The planet as method

I have two research portfolios: collaborative academia (teaching and research) and the cultural and artistic production of outer space. Both portfolios follow the rationale of building planetary praxes in and for theatre and performance practice and research.

My first research portfolio is collaborative academia (teaching and research). Here, I am interested in exploring collaborative methods for producing and transferring knowledge, paying particular attention to the sociocultural dynamics challenged and reaffirmed through shared authorship and authority practices. To this end, a central part of my research is to activate international research teams. As of March 2022, I am part of four teams working on various interconnected projects, all of which I have initially activated. Working primarily through digital platforms as the main methods and tools, these teams are spread around the planet, and we publish, teach, curate, and organise academic events. This interest started in 2015, when I co-founded the After Performance Research Ensemble (Australia-Singapore-UK) and was cemented in 2016, when I co-founded Performance Studies international’s Future Advisory Board (FAB). This line of my work has continued with the formation of the research ensemble Ends in 2019, which I co-convene. Ends focused on researching collaborative academia in relation to finitude, posthumanism, and dramaturgy questions. I have also initiated and co-developed a working group on performance pedagogy, which has collaboratively assembled a book titled Performance Pedagogy: Objects, Transfers, Formations. Our book is currently under peer review with Bloomsbury Academic, and we hope to publish it by 2023.

My second research interest centres on the cultural and artistic production of outer space and consequent planetary relationality and subjectivity models. This line of work stems from my doctoral dissertation, Planetary Performance Theory, and informs the development of my first monograph, tentatively titled Endless Planets: Performance and Outer Space. In this area of my work, I use performance as a methodology to study the cultural and artistic histories and implications of astronomy, astronautics, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. My work thus inspects the ontology of the extraterrestrial and calls for new and more inclusive frameworks to understand our planetary relationality beyond the current exclusive framework of “outer space”. Important journals in the field have published my work on this subject, and I am also an affiliated researcher with the Transmission in Motion platform at Utrecht University, where I am the co-convener with Professor Maaike Bleeker of the Performance Studies Space Programme or PSSP. The programme enables interdisciplinary encounters between these seemingly divergent disciplines to debate variable ontologies of time and space vis-à-vis the materiality of artistic, cultural, and scientific performance practices (read more about PSSP).