GENERAL EDITOR
Richard Gough is a co-founder and the General Editor of Performance Research, Professor of Music and Performance at University of South Wales, Cardiff, UK, and Artistic Director of the Centre for Performance Research (CPR). He has produced and organized numerous conferences, workshops, festivals and tours of theatre and dance companies across the past forty-five years, and he has directed theatre productions, curated events and lectured in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia and throughout Europe. His own artistic-led research explores the interface between food, cookery and performance.
Helena Grehan is the Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University. She writes on performance and ethics, art and politics and questions of spectatorship and responsibility. She has published four books, and two co-edited books, the most recent of which is The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics (with Peter Eckersall). She is currently leading a major Australian Research Council-funded project to digitize, to archival standard, vulnerable cultural collections from Western Australia.
ISSUE EDITORS
Frank Camilleri is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Malta and Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project. His publications on performer training, theatre as a laboratory and practice as research reflect the theatre work he has been developing since 1989. He is the author of Performer Training Reconfigured: Post-psychophysical perspectives for the twenty-first century (Bloomsbury 2019) and Performer Training for Actors and Athletes (Bloomsbury 2023).
John-David Dewsbury is Professor in Human Geography at the School of Science at UNSW Canberra. His research focuses upon the performative and non-representational nature of social life, in particular on how we view space, environment, affects, human behaviour and subjectivity. He has published extensively on habit.
CONTRIBUTORS
Irene Alcubilla Troughton (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University within the Dutch Research Council (NWO)-funded project Acting Like a Robot, where she researches phenomenological and embodied cognition perspectives on movement in theatre and dance as a way to approach the design of human–robot interactions.
Francesco Bentivegna (they/them) is an artist and a lecturer of Digital Theatre at the University of Bristol, focusing on voice studies and philosophy of technology. They have a prolific solo career in the performing arts with the stage name Francasixiə, with which they have produced multiple nationally recognized performance work.
Associate Professor Robert Burke (Monash University) is a composer, improvising musician and academic. His research focuses on jazz and improvisational processes investigating ‘What happens when we improvise?’, including studies into the phenomenology of musical interaction, experimentation, identity, agency and gender studies. Rob is the president of AJIRN (Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network).
Tanya Calamoneri is Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. Her scholarship on butoh and somatics has been published in Routledge's Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal, Dance Chronicle, Journal of Dance Education, The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2019), and Intercultural Acting and Performer Training (2019). Her book Butoh America (Routledge 2022) investigates Butoh dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the early 2000s.
Sarah Crews is Head of Music and Drama at the University of South Wales, and a Senior Lecturer in Performance and Media. Her research focuses on boxing, embodied practice and activism wherein she interrogates power structures as they relate to perceptions of gender, racial and class difference. Sarah also leads a sporting heritage project entitled ‘Women’s Boxing Wales: Past, present and future’.
Olly Crick, PhD and RSA, is a freelance researcher and teacher, and has published monographs, edited volumes and journal articles on Commedia dell’Arte, as well as run a community commedia company in Gloucestershire from 2004 to 2014. Current research involves early modern original practice and therapeutic masks.
Samuel Curkpatrick is a Research Associate in Indigenous Studies at the Indigenous Knowledge Institute and the Indigenous Studies Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, the University of Melbourne. He specializes in Indigenous Australian music and philosophical issues of language, epistemology and religion.
Alice Gaby is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Monash University and Australian Research Council (ARC) Industry Fellow at Living Languages. She is a non-Indigenous linguist who has collaborated with speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre and other Paman languages since 2002, and has supported language reclamation efforts in communities around Australia.
Eddie Hanchen Feng, PhD, is an award-winning scholar and a Lecturer at The Central Academy of Drama, China. His research intersects avant-garde performance, mediatized culture and more-than-human philosophy, with a special focus on identity discourses in transnational and diasporic Chinese theatre.
Peter Knight is a multi-award-winning composer and performer whose practice exists in the spaces between categories, between genres and between cultures. He has performed his music at significant festival venues in more than twenty countries and from 2013 to 2023 was the Artistic Director/co-CEO of Australia’s leading contemporary music ensemble, the Australian Art Orchestra. Under his leadership the ensemble developed an international reputation for its distinctive approaches to cross-cultural collaboration. Peter holds a doctorate from Griffith University and currently co-leads the ensemble Hand to Earth with Yolngu song keepers David and Daniel Wilfred.
Maheshwar Kumar is a PhD research scholar in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar, an off-campus centre (OCC) of Homi Bhabha National Institute, Odisha, India. His primary areas of interest are Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, Dance Research and Indigenous Culture.
Andrew Lapworth is a cultural geographer at UNSW Canberra. His research is interested in exploring how people make sense of and respond to a world being drastically reshaped by new technologies (including artificial intelligence (AI)), and the role of art and aesthetic practice in mediating and potentially transforming that experience.
Andy Lavender is Vice Principal and Director of Production Arts at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London. His writing includes Documentary Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2024) and Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement (Routledge, 2016), along with various articles and chapters on contemporary theatre and performance.
Sarah Levinsky works as Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Falmouth University where she completed her practice-based PhD project entitled Encounters Between Dance and Digital Meaning: Discovering potential in the question of movement. She is also a theatre maker, choreographer, and workshop leader, as well as consultant arts strategist/fundraiser. www.sarahlevinsky.co.uk
Ashley Lucas is Professor of Theatre & Drama at the University of Michigan. Her book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the ways in which incarcerated people use theatre to counteract the dehumanizing forces of the prison.
John Matthews leads the School of Society and Culture at the University of Plymouth where his most recent research has been in the practical application of new technology and advancing the philosophical theorization of training in an age of artificial intelligence.
Dick McCaw. Alongside various articles and chapters he has written three books – Bakhtin and Theatre (Routledge 2016), The Actor’s Body: A guide (Bloomsbury 2018) and Rethinking the actor’s Body: Dialogues with neuroscience (Bloomsbury 2020) – and edited two books of writings by Rudolf Laban. He is a qualified Feldenkrais practitioner and teaches Wu Family Tai Chi Chuan.
Sean Mulcahy is a Research Officer at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University. He holds a joint PhD in Law and Theatre from the University of Warwick and Monash University and Honours degrees in Law and Performing Arts. He is a member of the Gender, Law, and Drugs Program at La Trobe University.
Ranjini Nair is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. She is a kuchipudi dancer, and researches dance in India, and its relationship with gender, caste and nationalism, through archival research and performance-making.
Amarjeet Nayak is a Reader-F in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhubaneswar, an OCC of Homi Bhabha National Institute, Odisha, India. His primary areas of interest are Postcolonial Studies, Speculative Fiction Studies, Film Studies and Indian English Literature.
Katherine Rees works at the intersection of movement and technology and is a Lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts. Her work focuses on wearable technology in the creative process of making dance.
Tom Roberts is a cultural geographer based at UNSW Canberra. His research explores the non-human dimensions of cultural life, with a particular interest in conceptualizing the agentic capacities of emerging technologies and novel materials. Tom situates his thinking at the intersection of new materialism, non-representational theory and post-humanism.
Aileen K. Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance at Stanford University. She is a historian of performance and technology with specializations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British theatre, magic performance, and Black cultural performances. Her current project examines technological, scientific and theatrical knowledge in early science museums.
Phoebe Robinson is a professional dancer/choreographer, research assistant, independent scholar and filmmaker. Her research interests include Walter Benjamin’s ‘peculiar phenomenology’ of embodiment, and the ‘archival turn’ in performing arts. She holds a PhD titled ‘Dancing the Mimetic Faculty: A peculiar phenomenology’ from the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Tom Rodgers is an artist and designer based in York, UK. His practice engages with photography, graphic design, book design and writing. He is currently a PhD student at Leeds Beckett University. He co-edits the small press Gordian Projects.
Filippo Romanello is researcher and theatre-maker, his practice encompassing dramaturgy, directing and actor training. He has worked in theatre, opera and dance in the UK, Germany and Italy, and taught drama subjects at university level in the UK. He runs acting research workshops building on the findings of his Practice as Research (PaR) PhD.
Kate Seear is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Monash University and Honours degrees in Law and Arts. She is a member of the Gender, Law, and Drugs Program at La Trobe University.
Elizabeth Stich is an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia specializing in aerial and contemporary dance. Her practice-research focuses on performance training and creative practice for aerialists. Elizabeth holds an MFA from The University of Utah, certification in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis, and is a graduate of the New England Center for Circus Arts.
Pranaya Kumar Swain is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Science Education and Research, an OCC of Homi Bhabha National Institute, Odisha, India. His teaching and research interests include Public Policy, Social Development, Education and Livelihood, Society-Science Interface and Contemporary Social Issues.
Angus Tarnawsky is an artist, musician, educator and researcher investigating everyday listening practices in urban spaces. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
Ilinca Todoruț is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Babeș-Bolyai University, and author of Christoph Schlingensief’s Realist Theater (2021).
Daniel Wilfred is a Wägilak ceremonial leader and artist with the Australian Art Orchestra. He has performed at major international festivals, including the London Jazz Festival, and conducted workshops at the University of Cambridge and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. Daniel received the Northern Territory Government Arts Fellowship (2019).