Markers, Milestones, Celebrations and Festivities: Our Research Futures (Warwick Sponsored Panel)
Wednesday 27 August, 3.30pm-5pm
Room: Oculus 1.05
This plenary panel asks us to consider the significance of milestones and markers in theatre and performance studies research from four different perspectives. Each contribution comes from an Early Career Researcher and together these give us a sense of the future directions of our discipline.
CHAIR: Bryony White
SPEAKERS
Dr Gemma Edwards Cobbling as Historiographic Practice: Remaking the Record of Post-war English Theatre History
Responding directly to the conference themes of ‘milestones’ and ‘markers’, this paper critically reflects on the way that post-war English theatre history has been told to date, asking why we privilege certain temporal markers and formal milestones, and how we might be able to rearrange them. Here, I will describe and practice a methodological approach that I term ‘cobbling’ – a way of reading post-war English theatre which cuts across chronologies, geographies and economies of theatre production.1 ‘Cobbling’ offers a tactile process of engagement, placing emphasis on the principles of play, rearrangement, and repair, and, as I explore in my paper, the term itself comes from the themes of my case studies which each depict the changing nature of life and work for working-class people in England. Taking the view that the story of post-war English theatre too often relies on the same white, London-centric cultural touchstones, my work aims to decentralise the post-war theatre canon by focusing on regional performance and placing Global Majority and working-class theatre makers at the heart of a revised English theatre record. By looking to radical work produced in villages, towns, and cities in England’s regions, then, I shift the frame of reference, turning to alternative geographies and economies of theatre production.
This paper examines how a ‘cobbling’ and crosscutting approach has the potential to unsettle established understandings and orthodoxies of English theatre and instead offer a variegated view of theatre and performance in England in the post-war period. Indeed, the plays and performances under discussion often share a deep commitment to place and materiality, offering tactile and specific understandings of the regional places in which they are produced. It is through these tactile engagements with places and communities beyond London that I argue progressive readings of race-class intersections can be found and a radical, decentralised view of Englishness formed.
Dr Gemma Edwards is a Leverhulme ECR Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. She has published on class and race in non-metropolitan performance contexts in a number of journals and edited collections. Her interest in the politics and economies of regional theatre production is explored in her first monograph Representing the Rural on the English Stage: Performance and Rurality in the Twenty-first Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and her co-authored book with Professor Jenny Hughes, Professor Helen Nicholson, and Dr Cara Gray, Theatre and Towns (London: Routledge, 2022). Gemma co-convenes the Performance Identity and Community Working Group at TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) and the international regional theatre network, Playing in the Periphery, with Andy Colpitts (Cornell University, US).
Rachel Vogler Notes towards a rupture: imagining the end of sexual harm
“Humanity installs each of its violence in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (Foucault, 1977).[1]
“We [The Old Vic] are committed to a new way forward” (The Old Vic, 2017). [2]
This paper offers a feminist critique of milestones and markers, and their institutional function. It argues that such devices commonly do potent political work by presenting social phenomena as fixed and stable, and time as linear and progressive. Markers, such as public statements or awareness
days, are used to signal distance from past harms, configuring an institutional present that is always reformed and reforming. These tactics become cl
ear through institutional responses to sexual harm, where liberal feminist logics and their reliance on institutional power become exposed. In opposition to these logics,I foreground abolitionist genealogies that view institutions as life-draining assemblages. These genealogies, and the Indigenous temporalities with which they are in dialogue, open the possibility of life untethered from the institution.
Drawing on my PhD research on sexual harm in British theatre, I outline two approaches to conceiving of the end of sexual harm. The first, institutional, uses milestones defensively to track distance from vulnerability. I examine The Old Vic Theatre’s response to harms perpetrated by former Artistic Director Kevin Spacey to show how such temporal strategies suppress critique. The second, grounded in abolitionist thought, views these markers as liberal architecture and instead asks: what kinds of social relations would need to exist in order for a world without sexual harm to be possible?
I consider the resonances of these approaches for contemporary organising. In particular, I examine crisis as an abolitionist tactic - deployed not as dysfunction, but as a clarifying force that reveals the labour relations and power flows underpinning harm. Where institutions fear crisis as dis
order, I trace its radical potential. I propose that, rather than contributing to the institutional project of establishing milestones, scholarly critique might set itself the task of producing ruptures from institutional logics within which new possibilities for living may emerge.
Holding that anything constructed can be deconstructed, I hold open the possibility of rupture, of undoing institutional time and staying with the promise of life amid a violent and drawn-out present.
[1] Michel Foucault. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans by. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 151.
[2] The Old Vic, Statement from The Old Vic, (London: The Old Vic, 2017), https://www.oldvictheatre.com/news/2017/11/statement-from-the-old-vic.
Rachel Vogler is a LAHP-funded doctoral candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama, where she is also a visiting lecturer and practitioner. Her work focuses on sexual violence across contemporary theatre institutions and across the Higher Education landscape in the UK. She comes to her PhD research from a cluster of different practices which she has developed through working with a range of grassroots organisations, including Intimacy for Stage and Screen, the 1752 Group, The Violence Against Women and Girls Research Network, Birkbeck’s Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters Project and Moving Body Arts. She is interested in themes of transformative justice, feminist (re)imagining, abolition and institutionality as they pertain to sexual harm.
Claire French Language as an impulse: NTL and the artist’s way
This paper articulates pathways for including spoken language in circus dramaturgies of Human Can (2025) – a milestone production by Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium (NTL) following the departure of Odin Teatret and Eugenio Barba. I focus on how the body as the site of the action in circus dramaturgies creates opportunities to explore spoken language as an impulse. I argue that such explorations can delay processes of intuiting signification so that performers can focus on their body’s perception of the world in relationship to their language(s), before such knowledge is signified. This theorisation is part of my ongoing methods-driven challenge to the hegemonic spectatorial gaze that omits and neutralises multilingualism.
My analysis follows an interaction between circus performers Ward Mortier and Villads Bugge Bang, both of whom are working with NTL for the first time, and director Søs Banke, who is part of the NTL team and thus shares connections to the Odin way. I locate the internal dynamics of the rehearsal room and analyse an improvisational moment when Mortier tenderly draws on Dutch and French with Bugge Bang, despite Bugge Bang’s unintelligibility. I conceptualise circus dramaturgies as connectors to Mortier’s spoken languages, experiences and epistemologies. In parallel, I map Banke’s relationships to the external ecology as she is positioned between Odin, NTL and the rehearsal room. Rather than earmarking this milestone production as a metaphor for future dramaturgies, I highlight a commitment by NTL to inviting individual artists’ personal and artistic resources, their way.
Claire French is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow in dramaturgy at Aarhus University, Denmark, and was previously Assistant Professor of Performance and Creative Practices at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research investigates the ethics, aesthetics, and epistemologies of multilingual dramaturgies within socially engaged and ensemble traditions. With a methods-driven approach, she draws on sociolinguistics, decolonial theory, and performance studies to develop analytical strategies for identifying and rethinking how the body reproduces language ideologies. French’s work spans a wide range of making practices, including performance training, community facilitation, ensemble devising, and playwriting. Her artistic practice deepens this inquiry through roles as facilitator, dramaturg, and playwright, with recent plays including Courage Songs (2024) and The tongue / Die tong (2025) with Mercy Kannemeyer. She is particularly focused on the geo-political consequences of storytelling that misrepresents the global majority, using multilingualism as a means to expand and enrich knowledge production.
Swati Arora Black Kite as Method
August 2025 marks 78 years of freedom from the British colonial rule in India. As the postcolony celebrates another temporal milestone, I interrogate the contemporary remnants of the event through a spatial lens by focussing on Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022) – a story about Delhi where the slow-moving camera follows black kites in the sky with patience and tenderness. I follow the camera’s gaze to think through what it might mean to read the urban through these avian creatures with beady eyes. What spatial reading of postcolonial Delhi emerges when we look up? Working with this vertical scale, I track the flight of the black kite as a meditation on the politics of life and death. The discussion pivots around attention to bodies made prone to injury, forcing a reckoning with the shadows of social life of Delhi.
Swati Arora is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies at Queen Mary University of London. Her work sits at the intersection of minoritarian performance and visual culture, feminist theory, and postcolonial urbanisms. She co-edited Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place (2024) which engages with pluriversal, transnational, and decolonial feminist methodologies to explore epistemic and disciplinary border-crossings. She was awarded the Early Career Researcher Prize 2024 by the Theatre and Performance Research Association, UK and is a Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude for 2025-26.