Raising the Dead: Rituals for a New Theatre is an essay for US theatre journal HowlRound on how the collapse of liberal democracy is reconnecting theatre with its origins in ritual experience. Written at Tampere International Theatre Festival (August 2019).
Revolution Reloaded: Lessons from Moscow was a catalogue essay commission for HOME Arts Centre’s season of film, art and theatre on the 2017 centenary of the Russian Revolution. (See p22 of PDF)
HOME Manchester's newly-published book, exhibition, film series and theatre programme explored how the visionary avant-garde art, film and theatre that inspired the Russian Revolution were betrayed by its political reality. This essay, written shortly after I returned from Moscow uncovers the legacy of the Revolutionary avant-garde and the politics of art in Russia today.
Playing Real: the Eerie Prognosis of Robot Theatre is an essay for Frieze Magazine on Uncanny Valley - a theatre production by theatre collective Rimini Protokoll. The production, which puts a robot protagnist onstage, explores the potential of artificial intelligence to destabilize our understanding of what it is to be human by having the robot ‘play’ a famous writer known for his excavation of subjectivity.
This essay, commissioned by the International Association of Theatre Critics makes two arguments:
1. For theatre criticism to engage with the new kinds of audience experience being birthed to make sense of a changing world.
2. For theatre to deepen its engagement with critical discourse to develop the new kinds of audience experience required to re-situate theatre at the heart of everyday life.
Investigative essay for Tribune, the British political magazine founded by George Orwell.
It explores how the rise of nationalist isolationism is reshaping the global art world, holding art institutions hostage and summoning the ghosts of history at Munich's Haus der Kunst, which was built by Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer.
Climate Circus is one of several pieces of written and photo reportage commissioned while embedded for two weeks with climate protestors at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. It reflects the gonzo style and subcultural focus of the commissioning publication. This event was the birthplace of the Climate Justice Action Network that shapes activism today and the first of the wave of global protests that dominated the 2010s.
Sin City is a longread piece of reportage on Berlin's underground sex scene - from sex clubs and strip clubs to sex as experimental artform
Firsthand report on turf wars between local gangs and attacks on gallery goers in Istanbul. The exhibition at which attacks occurred is used to contextualize political tensions in Turkey.
An essay on emerging theatre forms for Camden People’s Theatre
Towards an Ecorealist Theatre - Brecht, Bacon and the New Age
A paper delivered to the International Brecht Society at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus for Baustelle Brecht – Working with Brecht 23 June 2017
“Veronica Brovall's sculptures are born into a wasteland stuffed with dead-ends. Rejecting the invitation to disentangle those them, she harvests them. Necessarily, her materials are familiar, domestic and manufactured. Assembling them, she disengages them from their present forms – tyre, chair, plaster bandage – to elicit their natural origins – oil, metal ore, earth – and reveal a secret geology of experience.” Essay commission