Research Student

Theatre and Performance Studies

About Me

Nora Wardell is a theatre director from Edinburgh. She is artistic director of Edinburgh-based touring theatre company Surrogate Productions.

She is in her first year studying part-time in Theatre and Performance Studies, undertaking a practice-as-research modality.

Research Interests

My practices-as-research project explores the potentiality of theatre practice, as a corporeal mode of truth-telling, to grasp and unmask the effects of a new economic rationality inscribed in the performance of the modern neoliberal subject in the West. It does so by critically exploring the theme of female liberation, defined as the embodied exercise of freedom beyond the dominant modes of representation of the neoliberal nation state, through adapting and directing Édouard Louis’ autofiction novella A Woman’s Battles and Transformations (Combats et métamorphoses d’une femme, 2022). In the context of a recent rise of right-wing populism across Europe, the neoliberal construction of social abjection in the UK understood in relation to legacies of empire, colonialism and post-war reconstruction, the contemporary political rhetoric surrounding issues of gender, and the increasing mediatization of the public sphere, my project argues for the potentiality of theatre practice to generate a counterforce to normative modes of cultural reproduction by destabilising hegemonic critical formations of knowledge production in the West. My methodologies involve the use of key directing methods that incorporate the affective embodiment of situations from actors’ real-life experience in the context of British austerity politics. This enables me to critically explore female emancipation through the rhythmic orchestration of actors’ movement, action, gesture, and the materiality of scenic processes

Nora is supervised by Dr. Milija Gluhovic

Education

MA Philosophy and the Arts: Warwick University

BA in Professional Acting: Bristol Old Vic Theatre School

BA (Hons) Film and Television Studies: Warwick University