University of Kent

Faculty Member, Drama

Senior Lecturer in Drama

About

My teaching and research specialisms are contemporary performance, puppetry and object theatre, scenographic space, Modernism, the Bauhaus stage and applied theatre. In the 1980s, I helped to found Horse and Bamboo Theatre, Lancashire, working with the Artistic Director, Bob Frith, and stayed with them  until the early 1990s. I also worked with Chol Theatre, then in Huddersfield and under the direction of Adam and Kim Strickson; and I joined Shadowland Theatre in Toronto to create a show which toured to the Toy Theater Festival in New York (2005).


My current research centres on embodiment, phenomenology, the plastic and sonic properties of scenographic space, and puppetry. I am particularly interested in the connections between the ‘materiality’ of performance and the autistic perception of the world, and I have published on  this. I led with Dr Nicola Shaughnessy a pilot research project in autumn 2009 funded by Kent’s Innovation, Creativity and Enterprise Workshop. This project explored intermedial drama and performance work with autistic children, using light, sound, puppetry, masks and digital media. Thhis  project  won the University of Kent Innnovation, Enterprise and Creativity annual award for the most Innovative  project.

Dr Nicola Shaughnessy and I jointly head the Kent Research Group in Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance. My publications include an essay on the methodology of practice as research and articles on the theatre of the Bauhaus. My monograph The Theatre of the Bauhaus: the Modern and Postmodern Stage of Oskar Schlemmer is published by Routledge, 2011.

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