Monday 25 April 2016

what's exciting in performance-land

Soon to be hot off the presses: the 'drama and performance studies' chapter of the 2016 edition of The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, courtesy of the lovely and talented Patrick Duggan and myself. I'm very excited that Patrick brought me into the YWCCT fold. It's an opportunity to submerge myself in all the best book-length writing in the field(s) of theatre, performance, and drama, and then come up with an (entirely unbiased) discussion of (what Patrick and I find to be) the most salient, compelling, trend-setting, and otherwise noteworthy ideas from 2015. I had a grand time working on it, and we hope you will have a grand time reading it when it's out!

Working at the Mixed Reality Lab keeps me very tightly anchored in HCI and computer science, so while I spend a lot of my time evangelising for performance studies, it's always against the backdrop of worthy projects on algorithmic optimisational graphene flux capacitors... ok, I might be exaggerating a bit, but some of these MRL folk are doing some pretty hard-core stuff.

Working on the YWCCT chapter is a wonderful chance for me to turn the tables and immerse myself in the norms and expectations of an unabashedly arts-centric academic community. The work I'm doing now in PED gets me even more motivated to view the performance elements of what I do in their own right, not simply as feeders into HCI's giant maw.

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