(2020). Diffraction for Performance Research. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Diffraction, pp. 1-3.

This article argues that diffraction sits at the heart of the affective experience of being in audience. By combining affect theory, new materialism and feminist psychoanalysis, I establish diffraction as a metaphor for grappling with the unnameable 'in-between' of affect and performance, and use performative writing to illustrate the intra-active affective attachments that are formed – only to dissolve

When conceptualizing futures and new ways of working within and beyond the field of performance studies, diffractive methods suggest new orientations to a ‘more subtle vision’ (Haraway 1992 Haraway, Donna J. (1992) ‘The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d Others’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 295–337

In this essay, I conceptualize the material nature of theatrical atmospheres as interobjective phenomena, emerging from and through objects as collaborative events. I apply Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action” to consider the ways in which the atmosphere is produced by and producing entangled agencies, and to consider the implications of this collaborative nature on notions of human agency and causality

The stumbling matters in question here are the embedded results of the art project Stolpersteine ('stumbling blocks'), instigated by the Cologne artist Günther Demnig (2020). The stumbling blocks are small squares of concrete, 10 by 10 centimetres, covered with a brass plate and installed in the pavement in front of the last address of particular victims persecuted or murdered by the Nazi regime between

Inspired by Karen Barad’s understanding of diffraction as a methodology and experiments in moving across time and space with diffraction I will in this text experiment with diffraction as a method for performance. On the one hand I will understand diffraction as reading images and texts diffractively, through one another, and on the other hand I will link diffraction to the tradition of artistic cut-up

(2020). The Diffraction of Cells: Places to (Mis)carry. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Diffraction, pp. 39-44.

The Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity (IRB) is an artistic research agency that speculates on possible multispecies futures. IRB conducts trans-disciplinary "field work" that reflects on interspecies relations, questions the intentionality of evolution and speculates on the (im)possibility of intra-and inter-species communication. Rather than showing solutions, it addresses the complexity of

Diffraction, as defined by Karen Barad, functions as a means of reframing corporeal-machinic relations through performance, as made evident through the examination of works by Joan Jonas, Pipolotti Rist, and myself, EL Putnam. Specifically, in this paper, I consider the practices of artists who bring together moving image and performance in a manner that draws attention to the material properties of

This article engages with North-American choreographer Trajal Harrell's interrogation of the relationship between performed histories, presents and futures. Working with the new materialist concept of diffraction, it examines how his choreographies engage with crucial questions surrounding racial politics and the construction of history, arguing that his works are performative and imaginative enactments

This article provides a diffractive reading of three phenomena to produce meanings: the popular Netflix series Stranger Things (seasons 1-3), promenade theatre company Secret Cinema’s 2019 performance of Stranger Things, and Karen Barad’s 2015 article ‘TransMaterialities: Trans*/matter/realities and queer political imaginings’. The article examines Karen Barad’s notion of touch and touching through

Feminism and Physics underpin the theory of Diffraction. Re-turning as a multiplicity of processes is central to the work of diffractive theorists like Karen Barad and Donna J. Haraway. This paper explores diffraction from the perspective of the dancing and performing body, using as a case study Vertical Dance Kate Lawrence’s (VDKL) Yn y Golau/In-visible Light (YYG). Diffractive principles inspired

everything that rises must dance (2018) is a dance performance produced by Complicite, premiered as part of Dance Umbrella Festival and created by choreographer Sasha Milavic Davies, composer Lucy Railton, dance artists Antigone Avdi, Makiko Aoyama, Amanda Dufour, Valentina Formenti, Jennifer Irons, Camilla Isola, Ciara Lynch, Gabrielle Nimo, Claudia Palazzo and Inês Pinheiro and 200 volunteer performers

By referring to the philosophies of Izutsu Toshihiko, the article argues that it is often the case that the profiling of difference increases the sense of isolation experienced by the very people the practice intends to help, and thus intensifies the number of micro-opponents even among peers. This was precisely the case in Aichi Triennale 2019, a Japanese interdisciplinary art festival financially

While equality, inclusivity, diversity and accessibility now regularly appear in mainstream discourse, the UK’s Equality Act (2010) paradoxically preceded a year-on-year increase in recorded cases of hate crime and discrimination based on protected characteristics such as (perceived) gender identity, sexuality and disability (Home Office 2019). A hostile environment is manifest through the ongoing

Diffracting Virtual Realities: Towards an anti-theatre of VR offers a short manifesto for a diffracted, critical virtuality and for wider technological and related pedagogic practices, ones which eschew over determination and simplistic empathy rhetoric. The paper, or rather, manifesto, proposes, instead, a deliberately artificial VR, with a purposeful strategy of diffractive observation and commentary

This article explores how aspects of posthuman theory, and in particular diffraction as theorised by Haraway and then Barad, can be used by theatre makers to develop the practice of being and making in company at this current moment in time. I begin with an analysis of the ways stories (including stories within plays) are shared in the rehearsal room. When framed as a diffractive practice that allows

The backdrop for our performance is the entanglement of humans and their microbes. In detail we explore the relation between human-centered language and microbes, aiming to give their relationship more meaning and structure. The performance itself unfolds as an entanglement between the researcher, the research objects and the method of investigation. Oral microbes transgress the boundaries between

This piece of writing acts as a practice statement of sorts—one through which I attempt to find an alternative foundation for creativity and practice by making sense of the materiality of bodies in search of an embodied position. This writing invites readers to (re)search for ways we can imagine participatory futures and shape alternative worlds from the ashes of the present. The text speaks through

Throughout this article we have transplanted passages from Karen Barad and Jean-Luc Nancy, threading their voices through one another and with our own, such that we remain responsible for our re/configuration of these estranged articulations. With reference to our ongoing use of heart rate sensors in choreography and composition, as well as our practice of Relational Listening, we foreground the metaphors

(2020). Web-Dance’s Era of Ecstasy. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Diffraction, pp. 143-144.

(2020). Productive Ruptures. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Diffraction, pp. 144-145.

(2020). Productive Disorientation Towards a More-than-Human Attunement. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Diffraction, pp. 145-146.

(2020). Diffracting Cybernetic-Existentialism. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Diffraction, pp. 146-147.

(2020). Notes on Contributors. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Diffraction, pp. 148-150.

(2020). On Hybridity. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Hybridity, pp. 1-6.

In the late 1980s, Jean-Luc Nancy brought together nineteen leading thinkers to consider ‘Who comes after the subject?’, in the wake of major historical and philosophical developments that had radically destabilized modern understandings of selfhood and agency. Several of the respondents addressed ideas in their work that have contributed to fundamental reconfigurations of subjectivity in performance

The article proposes an analytical framework in the form of a continuum in order to examine instances of hybridity in terms of mechanisms, qualities and outcomes. By foregrounding material pathways and processes through the coming together of disparate elements, the continuum provides a platform to analyse the overlapping spatio-temporalities and bleeding palettes of hybridity. The continuum is deployed

This article develops the notions of ‘hybridity’ through animal-human-technological triangulations, focussing primarily on the performance art, VR installation work, Becoming Leeches: Episode 1—Having dinner, by artist Doo-Sung Yoo. In this work, humans and living leeches ‘power’ animated counterparts in VR to journey through a toxic world to attempt to heal the planet. The piece presents a hybrid

Formal and systemic boundaries can be problematic, for they easily become vehicles of normative attempts to polarize, enclose and isolate. A tactic that has high political currency today. This article elaborates on hybridity as methodology, expression and dynamic that can discard bodily and disciplinary boundaries in theatre and performance. Hybridity here will be discussed as a gale, an invisible

This article examines the use of sonification, and movement sonification, as a tool for engagement with artworks in galleries and museums. It focuses on the relationship between artwork and sighted, partially sighted and non-sighted visitors and the way sonification, by offering an audio-centred mode of engagement, complicates the aesthetic experience. By drawing on Bruno Latour’s discussion on hybrids

(2020). Hybridity in the Utopian City: A multisensory performance practice in action. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Hybridity, pp. 54-55.

Hybridity as the essence of puppetry is the key idea that is considered in the article. By reflecting upon aspects of in-betweenness in puppet performing practices, the conceptualization of puppetry’s hybridity permits us to overcome a prevalent view that reduces puppetry in terms of binary oppositions such as human/non-human, living/lifeless, tangible/intangible. In this regard, a hybrid perspective

In my research about dementia and its representation in contemporary theatre, I have found that works that employ parataxis are conducive to narratives that foreground the experience of characters with dementia. Parataxis refers here to a dramaturgy in which theatrical elements are placed alongside one another, instead of in a hierarchical arrangement (Lehmann 2006). This article considers several

This article draws on doctoral research that explored methods of making theatre that use hybrid performance practices to provide equality of participation in theatrical events for deaf and hearing people. The social and political contexts of the deaf and hearing communities in the UK demonstrate hierarchical power dynamics resulting in the ongoing oppression of deaf people by the hearing hegemony.

In recent years, a growing number of artists and performers have become involved with a group psychoanalytic practice called the Tavistock method. British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) initiated this methodology, which centres on the study of the ‘here-and-now’ within group life. Exploring the unconscious dynamics within groups, Bion’s approach evolved into a model known as a group relations

(2020). Experiencing Choreographed 4D Visuals in a VR Dance Installation. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Hybridity, pp. 94-97.

The Andean patron-saint fiesta is an iconic folkloric celebration often considered as a religious syncretic and hybrid expression of popular culture that brings together Spanish and Indigenous influences. Within fiestas, danzas (dance-dramas) represent both embodied devotional offers that include gendered costuming and dancing and representations of folklore as an ideology sustained by the idea of

British South Asian dancers, choreographers, curators, Arts Council policymakers, and directors of South Asian dance agencies, used ‘hybridity’ as a multi-faceted historical, political, cultural, aesthetic and public culture trope to constitute what is today known as the British South Asian Dance Sector in the UK. This constitution story, initiated under the ideological signs of British multi-culturalism

In this article, I examine how the semahs, a genre of choreo-musical forms performed within the rituals of the Alevis from Turkey, were reinvented into a more contemporary movement and performance vocabulary. As part of a larger investigation on staged representations of Aleviness in theatre and dance, I focus here on the individual and embodied reworking of the semahs by the Istanbul-based choreographer

This article considers the many layered and multi-faceted questions of hybridity as interdisciplinary encounter through the lens of a central case study – the EU-funded project, CultureMoves (2018-2020), on which the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) was a collaborating partner. With Europeana principles as a backdrop for the re-use of cultural heritage content, CultureMoves was an 18-month long project

(2020). Photoscenography: Cuddington. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Hybridity, pp. 134-135.

This contribution aims to enrich the discussion on the notion of ‘hybridity’ in this present volume of Performance Research through the lens of the essay form. The interest of my present assessment is to demonstrate how ‘hybridity’ as a key feature of the essay form is not merely a random mix of styles and genres. Rather, as the essayistic performances in this contribution will illustrate, they attest

(2020). Notes on Contributors. Performance Research: Vol. 25, On Hybridity, pp. 145-146.

In the midst of climate catastrophe-a warming rate twice the global average, raging wildfires, surging floods-the Canadian addiction to pipelines and oil sands exploitation remains unchecked. The spectacle of a settler colony desperately turning more oil into state revenue, while ravaging Indigenous lands and simultaneously preaching environmental sustainability, could inspire a dark sort of laughter:

The language of 'climate grief' has recently been popularized across the English speaking world, with many in North America beginning to host regular 'climate grief circles'. These gatherings allow for the collective processing of feelings associated with climate-related grief. If the 'grief circle' is one common strategy for moving through personal grief within one's immediate context, the monument

In Dark Ecology (2016), Timothy Morton argues that one of the challenges presented by the impact of human activity upon the environment is that ‘[w]e are faced with the task of thinking at temporal and spatial scales that are unfamiliar, even monstrously gigantic’ (25). The advent of the Anthropocene era thus requires us to understand the agency of the individual in the context of a geological epoch

Our bodies, suffused with atmospheres, ancestors and chemical compounds produced by sunlight, are ‘meterontological' (Randerson 2018). We are the weather. And yet an apocalypse of the skies threatens the futures of our children. In this writing we propose a complex and nuanced alternative to the monolithic concept of the Anthropocene through intracultural and indigenous place-based performance incorporating

This essay explores the work Remembrance Day for Lost Species (RDLS), a coalition of artists, activists, and environmental organizations who memorialise the losses of extinction. I argue that RDLS's practices create an ethics of witnessing ecological loss in ways that expand discourses about what (and who) counts as grievable life. I take up Judith Butler's theorisation of the powers of mourning in

This article addresses land acknowledgement in contemporary Indigenous performance to illustrate how the invocation of Lakota cultural knowledge animates the contradictions of existence. The Native American Medicine Garden (NAMG) on the University of Minnesota campus, and Cânté Sütá-Francis Bettelyoun's (Lakota Oglala) pedagogy, informs the overarching conundrum with the ontological turn in academia

In ‘Dark Choreography' of the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, Robyn Sassen writes about how the designer and curator of a South African museum that deals with mass killing in Europe and in Africa have imposed an ad hoc choreography for the visitor, encouraging them to move their bodies in response to the dark ecology of a world turned by hate. The permanent display of the JHGC, which was

Stephen Carleton's The Turquoise Elephant and David Finnigan's Kill Climate Deniers have each won Griffin Theatre's national award for best new Australian play over recent years, placing these theatrically irreverent black comedies at the vanguard of new Australian works dealing with climate change and global warming. In order to lampoon the absurdity of political inaction in relation to climate change

We eat, drink, breathe, touch and absorb plastic polymers. The global proliferation of plastic objects permeates not only the deep sea, but also our kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms and bodies. This essay examines a series of case studies crystallizing some thoughts towards a dark ecology of plastic performativity. First, I develop a theoretical framework of plastic ecologies with reference to Kelly Jazvac's

This article places a performance called Meanwhile by Gaëtan Rusquet in conversation with theories of New Materialism and Indigenous epistemologies to analyse how these events contribute to ecological awareness. Each performance of Meanwhile is variable and foregrounds human imbrications in environments, rather than human domination or control of environs. As a result, the project intervenes in discourses

This article looks to performing arts and performance studies for ways to grasp and make meaning for contemporary climate change, a phenomenon that influential ecological philosophers regard as highly resistant to human comprehension. Thinking through a lethal protest of climate inaction and a dance between human and fungal bodies, the author argues that these embodied acts enable a novel recognition

This essay examines object-driven performances from the perspective of disposability in order to detail threads of dark ecology that inform the complexities of performance practice in an era of anthropogenic climate change. I begin ‘at home’ with Geoff Sobelle's The Object Lesson (2015) in which the accumulation and disposability of objects becomes uniquely visible in human narratives and perceptual

‘Estado Vegetal, a Gesture of Imitation: An Interview with Manuela Infante' features a conversation between theatre playwright, director, scriptwriter and musician, Manuela Infante, and art historian and curator Laurel V. McLaughlin concerning Infante's most recent one-woman show, Estado Vegetal (vegetative state), 2018 in resonance with Timothy Morton's concept of ‘ecognosis', or attunements to ecological

This article analyses Deepan Sivaraman's 2012 production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876) and argues that the production's scenography evoked scepticism toward the Indian nation-state. This scepticism came as a direct consequence of the scenography's ability to alienate the audience through the formation of dark ecological environments, with the help of three characters: the elf princess, the son

The current dark ecological context has prompted resurgence in debate about the concepts of hope, despair, responsibility and urbanism. Both Bonnie Ora Sherk's The Farm (San Francisco 1974-1980) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles' work at the New York Sanitation Department (1976-present), revision human/more-than-human relationships and interactions, conceiving of an urban community as made up a multiple species

At a ritual compound in Salvador, Bahia's capital city in Northeastern Brazil, the Caboclo Sete Flechas dances a sinuous samba, his bare feet marking time on the leaf-covered floor. With a serpentine spine and syncopated steps that turn on a polymetric beat, Sete Flechas rides out on the horse that is Mãe Oba's body. A priestess in the Afro-Brazilian religio-cultural matrix of Candomblé, Mãe Oba, cultivates