Reimagining Performance Network
This network was funded from 2021 to 2023.
The Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped the contemporary performance landscape, creating new spaces for conversation between performers and performance researchers. At this moment of change, the Reimagining Performance Network worked to build invaluable networks of support, debate and knowledge exchange between researchers and practitioners across a broad range of disciplines. We explored pressing new questions in the theatre and other creative fields, looking to both historical and contemporary performance practice to help confront the challenges and opportunities facing us.
Key among the Reimagining Performance Network’s questions were:
- What new avenues does ‘performance-as-research’ practice offer traditional theatre scholarship and the theatre industry? What might be gained by fostering new - performance-as-research practices?
- How have minority identities been served or excluded from various forms of performance practice? And what new opportunities present themselves in our contemporary moment?
- If performance has historically offered us a cultural and political ‘meeting place’, what do these forms of encounter and tentative community look like today? And what might they look like in the future? What do terms like “liveness”, “ephemerality” and “the archive” mean in today’s performance moment?
Our events brought theatre researchers and practitioners into close working and discursive contact, in order to explore these questions together.
This network started in MT2021 and for the first year was convened by Dr Hannah Simpson, JRF in Theatre and Performance. After Hannah moved to Edinburgh University, the network continued - please see people tab for key contacts.
