Awards for Performance Research Hub funding, 2024-25
The Performance Research Hub called for applications for MT 2024, for events and projects to be funded by the Hub with a sum of up to £500.
The Hub is delighted to announce the successful applications.
This programme is made possible by the Van Houten fund.
Ibsen-Kieler Translation Workshop
Lead applicant: Professor Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (English)
A workshop on the new translations by Gaye Kynoch of Ibsen’s plays A Doll’s House and When We Dead Awaken and Laura Kieler’s play Men of Honour, to be published by OUP in their Worlds Classics series in November 2025. Men of Honour has never before been available in English, so this volume will not only make it available to Anglophone readers and audiences for the first time but will also show how it brilliantly interacts with the two Ibsen plays. Kieler was the inadvertent model for Nora in A Doll’s House, and had complex, ongoing interactions with Ibsen over several decades and, most intriguingly, through these three plays in which they speak to one another. The workshop will be exploring and testing the speakability, rhythm, pace, and tone of the translations, a key step toward publication.
Happy Baby
Lead applicant: Jasmine Johnson (doctoral student, Ruskin School of Art)
Jasmine Johnson’s new screenplay, Happy Baby, will be performed as a live reading at Modern Art Oxford MAO Lates, with a live score from artist/musician Vivienne Griffin. The screenplay dramatizes Johnson’s personal attempts to conceive a child queerly. The screenplay follows a Hollywood-style cinematic arc in three acts with the protagonist’s increasing alienation and disconnection from their body as a medical site and the associated feelings of disembodiment, oscillating cycles of grief and hope. Events such as insemination, scans, tests, and conversations with friends – brainstorming new names for themselves as gender-fluid parents or discussing what constitutes good sperm – intertwine with discussions about the intergenerational transmission of ideas. What begins as a critique of discrimination and UK fertility inequality evolves into a stark reality, a story of attempted conception turns into an absurd Kafkaesque tragicomedy featuring a protagonist named JJ repeatedly slipping through the cracks.
Journal of Embodied Research: A Study Day
Lead applicant: Ben Spatz (visiting scholar, Ruskin School of Art)
Co-applicants: Dr Paola Esposito (Anthropology)
Journal of Embodied Research (JER, https://jer.openlibhums.org/) is an innovative open access journal that exclusively publishes video articles. This one-day symposium will be the first in-person gathering of the journal’s extended community, bringing together artist-scholars and practitioner-researchers to share and discuss the questions opened by the journal’s unique combination of videographic form and titular theme of embodiment. JER will be used as a starting point for broader discussions of videographic scholarship practice across disciplines.
Plot Holes – 3 Acts
Lead applicant: Frank Wasser (doctoral student, Ruskin School of Art)
Co-applicants: Kelly Lloyd (doctoral student, Ruskin School of Art) and Professor Daria Martin (Ruskin School of Art)
Three short lecture-performances by artists and academics Frank Wasser, Adam Gallagher, and Kelly Lloyd. These performances will examine how class has historically been mediated and understood within the University of Oxford and contemporary art-making. Participants are invited to respond to Fors Clavigera – 3 Potholes, an exhibition by Frank Wasser at Fusion Arts, which questions John Ruskin’s call for empathy with the working class through his 1874 initiative to repair the Hinksey Road. This event will explore class histories through performance-based responses without seeking to resolve these tensions, but rather considering how class issues can be expressed through the body. Plot Holes – 3 Acts will offer a unique, thought-provoking exploration of how class, labour, and art intersect, engaging participants in a critical reflection on both historical and contemporary social issues.
The White Whale
Lead applicant: Professor Christine Gerrard (English)
Co-applicants: John Terry, Director, The Theatre, Chipping Norton
This application supports a collaboration between TORCH/Oxford researchers and The Theatre, Chipping Norton, to create a new stage version of Melville’s Moby Dick. This version moves away from the ‘sea yarn’ conventions of previous productions and will lean into the text’s radical experimentalism with multiple forms and voices. It will give due weight to Melville’s unprecedented polyvocal representation of a shipboard community of subaltern voices – queer, black, marginalized, enslaved – as a counterweight to monovocal charismatic authoritarian command. This adaptation will resonate powerfully with current political and societal concerns. Two R & D events are planned in Oxford to integrate the academic community into the play’s development. The first is a half day of developments rehearsals, with Gerrard and other Oxford colleagues offering ideas and input. The second is a half day for an open rehearsal and discussion session with audiences held at St Luke’s chapel, open to students and the public.
What’s in a letter: Queer Temporalities
Lead applicant: Jen DeNike (doctoral student, Ruskin School of Art)
Co-applicant: Giulia Astesani, artist
A performative lecture and conversation to collaboratively think through an (inherently queer!) epistolary form. DeNike and Astesani’s intervention evolves from utilizing autobiographical and auto-fictional methods of writing, overlapping lived experiences, critical theory, and historical research (with a focus on queer and feminist history). These tactics will allow an embodied and affective reading of the past but also for less stable approaches to history translated into a performative voice and action. The script for the performative lecture will emerge from a letter exchange between DeNike and Astesani. Both the content of the letters and the performative delivery will engage with the notion of the 'chorus', investigating forms of non-hierarchical citations and polyvocality in the writing and the performance itself. Throughout the live intervention, DeNike and Astesani will ultimately trouble notions of authorship and expand tactics of ‘live address’.
