechner. The literature analysis and previous training with Italian company, Teatro Gioco Vita, served to inform the application of my theories as praxis. The central question of this research project is: How can I break the fifth wall (which is the screen) in shadow theatre performance? Subsidiary questions are: How can we harness the advantages of both mediatized and non-mediatized performance to produce a contemporary shadow theatre form catering to the needs of a twenty-first century audience? How can I optimize the live theatrical experience? What is contemporary Shadow Theatre?