PhD Practice-based Research "Embodying the Eerie: An investigation of the eerie as a dramaturgical concept in the process of directing devised performance". 

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A practice-based methodology that offers an expanded view of the devising process in post-dramatic performance. I explore my role as a director within a research context that addresses research questions with an ensemble of professional performers. The embodied interdisciplinary practice foregrounds the performer's body in somatic practice, emphasising the internal experience of kinesthetic, sensory-perceptual and intuitive ways of knowing and feeling that relate to subconscious processes.

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The practice develops performative elements and techniques through an improvisatory method, facilitating the performers in an emergent process of responding to movement scores. 

The visual dramaturgy draws on movement, text, objects, light and sound technologies as key elements composed through juxtapositions, disrupting sequential time and narrative.

 

I contextualise my research through the philosophical theory of hauntology. Philosopher Jacques Derrida theorised hauntology, a merger of ontology and haunting, to describe a state in which the present is infused by a past that was never fully realised (1993). Mark Fisher expands  Derrida's theory to describe the spectral presence of 'lost futures' in the early millennium. Fisher's hauntology and his theory of the Eerie (2014,2016) offer a unique perspective on creative processes. The eerie is concerned with questions of agency, which I explore through a methodology that decentres the human, giving rise to the non-human and beyond the human. 

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The performer's 'open state' enables an 'eerie impulse', which I 'mine' through a directorial process that observes and expands impulses that resonate with the eerie. These are shaped through a visual dramaturgy, combining imagery, movement, light and sound technologies in an eerie theatricality. The performances explore 'what is felt that needs to be said' as it arises through this process in response to place and specific themes that are current. 

 

My PhD research consisted of three hauntological performances. The Strange Geometry of Time interrogates the haunted feminine, ghastly and ghostly female figures and domesticity as an intergenerational spectre. The performance uses live manipulation of sound/voices, giving rise to ‘agential objects’ (McKinney, 2015), and ‘uncalled for’ voices that haunt the stage. Dwelling continues to explore the haunted feminine through childhood and motherhood, eerie ghosts return in a chapel site as cultural spectres, urging remembrance and memorialisation. The intermedial site-specific performance integrates film shot in a derelict mansion, with live performance and sound, projecting ‘erasures’ as haunting fragmentary memories. This Is The Land  

interrogates the haunted landscape, anarchic ghostly human and nonhuman figures are summoned as

spectres of uncontested ownership and displacement. The performance uses live manipulation of music, song and juxtapositions of sound and image, generating disjointed temporalities, as a throng of ‘overlooked’ ancestral ghosts haunt the stage.

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Previous projects as part of the PhD submission

​This Is The Land (2022-2023), Dwelling (2019), The Strange Geometry of Time (2018)

The full PhD thesis can be accessed HERE

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The ensemble of performers includes Leeza Jessie, Alice Buckley, Zov Vélez,

Samuel De La Torre, Xavier De Santos.

Collaborations with musicians Helen Roberts and John Baggott.​​​

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