Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick has an active research community. As well as having a departmental Research Seminar Series which meets twice-termly, there are regular events hosted by individual members of our community relating to their current research projects. Above you'll see a link to our 'Past Events'. From here you can find out about individual events hosted recently, but can also link to ongoing research project webpages.

Departmental Seminar Series

Every year Theatre and Performance Studies run a twice-termly departmental seminar series. The dates and times for the 2023/24 Theatre and Performance Studies seminar series are as follows:

Research Seminar, Wednesday 10 June 2024, 4.00-5.30 pm, Rehearsal Room

Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal and Shane Boyle,‘One for the money, two for the show’:Taylor Swift as Commercial Infrastructure

Show business is big business. Nothing exemplifies this truism more today than the industry that is Taylor Swift. But what kind of business is show business exactly? What does the business of putting on a grand performance, like Swift’s ongoing international “Eras Tour,” share with other capital-intensive commercial undertakings? This talk proposes a definition of commercial performance as a form of show business geared, first and foremost, to circulation. Commercial performances, we contend, have the capacity to move but are also defined through the particular way they abet and depend on the circuit of capital.

Our paper considers what Swift can tell us about how commercial capitalism operates today. To do this requires taking seriously both the role of performance in the “Eras Tour”, but also all of the material infrastructure it demands—the trucks, the planes, the stadiums, the workers, the supply chains, and more. In addition, this paper will explore how the profitability of huge musical tours like Swift’s are increasingly reliant on fan-maintained digital and physical infrastructures which aid their continued success and circulation. Contrary to those who emphasise the ephemerality and dematerialised quality of performance commodities, we insist on attending to the significance of the capital-intensive infrastructure on which commercial performance depends.

While written and presented by Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal and Shane Boyle, this talk draws on conversations and collective writing with colleagues who, for the past 18 months, have been collectively researching commercial performance.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 24 April 2024, 12.00-1.00 pm, Microsoft Teams

Soo Ryon Yoon, “Crazy Dance” in Cold War Inter-Asia:Ch'angmuhoe and Temporality of Korean Dance in the 1986 Hong Kong Festival of Asian Arts

This talk explores temporality in the choreographic experimentation of Korean dance company Ch’angmuhoe (창무회) and its 1986 performance in Hong Kong. Analyzing administrative documents, magazine and newspaper reviews, interviews, and dance movement descriptions, I discuss how the potential for inter-Asia relations manifested during the late Cold War years through the question of what defined post-Cold War contemporary Korean, Hong Kong, and Asian dance.

Korean dance company Ch'angmuhoe’s 1986 performance at the Hong Kong Festival of Asian Arts was hailed by the local media as a “crazy dance” for its original styles. While it was certainly not the first nor the last time for a Korean dance company to visit Hong Kong, Ch’angmuhoe’s presentation ofch'angjakch'um(창작춤) or “tradition-based choreographed dance” (as opposed to a reproduced traditional repertoire) for the first time in Hong Kong and Asia warrants a closer look. The political implications of this go beyond the formalistic significance: Ch'angmuhoe’s new style of traditional movement-based choreography raised a question of what defined contemporary Korean and Asian dance different from the essentialist representations of the folk and tradition. As such, Ch'angmuhoe’s show exemplified late Cold War ambivalence in cultural practices. A Cold War liberal democracy “alliance” was activated through promoting the “progressive” arts against the “outdated” aesthetic expressions of the Communist Bloc. Yet the political affinities with Euro-American hegemony were complicated by the efforts to seek new forms of expressions away from cultural essentialism frequently mobilized as an important repertoire in the US-sponsored Cold War campaigns in Asia.

I argue that studying these late Cold War dance exchanges and policies helps us revise the existing narrative of how contemporary Asian dance and its transnational relations came about only after the mid-1990s. In light of this, I also demonstrate that Ch’angmuhoe’s case of the Hong Kong performance interrogated contemporaneity of Korean dance beyond the binary opposition of the Western and the Eastern Blocs, laying a foundation for imagining a future inter-Asia dance network.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Past Events in 2023/24:

Research Seminar, Wednesday 28 February 2024, 12.00-1.00 pm, Microsoft Teams

Ameet Parameswaran, Theatricality, Passion and Tragic: Thinking though Theatre in times of Authoritarian State

The two-year national Emergency (1975-77) that curtailed the fundamental rights of people and the contemporary period in India are often seen in relation to each other. Both periods are marked by the excessive authoritarianism of the state, with the contemporary often said to be the period of ‘undeclared emergency’ or a continuation and intensification of the processes inaugurated in the earlier period. One of the key political issues that such authoritarianism presents is censorship in the form of banning and arrests or unleashing of physical violence on performers and spectators as well as the saturation of the public sphere by state rhetoric that erases and prohibits in complex fashion the representation of oppression and suffering. Foregrounding theatricality as a complex site for engagement with authoritarian regimes, the paper interrogates the ‘productive’ aspect of censorship even as it is prohibitive. Drawing on examples across the two time-periods, the paper explores the strategies of engagement with and the new aesthetics emerging from this condition, and how these works necessitate a complex conceptualisation of passion and the tragic.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 31 January 2024, 16.00-17.30 pm, Room 5.03 Faculty of Arts Building (FAB)

Julia Peetz

Performance, Theatricality, and the US Presidency: The Currency of Distrust

This seminar will present Julia's recently published bookPerformance, Theatricality, and the US Presidency: The Currency of Distrust(Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and look ahead to the role of performance and distrust in the 2024 US election. The erosion of trust in politicians and political institutions is a major challenge in early twenty-first-century democratic politics, not least in the United States. Rather than being a flaw or corruption, the potential for political distrust should be understood as an essential feature of representative democracy because representation works through performance.Performance, Theatricality, and the US Presidencyexplores performance as a constellation of factors: scripts, embodiment, ideas of selfhood, and historical norms and ideals. The book draws on key scholarship of political representation, rhetoric, and populism; on theories of performativity, theatricality, and acting; and on interviews the author conducted with political speechwriters spanning presidential administrations and campaigns from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama to demonstrate both that distrust is inherent in representative politics and that in mainstreamed populism distrust becomes a focal point around which the theatre of politics revolves.

Research Seminar, Wednesday 29 November 2023, 12.00-1.00 pm, Room 0.16-0.18 Faculty of Arts Building (FAB)

Sharmistha Saha

From communities of belief to artists in performance: Nagakalam Pattu, the Covid-19 pandemic and Clear Enigma

This paper looks at the caste labour of Nagakalam Pattu, which is a form of Kalamezhuth Pattu where Kalam means floor art, ezuth is the act of writing/drawing, and pattu is to sing i.e. it is the song of drawing floor art. It is performed primarily by the Pulluva community, although different regions of Kerala, where this ritual art practice is found, often host other caste groups associated with this practice. Nagakalam Pattu is a negotiation with snakes of the region. The performance is mediated through the Pulluvas – a ritual which brings prosperity and keeps snakes away from destroying crops or biting small children. So is the belief regarding its efficacy. In 2014, I first saw a performance of Nagakalam Pattu as part of a narrative called Clear Enigma directed by Eugenio Barba. Clear Enigma was to have only one performance to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of Odin Teatret at Holstebro, Denmark where the theatre is located. However, from what is known, the village of Holstebro is not infested by snakes! Although both ritual and theatre have often been seen as embodied and transformative, this paper looks at what happens to caste labour that is entrenched in belief and a community’s social being, when it transforms into theatre. The paper will, in particular, look at the labouring lives of the practicing Pulluvas during the Covid 19 pandemic to address complexities that arise in thinking about art as work, ritual as caste labour, and traditional performances as intangible heritage.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Conference: Locations of (Dis)embodied Labour in Theatre and Performance, Thursday 30 November 2023

Keynote Speaker: Professor Nicholas Ridout (Queen Mary University of London)

This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars from around the world to explore themes of labour and body in the practices, theories, and histories of performance, covering topics such as the gendered perspectives of labour, aesthetics of labour, the agency of labouring bodies, theatre as work, etc. For the full programme please visithttps://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/theatre/staff/yangzizhou/locationsoflabour2023/.

Registration for in-person and online attendance is open until 16 November 2023.

The Global Cold War and Theatrical Modernism: A Case Study of Man-Guei Li

Jen-Hao Walter Hsu

Wednesday 18th October 12pm-1.30pm on MS Teams

In this talk, Hsu will explore the possible relationships between Cold War geopolitics and the formation of theatrical modernism from the 1950s through the 1970s in Taiwan. His research focus is on the leading figure in Taiwan’s theatre scene during this time period—Man-Guei Li (1907-1975), the revolutionary 'Little Theatre Movement', and dominant narratives about avant-gardism and Taiwan’s democratic process from the perspectives of Cold War geopolitics.

Past Events in 2021/22:

Mourning Theatres: Pandemic Grief and Queer Performance

Fintan Walsh

Wednesday 3^rd May 12pm-1.30pm on MS Teams

Grappling with extraordinary loss and its political denial, theatre and performance during the pandemic innovated forms and approaches to support the work of mourning. In particular, queer practices drew on their deep reservoirs of grief to make room for it in the bewildered present. This paper explores how some of this work intervened the social and cultural climate of the coronavirus pandemic, and how the pandemic enabled queer theatre and performance to reanimate and repurpose its own archives of loss.

Fat Performance (Studies) Today

Jussara Belchior, Magdalena Hutter, Gillie Kleiman

Wednesday 24^th May 4pm-5.30pm on MS Teams

The Fat Performance Reader is to be an edited collection of original artistic and scholarly material discussing fat performance, which we define - for the moment - as performance whose meaning-making is both predicated on fatness and can speak into a conversation about fatness. In this talk, the three editors of this collection will discuss the origins of the project, its aspirations and limitations, and the key themes that have emerged through dialogue with contributors, as well as our individual perspectives on fat performance (studies). We will continue to unpick our understandings of fat performance and its relationship to the disciplines of performance studies and fat studies, unfolding our collaboration in public.

Biographies

Jussara Belchior (Brazil)

Jussara Belchior is a fat ballerina. She also works as a choreographer, a collaborator in other artists’ projects and a researcher of practices and writings in contemporary dance. Her projects deal with fat people, fatness and non-normative bodies. She has a PhD degree in Live Arts. She is currently developing the CAIBA project (Catálogo Imaterial da Baleia - Whale Immaterial Catalogue), alongside that she is a part of the MANADA and the Escrita Performativa collectives. She is interested in poetics and politics of movement and positioning yourself through dance.

Magdalena Hutter (Germany/Canada)

Magdalena is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. Her projects frequently deal with themes of belonging, ranging from documentary film to installations and interactive documentaries. In addition to her own projects, she also works as a DoP and consulting producer on other documentary films. She is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal/Canada, doing research-creation about fatness in dance and developing frameworks for Fat ScreenDance.

Gillie Kleiman (United Kingdom)

Gillie Kleiman works with and in dance and choreography, creating performances, texts, events and pedagogical encounters. Gillie’s work has a persistent interest in both the figure and the activity of the non-professional, and many of her projects have involved participation of non-professional collaborators or of the audience; this was the topic of her PhD project (completed in 2019). In 2020, Gillie initiated a new cycle of thinking and working about fat and fatness. Alongside her artistic practice, she is Head of Higher Education at Dance City, an adviser to Jerwood Arts, a Trustee of People Dancing, and external examiner at the Danish National School of Performing Arts. She is a member of the trade union UVW-DCW and is an accredited trade union representative. Gillie lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Research Seminar, Wednesday 13 October 2021, 4.30-6.00 pm

Germany in the context of decolonisation

Speakers: Dr Pedzisai Maedza (Newton International Fellow-University of Warwick) & Dr Lisa Skwirblies (Post-Doc in Teaterwissenschaft, Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich)

Red Flag Day: The duty to remember and the aesthetics of commemorative memory - Dr Pedzisai Maedza

Abstract: German colonisation of lands and people in what is today known as Namibia was effected through a war of conquest led by General Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha. From 1904 to 1908 German forces and the indigenous population fought a war that ended in what has been dubbed the first German genocide of the twentieth century. This war and genocide, which is sometimes called the forgotten genocide, left an estimated 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama population dead. Using the annual Red Flag Day commemorations as a case study this paper will trace how Herero communities have developed distinct public performance practices to remember, commemorate, contest and transmit the memory of this disavowed genocidal war. It will also suggest how the Red Flag Day can be read and understood as a cultural performance which both represents and shapes the memory of the past and the community’s relationship with the genocide, and its sense of self in the present?

Performing the Spirit of Bandung - Dr Lisa Skwirblies

Lisa Skwirblies (PhD), is a Post-doc researcher at the Theater Studies Department of the University of Munich on the ERC Project “T-Migrants". She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick. In 2017 she was an Early Career Fellow at the IAS Warwick and between 2018 and 2020 held a Marie Sklodowska-Curie International Research Fellowship (“Horizon 2020”). Her research interests lie in the fields of theatre historiography, postcolonial theory, and their intersections. She is currently working on her forthcoming monograph Performing Empire. Theatre, Race, and the Colonial Culture of the German Empire, 1884-1913 (Palgrave 2022) and her second-book project European Stages of Decoloniality.

Abstract - This paper discusses the history of postcolonial student migration and the under-researched repertoire of decolonial protest performances in Cold War Germany. It shows how the recruitment of hundreds of African and Asian students in the mid-1950s to visit universities in the two Germanies led to political and performative interventions of the Global South students across the Iron Curtain and to political coalitions with the nascent West German student movement. From a specific theatre and performance studies approach, this article explores these decolonial protests through the lens of performance and argues for a new approach to protest culture, one that goes beyond static and reified conceptions and instead allows us to understand the immediate and material effects such protest techniques had for those protesting.

Research Seminar, Wednesday 24 Nov, 4.30-6.00 pm

Speakers: Chitra Sundaram (Department of Theatre & Performance, Goldsmiths College, London) & performer-researcher Dr Swarnamalya Ganesh

This seminar is being offered by dance-theatre practitioner and educator Chitra Sundaram (Goldsmiths, UK). It is part of a forthcoming series that Sundaram has conceived under the overall title 'The Politics of Choreographed Intimacies: Re-framing the beloved familiar'. Joining her from India, is a special guest artist Dr Swarnamalya Ganesh, performer, researcher and Prof of Practice, Literature and the Arts, KREA University, India.

Title: The Politics of Choreographed Intimacies

Dancing for Kings, ‘Nabobs’ and East India Company officers: Courtly Dance in pre-modern and cosmopolitan Southern India (17th-20th centuries).

Abstract -

Dance from India has for long posited to the world its ancientness, its textual treasure trove of ‘hard evidence’, and, above all, its special relationship to Hinduism’s great gods as its signature and validating hallmarks. Therefore, and often, Indian dance is all too easily and simplistically understood, glorified or dismissed as ‘ancient religious dance’ i.e. nothing to do with the now; devoid of human urge or urgency; somehow all ‘pure’ and divine; somehow innocent of strategies and negotiations necessitated by the complex political context of foreign rule and intersectionality of morality, social hierarchy, caste, gender, creed, breadwinning and wealth; somehow unfree.

In this seminar, we eschew the selective, sanitised, ‘sacred history’ of Indian dance, and make an exciting departure into herstory: we inquire into previously forbidden territory and nature of its avatar as Sadir dance in pre-modern and colonial India. Here, it presents as sophisticated entertainment in the cosmopolitan courts of kings, big and small, and in salons of courtiers and monied traders, all of them sponsors of arts.

Dance is seen here as a celebration of the Eros – a love for life itself, notwithstanding its troubles. And amid the hustle and bustle of courtly life, where ‘foreign’ colonial era Company Officers were both inserted or invited, we will see how—through the use of social and performative ‘codes’—the staged performance of love and desire achieved its abiding underpinning of ‘intimacy’. And how the dancers had their laughs too! (Such semiotics is still the preserve of Indian classical dance. And that’s a whole other ball of wool that's come unspooled.)

Research Seminar, Wednesday 10^th March 2021, 4.30-6pm (online)

Title: Re-membering assembly

Speakers: Louise Owen (Birkbeck, University of London) and Marilena Zaroulia (Central School of Speech and Drama)

Abstract: Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has radically compromised the possibilities and contours of collective assembly in the theatre. This jointly authored paper explores the conditions of theatrical assembly in the times we currently confront through analysis of Ben Duke’s In a Nutshell (The Place, 2020). Filmed in the auditorium of the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, In a Nutshell stages a series of recollections about theatregoing to a future audience of people for whom live theatre has ceased to be a reality. Though a monologue in form and function, Ben Duke’s piece and its interpellation of its imagined audience is premised on a notion of and commitment to theatre as a dialogic space across time and distance, in which the bodies of spectators play a critical role. Our response to the performance is based on a socially distanced viewing of the performance we undertook on 22 October 2020, in which we watched the piece simultaneously on YouTube while present together on Zoom. We bring our reflections on the work and its reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic into relation with this experience of spectatorship. We ask how the interrupted dramaturgies of both the piece and our socially distanced spectatorship re-invoke acts of collective assembly in the theatre, rendered temporarily out of bounds.

Biog: Louise Owen is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research examines contemporary theatre and performance in terms of economic change and modes of governance. Her writing has been published in various edited collections and in the journals Performance Research, frakcija, Contemporary Theatre Review, and TDR. She co-convenes the London Theatre Seminar, and is director of Birkbeck’s Peltz Gallery and co-director of the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre.

Biog: Marilena Zaroulia is Lecturer in Performance Arts at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Her research focuses on theatre, performance and the cultural politics of post-1989 Europe. She is the co-editor of Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe (Palgrave 2015). Her work has appeared in various international journals and edited collections. She is one of the editors of Studies in Theatre and Performance and has just finished co-editing a special issue for the journal, entitled 'Towards Decentring Theatre and Performance studies' (spring 2021).

Past Events in 2020/21:

Book(s) Launch, Wednesday 14^th October 2020, 4.30-6pm (online)

During this session we will celebrate the fact that researchers in Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick will have published five monographs in the six months from July 2020:

Nicholas Drofiak - Irusan: or, Canting for Architects, gta Verlag / eth Zürich

Milija Gluhovic - Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory, Bloomsbury

Nadine Holdsworth - English Theatre and Social Abjection: A Divided Nation, Palgrave

Silvija Jestrovic - Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence: The Author Dies Hard, Palgrave

Nicolas Whybrow - Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe: the work of Art in the Complex City, Bloomsbury

Each author will give a brief introduction to their book outlining the things that inspired them and the central arguments they make. There will be time to ask questions and to raise a virtual glass to this achievement.

Research Seminar, Wednesday 2^nd December 2020, 4.30-6pm (online)

Title: Disrupting negations of performativity: Motility, race and space in academic contexts

Speaker: Praveen Sewgobind

Abstract: Theorists Sara Ahmed and Fred Moten have both explored instances and processes of the negation of performativity. Moten’s profound assessment of nonperformance with respect to black bodies and Ahmed’s critical intervention as regards the non-performativity of diversity politics powerfully indicate how bodies of colour can arguably be desubjectified as they appear in spaces dominated by whiteness. My paper explores the bodily, spatial, and ocular conditions that give rise to the ubiquitous practice of bodies of colour undergoing ontological resistance from a racial visual regime that prohibits such bodies to become as motile as white bodies are. To do this, I will critically analyse academic spaces that often may seem to be “in transition” due to the promises and politics of diversity and inclusion efforts. Yet, as I will show, it will take more than altering the optics of an institution to counter the solid and insidious structures of whiteness. Phenomenological accounts as well as analyses of relevant academic texts from Fred Moten, Sara Ahmed, Shannon Sullivan, and Linda Martín Alcoff will elucidate some of the potential and strategic avenues in order to come to terms with and possibly even overcome the visual and bodily regimes emanating from the violence of hierarchized racialization of bodies of colour.

Biog: Dr. Praveen Sewgobind is an activist-academic working to deepen and complicate Critical Race Theory with a decolonial lens, focusing on the embodiment of white racism and social constructs of racial formation in the Netherlands. In the academic year 2020-2021 he will be performing research on racism in the Netherlands at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. More specifically, the project titled “Veiled Taxonomies and Ventriloquized Grammar: Unlocking Cultural Racism in the Netherlands” will investigate the workings of “ventriloquized racism,” i.e. racism that is packaged and disseminated as non-racist discourse but functions to centralise and uplift whiteness and Dutchness in the Netherlands. From September 2020 onwards, Praveen will organise and host the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis Critical Race Theory Seminar series (https://www.nicainstitute.com/critical-race-theory-seminar/).

Title: Stealing form my ancestors: the performance of restitution & reparation in European museum spaces

Speaker: JC Niala

Abstract: This paper takes its cue from Mwazulu Diyabanza, who was filmed in a viral video seizing African artefacts from the Musée du Quai-Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris, observing it as an act of attempted restitution. It also unpacks the removal of the Colston statue in Bristol as enacted reparation. Both of these protests were political and theatrical. They sit in direct contrast to an action carried out by a Nigerian man in the Museum of London who in frustration shook a case holding Benin Bronzes on loan from the British Museum, in the ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’ gallery, whilst exclaiming that the artefacts should be returned home. It was a spontaneous moment that received no media attention.

Drawing on work that theorizes the use of drama as a tool to transform conflict, I examine these grassroots protests in the light of Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre. Furthermore, theatre as a tool of resistance has been described by Ngugi wa Thiong’o with the powerful example of Kenyan people’s theatre. I argue that these protests are an invitation, a call to the keepers of the legacy of the British empire to enter into the dramatization of ongoing forms of colonial expression in order to create a break from them and perform a decolonised future.

Biog: JC Niala is a writer and researcher of African and English material cultural heritage. She is currently working on a book entitled A Loveliness of Ladybirds which was shortlisted for the Nan Shephard nature writing prize in 2019. JC is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick.

Research Seminar, Wednesday 20^th January 2021, 4.30-6pm (online)

Title: On border, identity and performance: an artist’s reflection from the field

Speaker: Taiwo Afolabi, University of Regina, Canada

Abstract: Migration is essential to human existence in this present ‘postnormal times’ characterized by chaos, contradictions, global displacement and neoliberal realities etc. From voluntary to forced migration, border shifts as living and non-living things move, and it is constantly being re/negotiated. Beyond physical or territorial border navigated in migration, cultures and arts transverse boundaries because people move with cultural practices, beliefs and traditions. For instance, as migrants’ cultural practices and art forms trans-border, culture becomes a mobile apparatus that constantly changes and shifts from one form to another. While researchers have largely focused on themes such as the relationship between border and governance, migration, securitization, historicity, visa regimes, borderland and culture, there is still knowledge base around the intersection of border and identity within performance discourse. In the presentation, I explore how experiences of migration and im/mobility find expression in my artistic practice. I investigate the notions of ‘shifting identities’ , ‘imagined communities’ to better understand root and routes and how arts conceive, perform and represent border in Africa. My reflection focuses on my artistic practices in Sub-Saharan Africa from a practitioner’s perspective with the inquiry: in what ways does border perform, (dis)connect, alter, shift, dissolve and (re)imagine identity? As an artist-researcher of African descent, my reflection on border, identity and race is both personal and political. Finally, in this presentation, I discuss the intersection of arts and border as “an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense” .

Biog: Taiwo Afolabi, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He is an applied theatre practitioner with a decade of experience working across a variety of creative and community contexts in over dozen countries across four continents. His practice and research interests include education, decolonization, socially-engaged creative practice, and research ethics. He is the founding artistic director of Theatre Emissary International, Nigeria and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Title: Performance Therapy and Therapeutic Performance: Theorising Creative Healing Amongst Displaced Persons in Daudu, Benue State

Speaker: Shadrach Teryila UKUMA, Department of Theatre Arts, Benue State University, Makurdi - Nigeria

Abstract: This paper examines conceptualizations around the healing function of theatre and performance. It recognizes the various strands of creative art therapies including dance therapy, drama therapy, music therapy and art therapy, as well as sociodrama. Using the experience with victims of violent conflict suffering collective trauma in Daudu, who use cultural performances to negotiate their wellbeing, the paper attempts to conceptualize their holistic performative experience other than the isolated performance genres as commonly found in literature on the subject. The paper goes further to argue for the inherent transformative aesthetic quality of cultural performances. Using descriptive and performance ethnography approaches in qualitative research, the paper examines the self-created cultural performances mechanism for coping with collective trauma experiences in order to arrive at fresh theoretical considerations. It concludes that culture is at the centre of human actions and reactions, and within it there exists a pool of resources for solving societal problems, just as such resources can indeed be triggered internally. It observes that there should be a limit as to where concept affects contexts and vice versa. The paper recommends that context specific thinking should guide both discourse and praxis in engaging societal problems and solving them, especially as it is still within the same cultural matrix that these problems are created and as such approaches from a different cultural background might not work well.

Biog: Shadrach Teryila UKUMA is lecturer at Benue State University, Makurdi – Nigeria, in the Department of Theatre Arts. He recently obtained a PhD with a thesis titled “Cultural Performances: A Study on Managing Collective Trauma amongst Displaced Persons in Daudu Community, Benue State, Nigeria”, at the SDG Graduate School “Performing Sustainability: Cultures and Development in West Africa” hosted by the Universities of Hildesheim, Germany; Maiduguri, Nigeria; and Cape Coast, Ghana. His research interests include Cultural Performance, Transformative Aesthetics, Creative Peacebuilding, Cultural Entrepreneurship and Leadership, and Performance Therapy.Shadrach is a member of the African Theatre Association (AfTA), Society of Nigeria Theatre Artists (SONTA), and Society for Peace Studies and Practice (SPSP).

If you want to find out more about these events, please contact Nadine Holdsworth (N.Holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk).