This Practice as Research thesis is a contribution to and intervention in the fields of intermedial performance studies and live media practice. Its arguments are formulated through live intermediality, a mode of practice whereby the solo performer activates image, sound, object and body in the presence of and sometimes with the ‘experiencers’ (Nelson 2010), in order to compose a series of shifting intermedial combinations. The thesis interrogates current discourses around intermediality in performance, the role and actions of the live media performer and the generation of events in intermedial and live media practice, arguing that each can be productively re-­-viewed through live intermedial practice. In positioning the practice clearly within the various lineages from which it draws and positing the particular ‘knowings’ it produces, live intermediality is formulated as distinctive ‘praxis’ or ‘doing-thinking’ (Nelson 2013). In addition, the specific characteristics of live intermediality – the dualities, discourses and collisions it generates - are presented both as form of new knowledge through practice and employed as the tools to pierce existing thinking from an ‘insider’ perspective. Working from a Practice as Research methodology, live intermediality is placed in dialogue with resonant conceptual frameworks, such as the work of intermedial theorists, Kattenbelt (2008) and Lavender (2006), new media theorists, Bolter and Grusin (2000), as well as broader paradigms of presence (Power 2008), autopoiesis (Fischer-­-Lichte 2008, Maturana and Varela 1987) and event (Derrida 1978, Deleuze 2006). The praxis, through its dialogue with such frame works, reconfigures current theories around the activation, operation and experience of intermediality in live media forms. In addition, through its distinctive features and the ‘knowings’ they generate, live intermediality is proposed as new mode of praxis within these fields.

This thesis examines the political dimension of comedy in performance through a practice-as-research project incorporating elements of stand-up comedy, relational art, and participatory performance. In the wake of the depoliticisation of live performance comedy in Britain after the incorporation into the mainstream of the agit-prop driven Alternative comedy of the 1980s, I question whether stand-up in particular can have a political efficacy greater than raising awareness or representing a political struggle. Satirical comedy, comedy of Carnival, and more recently, comedies of ‘transgression,’ are held as paradigmatic of comedy’s generic political dimension, and contemporary discourse celebrates the comedian’s ability to negotiate lines of offense or taste. Opposing this view, I argue that this ‘Canivalesque logic’ is incompatible with the ideological conditions of global capitalism. A ‘radical democratic’ comedy necessitates a focus on the relational and affective dimensions of comedy performance. Following from this theoretical framework, this thesis progresses through three phases of experimental practice. I begin by interrogating and expanding my existing practice as a ‘circuit comedian.’ Next, audience-performer relationships become the site of interrogation, and I engage in two projects influenced by participatory performance and relational aesthetics. The third phase returns to stand-up comedy, coloured by my previous experiments. This project results in a model of comic performance as embodied formalist critique of ideology. The results of this project contributes to a way of reading comedy performance, as well as to discourse about the politics of theatre and performance. It is also provides an exegesis of comic techniques and a sustained analysis of my practice as a comedian and artist. Overall, this project intends to escape the false choice faced by the politically-minded comedian today: to paraphrase a well-known Marx Brothers joke, when given the choice between commenting on the world or changing it, we should answer: ‘Yes, please!’

Along with the live performance of Sissy!, the present document constitutes research centred on the figure of the ‘sissy,’ defined in relation to the effeminate homosexual. The practice-based study proposes ‘sissiography’ as an original concept, conceived of as a negotiation between the three elements of body, abuse and space. Bodily traits are investigated under the coin ‘negotiable markers’ to include mannerisms, behaviours and sartorial choices commonly regarded as characteristic of the sissy. Abuse is studied in reference to Butler’s notion of ‘words that wound’ as well as to incidents of hate crime in London. Thirdly, sissy space is analysed in relation to safe and hostile urban zones. The study concludes that the unifying principle at the heart of sissiography is the concept of failure. In examining the writing of sissiness, the thesis considers existing scholarship on sissies and positions itself against the diagnostic concept of so-called Gender Identity Disorder. The argument developed here is underpinned by autobiographical elements. Historical discourses of male effeminacy are presented to challenge the notion of fixity in perceptions of the sissy. While offering a written investigation of the concept of sissiography, the study also develops an analysis through the researcher’s body in a series of studio experimentations and live performances. Practice is the central instrument of the enquiry, facilitating the writing of new sissy discourses. A cyclical mode of research leads from practice to theory and back to practice. The sissiography is thereby shown to be a form of inscription on the body, a form of writing space, of writing movement, of reinscribing history, of describing possible sissy futures.

Using the social model of disability as a catalyst, this practice as research project starts with the understanding that theatre can disable some of its spectators. Contemporary theatre is conventionally visual. If a theatregoer has low or no vision she or he can be disable by theatre. An investigation of historic directing practice and dramaturgy will demonstrate an ocular bias in contemporary performance. A theatre director is in a unique position to counter this bias and influence opening performance to those with visual impairments or blindness. The idea of blind spectatorship is a provocation for directors and theatre makers. What are popular and experiential definitions of blindness and how might these ideas influence conceptions of an audience? How does theatre disable someone with low or no-vision? What can a director do to open performance to a blind or visually impaired spectator? Audio description interviews with audience members and access specialists, the practice of theatre companies like Extant and Graeae and an Affirmative Model of Disability frame and inform this study. It will be argued that access strategies for the visually impaired or blind, outside of a very few companies, are not widely considered within an artistic purview. This thesis aims to place these access responsibilities firmly within a director’s control and considerations. By locating this study in my own directing practice, I can demonstrate how performance can be opened to a broader audience. Four fully produced stage plays covering a range of performance styles (kōläzh, 2006; Foto, 2010; In the Tunnel, 2010; Variations on the Death of Trotsky, 2012) and several laboratory experiments focused on elements of staging, production, directorial intent and perceptive intersections of access are used to question and exhibit the findings of this study. Sonic dramaturgy emerges as a particularly useful tool for theatre makers and an economic and scalable balance to visual conventions.

As current precarious ecological conditions require urgent and multi-scalar responses, performance has an opportunity to creatively respond to the ecological situation, opening up new ways of thinking and engaging the public’s imagination. Problematising differentiating practices that divide humans from ‘nature’, I suggest performance may highlight the interconnectedness of humans and the more-than-human world by theorising, revealing and critiquing ecological relationships. My research into an ecological performance aesthetic takes up this opportunity and conceives of new ways of critically thinking about performance. I engage a range of ecological philosophy, combined with ecodramaturgical analysis of performance, to theorise the intersection of performance and ecology. Ecodramaturgy (May 2010) combines ecocritical and applied approaches to performance with ecological ways of performance-making, and represents a critical extension to the discipline of performance studies. Drawing on the ecomaterialism of Bennett (2010), Latour (2004), Alaimo (2013) and Barad (2012), I theorise ‘nature’ as a set of interconnected relationships, which disrupts the binaries between urban/nature, nature/culture, human/nonhuman. I coin the neologism the bio-urban to reflect the vibrancy and material agency of ecological relationships in urban settings. The focus on urban-based practice resists the rural bias present in much ecological writing (Harvey 1993b) and addresses a gap in scholarship around urban ecology in relation to performance. This research centres on a wide variety of illustrative, broadly site-based performance events, including urban gardening performances (and my own practice), walking and cycling performances, installation, live art, theatre pieces and work in places such as streets, mountains, (urban) meadows, cemeteries and rivers. I consider the way in which performance engages with the world, through the interrelated and overlapping discourses of postcolonial ecology, human geography and urban ecology. An ecological performance aesthetic informs modes of practice, presentation and reception, within current ecological conditions. From the provocation of the bio-urban, I theorise immersion and ‘environmental participation’, drawing on the corporeality of our relationship to the space around us, following ecological phenomenology. I then examine oikos as (earthy or planetary) home and consider it in relation to dwelling, suggesting that ecological performance opens up a space for critiquing these ideas. The complex relationship between the local and global is characterised in performance through eco-cosmopolitanism (Heise 2008). Finally, I suggest a non-anthropocentric paradigm for performance, one that employs an ‘ecological anthropomorphism’ that accounts for the material agency of the more-than- human, as well as the human as a geophysical force (Chakrabarty 2012). The aim of the research is to articulate an ecological performance aesthetic, extending and developing the field of performance and ecology.

Towards the end of the last century discussions on the representation of masculinity in male body-based performance art placed emphasis on the deconstruction of normative masculine identities. The focus of these investigations tended to position the image of masculinity within Lacan’s sexuation matrix, and as such, these representations were usually referred to as being phallic. That is, they reinscribed the behaviours, traits and characteristics of normative masculinity into the performance space. The central thrust of this practice-as-research thesis is that while some male artists deconstruct the performance of phallic masculinity, to challenge normative masculine ideologies, they often first reinscribe normativity onto their bodies. I argue that, while achieving a destabilisation, this approach does not take into consideration the multiplicity of masculine identities that emerge through the individual lived experiences of masculinity This thesis proposes that the performance of my personal experiences of having a masculine identity, and the exploration of these through my male body, might offer an alternative challenge to normative masculinity. Deriving from performance practices that I refer to as ’muscular masculinity’ consideration is given to how I might make space in my work to encourage a focus on the sensorial qualities of having a masculine identity. I mean this in relation to, for example, the feelings of emotions such as shame, anxiety, and vulnerability that emerge as a result of challenging my own identity, and also the different corporeal pleasures I experience as a result of having a male body. In this thesis, I refer to the practice of attending to these sensorial qualities and the gaps that emerge through an intersubjective exchange in performance, as generosity. Furthermore, I argue that generosity can challenge normative representations of masculinity because it requires the male artist to struggle; to struggle with the incoherence of their identity, to struggle with their body, and to struggle with the insecurity of meaning making.

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.

CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / Esta pesquisa cartografa a emergÃncia de corporeidades singulares em um contexto hÃbrido atravessado por experimentaÃÃes nas artes cÃnicas e nas performances latino-americanas, como tambÃm, por experiÃncias xamÃnicas provenientes das AmÃricas central, do norte e do sul. A partir de relatos escolhidos de uma trajetÃria de oito anos como performer-pesquisador, esta pesquisa busca refletir acerca do ser-fazer decolonial e da arte como aÃÃo desterritorializante, questionando os paradigmas dominantes dos modos de viver na contemporaneidade. Tomando como eixo norteador desta pesquisa, o conhecimento-obtido-pela-experiÃncia e a prÃtica-como-pesquisa, apresentamos um corpus de memÃrias composto por diÃrios de bordo e performances recentes, procurando compreender, por meio de um conhecimento corporificado, os processos sensÃveis e intuitivos de investigaÃÃo que revelam outros modos possÃveis de existÃncia. Neste contexto, reconhecemos o artista-xamà como o catalisador da pesquisa.

Come with Me is the process of making a short 3D animation. Introducing the practice as a research method, I explored 3D animation production steps in a non-linear workflow. Each production step is then introduced along with the mind processes as Come with Me was developed from the story to the final animated scenes. The failed attempts are also included as an important part of this research. In the end, the workflows that allow for mistakes at each step of the 3D animation production are being explored. / Master of Fine Arts / Come with Me is the process of making a short 3D animation. Introducing the practice as a research method, I explored 3D animation production steps in a non-linear workflow. Each production step is then introduced along with the mind processes as Come with Me was developed from the story to the final animated scenes. The failed attempts are also included as an important part of this research. In the end, the workflows that allow for mistakes at each step of the 3D animation production are being explored.

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.