The University of New South Wales
Graduate Student, School of English, Media and Performing Arts
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Dr Gillian Fuller
Mr John McCallum |
About
One of the key interests of my PhD research is to assimilate a haptic-affective topology of touching/being touched by theatre director Barrie Kosky’s performative events in order to examine their transformational impact on the body, and their subsequent political contingency. This approach aims to bring Kosky’s work out of textual, significatory discourses of analysis and into the flow of ‘the affective turn’ (Clough 2007) within an embodied (radical) empiricism (Whitehead, James) of feeling performative intensities.
My research seeks to integrate radical empiricism into performance studies to assemble a way of engaging with the felt affective intensities of Kosky’s post-tragedies. This project comes out of a need for theatre analyses to engage with performance practice through an affective and embodied empiricism. Kosky’s particular style of performance practice is most effectively illuminated by such an engagement with his work, as his performances interrogate notions of the body.
My work locates Kosky within an Australian theatre context to highlight the ways in which his work has disrupted dominant trends towards naturalism and realism in mainstream performance spaces in Australia, and how this has subsequently impacted upon the reception of his work as transgressive. The use of the prefix ‘post’ in ‘post-tragedy’ highlights that Kosky’s work is in conversation with discourses of classic tragedy, whilst disrupting classical modes of representation.
I am also a performance artist, comprising one half of What Makes Men Blush. Through practice we penetrate the interstice between burlesque aesthetics and the postdramatic to unravel fixed notions of the feminine body. I'm currently working on a solo performance event that explores notions of loss, traumatic memory and touch, using my own body as the work's site of interrogation.
