Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemMiasmatic Performance: Carceral Atmospherics in the Theatre of Clean Break( 2020)In this practice-informed doctoral thesis, I investigate the aesthetics that allow Clean Break Theatre Company, who work with women in prison and women at risk in the United Kingdom, to plunge audiences into atmospheres of imprisonment, resilience and subversion at the theatre. Through an exploration of six plays made while I was a company member (2009-2015), I propose that concepts of prison and criminality in Clean Break’s theatre become porous, atmospheric events – miasmas, as I argue here – which both elicit, and simultaneously confound, a collective desire to attribute a clear function to prison in society. Instead of treating prison as a setting through which storylines of incarceration move, in these productions ‘prison’ becomes a carceral logic, organising the dramaturgical semantics, temporalities and atmospheres of the play, to signify the conditions of carceral society at large. I call this ‘miasmatic performance.’ Miasmatic performance, I suggest, conjures juridical atmospheres, policing atmospheres and contagious atmospheres within audiences at venues such as the Royal Court, Soho Theatre, or Almeida Theatre, the majority of whom do not have lived experience of the criminal justice system. Section One, ‘Miasmatic Aesthetics’, develops decomposition and secretion as two key aesthetics of miasmatic performance. Section Two, ‘Miasmatic Contagions’, theorises the capacity of the miasmatic performance register to simulate and critique concepts of ‘contagious crime’ and social contagion. Section Three, ‘Miasmatic Investigations’, explores activations of the carceral imaginary through casework at the theatre. A miasmatic register in these Clean Break productions becomes both hopeful, and encourages collective responsibility, as it provokes an affective experience of carceral power within audiences who are often only latently aware of their own participation in carceral society.
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ItemBreaking Objects: Activating Artworks Toward New Modes of Thought( 2019)This research has emerged from the intersection between two ongoing preoccupations: how to exhibit spatiotemporal art practices in such a way that the artwork remains active as opposed to static or on display; and, an engagement with the knowledge that reductive thinking about things in the world—from complex and interrelated to simplified and separated out—is part of the human condition. In order to better understand these oppositional factors and how they operate both theoretically and practically, I have come to define a number of key terms that I use to describe different modes of thinking alongside our capacity to flip or switch between them. These terms—Object, broken Object, and an oscillation in thinking—also describe the research methodology I have used in my practice-based research. I have developed this methodology across my literature research and dissertation by looking closely at what factors contribute to a mode of perception where things in the world appear to be active, in motion or complex. I have reviewed how this mode of perception might relate to and operate within spatiotemporal artworks and exhibition contexts by considering the physiological, psychological and philosophical factors that contribute to how we perceive the world, and what we think is going on. However, I have also considered factors that influence a more abstract mode of thinking about the world; one whereby we reduce, condense or separate-out complex and interdependent phenomena. This abstract mode of thinking has philosophical, sociological and political as well as physiological bases; all of which influence the way we perceive the world around us. I have considered one particular mode of thinking, Object-Thinking as being dominant in the West, and throughout my dissertation I reflect upon the possible socio-political consequences of this. In my creative, practice-based research I have applied the methodology of making and breaking Objects as well as proposing methods that might facilitate an oscillation in thinking across several research outcomes including: Chair in Cooperation with Orange (Extended) (2015), The Possibility of Performance (2015), Work (in Progress) (2016), Cross-Section (2017), Tool-Things (2017), Set Elements (2019). My final practice-based outcome, No Single Thing (2019) was exhibited at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery between the 26th February and the 1st of March 2019.