- University of Hildesheim, Department of the English language and literate, Department Memberadd
- Anthropology, Philosophy, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Art, Theatre History, and 20 moreDirecting, Postdramatic theatre, Dramaturgy, Contemporary British Theatre, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Writing for Performance, Installation (Art), Performance Art, Live Art, Devised Theatre, Adaptation, Greek Tragedy, Ethics, Performance Studies, Politics, Trauma Studies, Cultural Politics, Drama, Interdisciplinarity, and Diasporasedit
- Patrick is an interdisciplinary researcher, research manager and facilitator working across cultural geography, polit... morePatrick is an interdisciplinary researcher, research manager and facilitator working across cultural geography, politics, and performance studies. A researcher and research manager with 10+ years’ experience, he has an internationally recognised scholarly profile in arts, cultural and humanities research, and a significant track record designing and delivering international research projects within and beyond academia.
As Head of Theatre and Performance at Northumbria University, I have strategic leadership responsibility for all aspects of research and knowledge exchange, and learning and teaching delivery and development at all levels from Foundation to PhD. Leading teams and overseeing a portfolio of projects as Research Director at the University of Surrey, I was part of the School of Arts and Guildford School of Acting’s senior management teams. In this role, I worked closely with senior University leaders to develop research strategies, and managed complex budgets. Committed to developing inclusive, collegiate and successful research cultures, I have facilitated the development of research infrastructures, supported the work of colleagues (funding bids, research outputs, strategic priorities), managed activities across sectors and disciplines, and lead specific projects that have public impact (including with the NHS, and with resilience professionals internationally).
My own research explores cultural production as a means of investigating the world, as well as object of analysis in it, investigating the place and geo-political function of contemporary cultural production in relation to questions of trauma, resilience and contexts of crisis. Commissioned to publish in non-academic contexts, my work has impact and application beyond the academy. I am Principal Investigator on the AHRC/UKRI funded project Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life: Performative strategies and practices for response and recovery in and beyond lockdown (part of the Covid-19 Rapid Response call).
Committed to ‘real-world’ research, my work is interdisciplinary, collaborative and concerned to engage professionals beyond the academy. For instance, recent research and knowledge exchange projects have included international colleagues from urban planning, hazard mitigation, cultural policy, and arts professionals. Thus, I have experience building and working in collegiate, transdisciplinary teams to co-design new, impactful research.edit
I'm very please to be able to share this call for papers for a special edition of the journal Performance Research entitled 'Staging the Wreckage' that I am co-editing with Dr Gianna Bouchard (Birmingham)
Research Interests:
The idea of trauma has become so used in the public sphere as to become almost meaningless in its ubiquity. But this is also to say that we live in a historical moment in which society feels bound to its traumatic experiences. Trauma, it... more
The idea of trauma has become so used in the public sphere as to become almost meaningless in its ubiquity. But this is also to say that we live in a historical moment in which society feels bound to its traumatic experiences. Trauma, it would seem, has become a cultural trope. Furthermore, contemporary trauma theory suggests a performative bent in traumatic suffering itself – the trauma-symptom is, after all, a rehearsal, re-presentation, re-performance of the trauma-event. This is not to trivialise traumatic suffering or detract from the insistence that trauma narratives must adequately, truthfully, be borne witness to so as not to diminish the weight of the original event. On Trauma explores a range of instances in which performance becomes a productive frame through which to address traumata and/or where trauma theory illuminates performance. With papers examining topics from African funeral rituals to witnessing, and ethics to Argentinean scratches, this issue of Performance Research benefits from a cross-cultural dynamic which brings together academic articles on and artistic responses to performance that embodies, negotiates, negates or provokes trauma.
Research Interests:
Between 1960 and 2010, a new generation of British avant-garde theatre companies, directors, designers, and performers emerged. Some of these companies and individuals have endured to become part of theatre history while others have... more
Between 1960 and 2010, a new generation of British avant-garde theatre companies, directors, designers, and performers emerged. Some of these companies and individuals have endured to become part of theatre history while others have disappeared from the scene, mutated into new forms, or become part of the establishment. Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre at long last puts these small-scale British theatre companies and personalities in the scholarly spotlight. By questioning what 'Britishness' meant in relation to the small-scale work of these practitioners, contributors articulate how it is reflected in the goals, manifestos, and aesthetics of these companies.
Some reviews of the book can be found here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10486801.2015.1006449#abstract
http://www.scottishjournalofperformance.org/Fletcher-Watson_book-review-duggan-ukaegbu_SJoP0102_DOI_10.14439sjop.2014.0102.11.pdf
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14682761.2014.992602
Contents:
Setting the scene: Introducing Reverberations
Patrick Duggan and Victor Ukaegbu
1. Foco Novo: The Icarus of British Small Scale Touring Theatre
Graham Saunders
2. Insider Knowledge: The evolution of Belfast’s Tinderbox Theatre Company
David Grant
3. Volcano: A Post-punk Physical-Theatre
Gareth Somers
4. Tiata Fahodzi: Second Generation Africans in British Theatre
Ekua Ekumah
5. Keeping it together: Talawa Theatre Company, Britishness, aesthetics of scale and mainstreaming the black-British experience
Kene Igweonu
6. Agitation and Entertainment: Rod Dixon and Red Ladder Theatre Company
Tony Gardner
7. Intercultural to Cross-cultural Theatre: Tara Arts and the Development of British Asian Theatre
Victor Ukaegbu
8. Kind Acts: Lone Twin Theatre
Eirini Kartsaki
9. Political theatre ‘without finger-wagging’: On The Paper Birds’ and integrative aesthetics.
Patrick Duggan
10. Angels and Modern Myth’: Grid Iron and the New Scottish Theatre
Trish Reid
11. Acts of poiesis: salamanda tandem
Mick Wallis and Isabel Jones
Coda
Franc Chamberlain
Some reviews of the book can be found here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10486801.2015.1006449#abstract
http://www.scottishjournalofperformance.org/Fletcher-Watson_book-review-duggan-ukaegbu_SJoP0102_DOI_10.14439sjop.2014.0102.11.pdf
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14682761.2014.992602
Contents:
Setting the scene: Introducing Reverberations
Patrick Duggan and Victor Ukaegbu
1. Foco Novo: The Icarus of British Small Scale Touring Theatre
Graham Saunders
2. Insider Knowledge: The evolution of Belfast’s Tinderbox Theatre Company
David Grant
3. Volcano: A Post-punk Physical-Theatre
Gareth Somers
4. Tiata Fahodzi: Second Generation Africans in British Theatre
Ekua Ekumah
5. Keeping it together: Talawa Theatre Company, Britishness, aesthetics of scale and mainstreaming the black-British experience
Kene Igweonu
6. Agitation and Entertainment: Rod Dixon and Red Ladder Theatre Company
Tony Gardner
7. Intercultural to Cross-cultural Theatre: Tara Arts and the Development of British Asian Theatre
Victor Ukaegbu
8. Kind Acts: Lone Twin Theatre
Eirini Kartsaki
9. Political theatre ‘without finger-wagging’: On The Paper Birds’ and integrative aesthetics.
Patrick Duggan
10. Angels and Modern Myth’: Grid Iron and the New Scottish Theatre
Trish Reid
11. Acts of poiesis: salamanda tandem
Mick Wallis and Isabel Jones
Coda
Franc Chamberlain
Research Interests:
NOW OUT IN PAPERBACK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0719099889/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr= """REVIEWS: - http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X13000572 (New Theatre Quarterly) -... more
NOW OUT IN PAPERBACK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0719099889/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=
"""REVIEWS:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X13000572 (New Theatre Quarterly)
- http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13569783.2013.838346 (RiDE)
- http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/04/02/book-review-trauma-tragedy-symptoms-of-contemporary-performance/ (LSE Review of Books)
- http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jcde.2014.2.issue-1/jcde-2014-0019/jcde-2014-0019.xml?format=INT (CDE)
"Trauma-Tragedy investigates the extent to which Performance can represent the ‘unrepresentable’ of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas – social, personal, political, violent, psychological, fictional, local, global – this volume considers what Performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not.
The book’s clear and coherent navigation of key theories within performance studies and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies at all levels. Yet its rigorous and incisive interrogation of the complex relationship between performance, spectatorship and trauma make it of particular interest and usefulness to scholars and specialists.
Chapters explore ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Addressing questions of witnessing, presence, ethics and kinaesthetics, Trauma-Tragedy employs trauma and performance theories as the central theoretical frames but draws also on sociology, postmodernism and metaphysics in analyzing a range of contemporary performances as well as social and ‘everyday’ events that might legitimately be modelled as performative.
Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, ‘trauma-tragedy’, that suggests much contemporary performance, from live art through the so-called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre of the 1990s to popular theatre, can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or ‘presence-in-trauma effects’.
This book is aimed at scholars and students of Theatre, Drama and Performance, Trauma Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Media and Communication and those concerned with questions of trauma, politics, ethics, and aesthetics in other disciplines."
"""REVIEWS:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X13000572 (New Theatre Quarterly)
- http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13569783.2013.838346 (RiDE)
- http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/04/02/book-review-trauma-tragedy-symptoms-of-contemporary-performance/ (LSE Review of Books)
- http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jcde.2014.2.issue-1/jcde-2014-0019/jcde-2014-0019.xml?format=INT (CDE)
"Trauma-Tragedy investigates the extent to which Performance can represent the ‘unrepresentable’ of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas – social, personal, political, violent, psychological, fictional, local, global – this volume considers what Performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not.
The book’s clear and coherent navigation of key theories within performance studies and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies at all levels. Yet its rigorous and incisive interrogation of the complex relationship between performance, spectatorship and trauma make it of particular interest and usefulness to scholars and specialists.
Chapters explore ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Addressing questions of witnessing, presence, ethics and kinaesthetics, Trauma-Tragedy employs trauma and performance theories as the central theoretical frames but draws also on sociology, postmodernism and metaphysics in analyzing a range of contemporary performances as well as social and ‘everyday’ events that might legitimately be modelled as performative.
Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, ‘trauma-tragedy’, that suggests much contemporary performance, from live art through the so-called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre of the 1990s to popular theatre, can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or ‘presence-in-trauma effects’.
This book is aimed at scholars and students of Theatre, Drama and Performance, Trauma Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Media and Communication and those concerned with questions of trauma, politics, ethics, and aesthetics in other disciplines."
Research Interests:
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COVID-19 has transformed the ways we live and work in cities. There is now an urgent need to understand how to practise, make sense of and sustain city life in the context of pandemic prevention measures. Emergency preparedness and... more
COVID-19 has transformed the ways we live and work in cities. There is now an urgent need to understand how to practise, make sense of and sustain city life in the context of pandemic prevention measures. Emergency preparedness and resilience planning (EPRP) has been at the heart of city responses to the current crisis. As we ‘emerge’ from the fervour of the last 18 months, there is an opportunity for us to build what Helen Hinds has referred to as a need for ‘entirely new ways of thinking’ about pandemic planning, and EPRP more broadly (letter to authors, May 2020). Taking account of perspectives, practices and strategies from the arts in EPRP processes reveals valuable ways of enabling and sustaining pandemic control measures and reimagining city life. Here, we are responding to recent calls for new and imaginative modes of thinking and practice in EPRP (e.g.: CRJ 15:4) to explore the strategic importance of cities’ performances (social and aesthetic) to city EPRP
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Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma offers a timely intervention into the growing field of, and literature on, performance and trauma studies. It demonstrates just how useful performance (studies and practice) can be as a... more
Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma offers a timely intervention into the growing field of, and literature on, performance and trauma studies. It demonstrates just how useful performance (studies and practice) can be as a means to complicate, critique, and develop understandings of the unsayable and the unknowable of trauma.
Research Interests:
In this article Patrick Duggan interrogates The Paper Birds' 2010 production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the... more
In this article Patrick Duggan interrogates The Paper Birds' 2010 production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a prisoner, a celebrity (a very non-committal Heather Mills, apparently), and an Iranian artist, Others fuses live music with verbatim and physical theatre texts to investigate the ‘otherness’ of women from vastly divergent cultural contexts. With equal measures of humour and honesty the performance deconstructs these voices both to highlight their particular concerns and problems and to interrogate larger issues relating to ‘others’ with whom we have conscious or unconscious contact. The ethical implications of continuing or discontinuing the correspondences with the three women are explored, and trauma and embodiment theories are used alongside Lévinasian and Russellian theories of ethics to ask what an encounter with such others might...
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This paper explores two distinct but interrelated performative moments. Drawing Goffman’s model of ‘faces’ and Bourdieu’s habitus it presents an exchange of two parts: Part I considers corpsing and stage fright to propose that these... more
This paper explores two distinct but interrelated performative moments. Drawing Goffman’s model of ‘faces’ and Bourdieu’s habitus it presents an exchange of two parts: Part I considers corpsing and stage fright to propose that these phenomena constitute a theatrical traumatic split. In corpsing the actor becomes ‘out of face’ and this not only amounts to a traumatic event but is also a site of physical exchange between performers on stage and between audience and performers. This first thesis exposes the inherent and specific trauma of the theatre (especially in playing a character) and considers the possibility that this might not only unravel the performance event but also impact, repeatedly and violently on the performers themselves in an uncanny echoing of trauma-symptoms. Part II uses photos from Abu Ghraib explored in relation to Goffman and Bourdieu to consider how theatricality/performativity can be employed as a mechanism by which ‘traumas’ might be inflicted. In parallel, this second part looks at how theatrical apparatus might help us to recognise the performativity of trauma in everyday life. The paper explores the impact of these particular aspects of theatrical exchange and further offers each an exchange between the two parts in order to illustrate their proximity and at the same time their opposite facing nature
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Interim report from Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project 'Sustaining Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life'. The report explores the value and importance of performance and the arts to city... more
Interim report from Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project 'Sustaining Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life'. The report explores the value and importance of performance and the arts to city pandemic preparedness and response processes to identify 5 key challenges facing emergency planning professionals. Partly responding to calls for new approaches and ways of thinking from within emergency planning, we offer a series of 'invitations to innovate' in relation to the challenges identified, inviting conversations on questions of urban resilience, pandemic planning and response and cities’ social and aesthetic performances
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ABSTRACT Performing City Resilience is a collaborative research project that investigates interrelations between theories, practices and strategies of city resilience, and those of performance. In this essay, the authors explore ways... more
ABSTRACT Performing City Resilience is a collaborative research project that investigates interrelations between theories, practices and strategies of city resilience, and those of performance. In this essay, the authors explore ways performance might conceive of and contribute to practices of hazard mitigation strategy to better understand how these might lead to a resilient city. They focus on their research in New Orleans, working with the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness during its development of the 2020 Hazard Mitigation Plan. They discuss their interventions, initial impact, and consider performance of strategy as a critical form of ‘strategy as practice’.
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In the summer of 2012, I directed a production of Anthony Neilson’s Normal (written and first performed in 1991) at Camden People’s Theatre in London. This chapter is a critical reflection on that production and its rehearsal process,... more
In the summer of 2012, I directed a production of Anthony Neilson’s Normal (written and first performed in 1991) at Camden People’s Theatre in London. This chapter is a critical reflection on that production and its rehearsal process, attending to Jody Enders’ contention that in the ‘world of theatre … the virtual becomes actual in every performance’.1 It explicates the ways in which Žižek’s philosophical writings were useful in and pertinent to rehearsals, and examines moments in which the play in performance adhered to and/or corresponded with that philosophical work, and also how it pushed back against it in various ways. The analysis is focused around a number of thick-descriptive reflections on the creative process and on the public performances of the play that I attended.
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One of O'Reilly's central concerns is 'how to have a body now', how one might con-stitute that body in performance and how that interacts with the other bodies in the space. From this starting point, the article... more
One of O'Reilly's central concerns is 'how to have a body now', how one might con-stitute that body in performance and how that interacts with the other bodies in the space. From this starting point, the article explores how we might perform, receive and make apparent the ...
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He kept fainting at junior school assembly. If Sartre was right, it was Gordon's way of opting out. The boy didn't want to grow up. Five years earlier, when he was five, his mum... more
He kept fainting at junior school assembly. If Sartre was right, it was Gordon's way of opting out. The boy didn't want to grow up. Five years earlier, when he was five, his mum Agnes told him a story about a tall dark stranger a man she was very fond of who had seen ...
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We are standing on the top floor of City Hall in New Orleans, surrounded by a series of meeting room style tables. Individual working areas are demarcated by chairs, each one with a telephone and laptop in front of it. Small printed cards... more
We are standing on the top floor of City Hall in New Orleans, surrounded by a series of meeting room style tables. Individual working areas are demarcated by chairs, each one with a telephone and laptop in front of it. Small printed cards on stands designate the function of the table. These designations are echoed on large, triangular signs that hang from the ceiling so as to be visible from almost any corner of the space: OPS Table 1, Situation/Documentation, Logistics, Planning, Purchasing/Finance. At several of these stations, a high-vis jacket of orange or yellow hangs over an empty chair signifying the position that the ‘Table Lead’ will occupy. At one, a dark blue cardigan hangs incongruously where we would expect high-vis. The room has windows on two sides. The view from one window, by ‘OPS Table 2’, where we find ourselves, is obscured by a storm force blind that can withstand the impact of a hurricane at least as strong as Katrina. From the window next to it, we can look ou...
Research Interests:
Trauma-Tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the ‘unrepresentable’ of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on... more
Trauma-Tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the ‘unrepresentable’ of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas, this volume considers what performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not. The book’s clear and coherent navigation of complex relation between performance and trauma and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies, yet rigorous and incisive for scholars and specialists. Duggan explores ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Ultimately, the book advances a new p...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Between 1960 and 2010, a new generation of British avant-garde theatre companies, directors, designers, and performers emerged. Some of these companies and individuals have endured to become part of theatre history while others have... more
Between 1960 and 2010, a new generation of British avant-garde theatre companies, directors, designers, and performers emerged. Some of these companies and individuals have endured to become part of theatre history while others have disappeared from the scene, mutated into new forms, or become part of the establishment. Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre at long last puts these small-scale British theatre companies and personalities in the scholarly spotlight. By questioning what 'Britishness' meant in relation to the small-scale work of these practitioners, contributors articulate how it is reflected in the goals, manifestos, and aesthetics of these companies.
Research Interests:
Duggan, P. (2011) Staging the impossible: severance and separation in the National Theatre's adaptation of His Dark Materials. In: Barfield, S. and Cox, K. (eds.) Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials:... more
Duggan, P. (2011) Staging the impossible: severance and separation in the National Theatre's adaptation of His Dark Materials. In: Barfield, S. and Cox, K. (eds.) Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. ...
Research Interests:
This paper explored the relationship between ethics, performance, anti-theatrical prejudice and Michael Fried's essay 'Art and Objecthood'
*Published in Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, Vol. 15, 2017* My contention in this article is that in the contemporary moment live performance encounters offer a means with which to attend to both discourses and politics of... more
*Published in Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, Vol. 15, 2017* My contention in this article is that in the contemporary moment live performance encounters offer a means with which to attend to both discourses and politics of fear and anxiety and the effacement of reality with complexity. That is, performance seems to be attending to plural social discourses and working through the geo-political complexity of the social milieu in ways that go beyond the theoretical frames of analysis provided by, for example, psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. This essay explores the political, ethical, and socio-cultural implications of two contemporary performances that deliberately attempt to unsettle their audiences through what I’m calling a performative aesthetics of ‘dis-ease’: Greg Wohead’s 'The Ted Bundy Project' (2014) and Action Hero’s multimedia, immersive installation 'Extraordinary Rendition' (2015). In analysing how these works might be seen deliberately to attempt to induce an experience somewhat cognate to anxiety in the audience, I want to explore why they might be doing so: what does such a practice ‘do’ in the world with regard to understanding the politics of fear and anxiety?
Research Interests:
This paper interrogates The Paper Birds’ recent production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a... more
This paper interrogates The Paper Birds’ recent production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a prisoner, a celebrity (a very non-committal Heather Mills, evidently) and an Iranian artist, Others fuses live music with verbatim and physical theatre texts to movingly and intelligently investigate the ‘otherness’ of women from vastly divergent cultural contexts. With equal measures of humour and unflinching honesty the performance deconstructs these voices not only to highlight their particular concerns and problems but also to interrogate wider concerns about ‘others’ with whom we have conscious and unconscious contact. The paper braids two central concerns: firstly (as a frame to the second concern) the work explores the ethical implications of continuing or discontinuing the correspondences with the three women and especially the prisoner who asks in one section of the piece: ‘will you, please, still write once it’s over… won’t you?’ From this, the paper employs embodiment theory alongside Levinasian theories of ethics, to ask what an encounter with such othered others might teach us about ourselves, about ‘the’ other and about the ethics of encounter within performance texts
In his study of Northern Ireland, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991), anthropologist Allen Feldman proposes that the H-Blocks of the Maze prison were full of ‘myths, local... more
In his study of Northern Ireland, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991), anthropologist Allen Feldman proposes that the H-Blocks of the Maze prison were full of ‘myths, local histories, performance spaces, carnivals of violence, symbolic kinship, death rituals, and animal totems’ (Feldman 1991: 166).2 Throughout Formations of Violence — and indeed elsewhere in the extant literature on the Maze prison — the events that took place in the Maze are described as ‘theatre’, ‘theatrical’ and/or as ‘performance’. To a certain degree these terms are deployed poetically to highlight the spectacular, internally spectated and performance-like nature of many of the events within that carcerial space. Even so, the use of such terminology in studies that are not from performance or theatre studies calls to mind the fact that, to some degree, all theatre and performance is concerned to explore presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, representation and ‘reality’. This concern with visibility or presence is precisely at the heart of the different protests performed in the Maze prison between 1976 and 1981. My contention in this chapter is that the learning of Gaelic (the Irish language), the so-called ‘dirty protests’ (1979–81) and the 1981 hunger strikes were performative attempts to rewrite the narrative of the prison space and to make radically visible the body and body politic.
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Research Interests:
In The Art of Philosophy, Peter Sloterdijk traces the evolution of philosophical practice from ancient times to today, showing how scholars can remain true to the tradition of “the examined life” even when the temporal dimension no longer... more
In The Art of Philosophy, Peter Sloterdijk traces the evolution of philosophical practice from ancient times to today, showing how scholars can remain true to the tradition of “the examined life” even when the temporal dimension no longer corresponds to the eternal. Building on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Arendt, and other practitioners of the life of theory, Sloterdijk launches a posthumanist defence of philosophical inquiry and its everyday, therapeutic value. Patrick Duggan enjoyed this insightful and informative book a great deal, although found it to be unnecessarily dense in places.
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The idea of trauma has become so used in the public sphere as to become almost meaningless in its ubiquity. But this is also to say that we live in a historical moment in which society feels bound to its traumatic experiences. Trauma, it... more
The idea of trauma has become so used in the public sphere as to become almost meaningless in its ubiquity. But this is also to say that we live in a historical moment in which society feels bound to its traumatic experiences. Trauma, it would seem, has become a cultural trope. Furthermore, contemporary trauma theory suggests a performative bent in traumatic suffering itself – the trauma-symptom is, after all, a rehearsal, re-presentation, re-performance of the trauma-event. This is not to trivialise traumatic suffering or detract from the insistence that trauma narratives must adequately, truthfully, be borne witness to so as not to diminish the weight of the original event. ‘On Trauma’ explores a range of instances in which performance becomes a productive frame through which to address traumata and/or where trauma theory illuminates performance. With papers examining topics from African funeral rituals to witnessing, and ethics to Argentinean escraches, this issue of Performance Research benefits from a cross-cultural dynamic which brings together academic articles on and artistic responses to performance that embodies, negotiates, negates or provokes trauma.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Duggan, P. (2011) Staging the impossible: severance and separation in the National Theatre's adaptation of His Dark Materials. In: Barfield, S. and Cox, K. (eds.) Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials:... more
Duggan, P. (2011) Staging the impossible: severance and separation in the National Theatre's adaptation of His Dark Materials. In: Barfield, S. and Cox, K. (eds.) Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. ...
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Research Interests:
Ben Harker's authorized biography of political activist, theatre maker and celebrated folk singer, Ewan MacColl (19151989) is engagingly written, meticulously researched, and sheds light on a dedi c ated cultural pioneer with an... more
Ben Harker's authorized biography of political activist, theatre maker and celebrated folk singer, Ewan MacColl (19151989) is engagingly written, meticulously researched, and sheds light on a dedi c ated cultural pioneer with an unstinting faith, however romanticized, in ...
Research Interests: Art and Live Performance
COVID-19 has transformed the ways we live and work in cities. There is now an urgent need to understand how to practise, make sense of and sustain city life in the context of pandemic prevention measures. Emergency preparedness and... more
COVID-19 has transformed the ways we live and work in cities. There is now an urgent need to understand how to practise, make sense of and sustain city life in the context of pandemic prevention measures. Emergency preparedness and resilience planning (EPRP) has been at the heart of city responses to the current crisis. As we ‘emerge’ from the fervour of the last 18 months, there is an opportunity for us to build what Helen Hinds has referred to as a need for ‘entirely new ways of thinking’ about pandemic planning, and EPRP more broadly (letter to authors, May 2020). Taking account of perspectives, practices and strategies from the arts in EPRP processes reveals valuable ways of enabling and sustaining pandemic control measures and reimagining city life.
Research Interests:
Interim Report from Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life: Performative strategies and practices for response and recovery in and beyond lockdown. As part of our Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project... more
Interim Report from Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life: Performative strategies and practices for response and recovery in and beyond lockdown.
As part of our Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project 'Sustaining Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life', Stuart Andrews and I have published an interim report on our research findings: 'Performance as Pandemic Response: Invitations to Innovate'. The report can be found here: https://performingcityresilience.com/publications/
Looking at the value and importance of performance and the arts to city pandemic preparedness and response processes, the research builds on our wider Performing City Resilience research (particularly in New Orleans) to identify 5 key challenges facing emergency planning professionals.
Partly responding to calls for new approaches and ways of thinking from within emergency planning, we offer a series of 'invitations to innovate' in relation to the challenges identified. We're inviting conversations on resilience, cities, emergency planning, and performance.
A partner essay can be found in The Crisis Response Journal, 16:3. Found at: https://crisis-response.com/Publisher/Article.aspx?ID=617774
As part of our Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project 'Sustaining Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life', Stuart Andrews and I have published an interim report on our research findings: 'Performance as Pandemic Response: Invitations to Innovate'. The report can be found here: https://performingcityresilience.com/publications/
Looking at the value and importance of performance and the arts to city pandemic preparedness and response processes, the research builds on our wider Performing City Resilience research (particularly in New Orleans) to identify 5 key challenges facing emergency planning professionals.
Partly responding to calls for new approaches and ways of thinking from within emergency planning, we offer a series of 'invitations to innovate' in relation to the challenges identified. We're inviting conversations on resilience, cities, emergency planning, and performance.
A partner essay can be found in The Crisis Response Journal, 16:3. Found at: https://crisis-response.com/Publisher/Article.aspx?ID=617774
Research Interests:
Emerging from a research trip to New Orleans in March/April 2018, this article explores questions about the politics 'staging' wreckage in relation to conceptualizations and practices of tourism, class and race. Taking as it's central... more
Emerging from a research trip to New Orleans in March/April 2018, this article explores questions about the politics 'staging' wreckage in relation to conceptualizations and practices of tourism, class and race. Taking as it's central case studies a private vehicular tour of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans (the area most devastated by flooding as a result of Katrina) and Goat in the Road's immersive, promenade production The Stranger Disease, the work seeks to understand how these two very different cultural objects might be seen to be 'staging' New Orleans in different but inter-related ways that illuminate and critique the politics of (disaster) tourism in the city, and cognate (urban) contexts. Reflecting on the phenomenological experience of the tour and the play in relation to more 'normal' modes of being a tourist in New Orleans, the argument proposes that the embodied experience of performance spectatorship can make radical interventions into process and practice of tourism by rupturing dominant paradigms of power, equity, race and environmental change.
Research Interests: Cultural Geography, Tourism Studies, Performance Studies, Resilience, Cultural Tourism, and 3 moreTheatre, New Orleans, and narrative, multimedia, immersive virtual environments, simulation, and instructional games for development of positive self-efficacy and improved performance for K20+ learners in concepts traditionally difficult to teach and/or learn.
Performing City Resilience is a collaborative research project that investigates interrelations between theories, practices and strategies of city resilience, and those of performance. In this essay, the authors explore ways performance... more
Performing City Resilience is a collaborative research project that investigates interrelations between theories, practices and strategies of city resilience, and those of performance. In this essay, the authors explore ways performance might conceive of and contribute to practices of hazard mitigation strategy to better understand how these might lead to a resilient city. They focus on their research in New Orleans, working with the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness during its development of the 2020 Hazard Mitigation Plan. They discuss their interventions, initial impact, and consider performance of strategy as a critical form of ‘strategy as practice’.
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Report on research and impact work in New Orleans, June 2019, on the Performing City Resilience project. Full report also available at: http://performingcityresilience.com/2019/09/06/reporting-new-orleans-2019/
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This paper explores the relation between performance, place and city resilience in the context of contemporary New Orleans.
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The Intellect Playtext series publishes innovative performance texts under three interrelated strands: new writing (scripts), performance writings (‘non-traditional’ forms such as choreographic scores, devised performance texts,... more
The Intellect Playtext series publishes innovative performance texts under three interrelated strands: new writing (scripts), performance writings (‘non-traditional’ forms such as choreographic scores, devised performance texts, performance documentation) and translations (writing that is new to English-speaking audiences). The Playtext series makes available performance texts that are aesthetically and stylistically innovative as well as those that explore the socio-cultural and political contexts of their making. Each volume includes the performance texts alongside contextual essays that examine the processes of development, writing and performance as well as critical essays that discuss the texts from political, social, cultural and theoretical perspectives. Intellect Playtexts are concerned also to present volumes that engage with the wider historical and performance contexts of the work through, for example, the inclusion of production photographs, design sketches, historical documents and/or typographical design. The series celebrates critical writing, adaptation, translation and devising processes and provides a forum for textual performance practices-as-research.
Research Interests:
With growing international interest in city resilience, we invite you to join us for a conversation on the ways in which the arts contribute to the resilience of New Orleans. How do artists in the city engage, implicitly or explicitly, in... more
With growing international interest in city resilience, we invite you to join us for a conversation on the ways in which the arts contribute to the resilience of New Orleans. How do artists in the city engage, implicitly or explicitly, in ideas and practices of resilience? What can the arts reveal about resilience in this city? Indeed, what do the arts reveal about the city and its cultures more broadly? Whether you’re engaged in making, watching, writing or thinking about the arts in the city, we invite you to pull up a chair, have a drink and join us for a conversation on the art and performance of resilience in New Orleans.
This event will be led by Patrick Duggan and Stuart Andrews, both from the University of Surrey (UK), who are exploring the ways in which the arts can contribute to emerging definitions and practices of city resilience (www.performingcityresilience.wordpress.com). The event is free to attend and liquid refreshments will be provided but do please book so we can confirm numbers.
Book here: http://cacno.org/special-events/arts-and-city-resilience-new-orleans
This event will be led by Patrick Duggan and Stuart Andrews, both from the University of Surrey (UK), who are exploring the ways in which the arts can contribute to emerging definitions and practices of city resilience (www.performingcityresilience.wordpress.com). The event is free to attend and liquid refreshments will be provided but do please book so we can confirm numbers.
Book here: http://cacno.org/special-events/arts-and-city-resilience-new-orleans
Research Interests:
Keynote address for Westminster Media Forum’s policy conference: "Priorities for Cultural Recovery and Renewal", 28 January 2021 (online). This paper reflects on the rhetoric used to describe arts, humanities and cultural studies... more
Keynote address for Westminster Media Forum’s policy conference: "Priorities for Cultural Recovery and Renewal", 28 January 2021 (online). This paper reflects on the rhetoric used to describe arts, humanities and cultural studies education and the need urgently to nuance this taxonomy.
Research Interests:
Interdisciplinary Understandings of Urban Resilience Part of the launch GSA's new Centre for Performance and Urban Living at the University of Surrey: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Resilience, 10 January 2019 Booking:... more
Interdisciplinary Understandings of Urban Resilience
Part of the launch GSA's new Centre for Performance and Urban Living at the University of Surrey:
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Resilience, 10 January 2019
Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-approaches-to-urban-resilience-tickets-51757402785
(includes lunch, wine, cake, tea and coffee… banish any January blues!)
The event features an interdisciplinary workshop and talks from:
Sarah Toy (urban development consultant, ex-Chief Resilience Officer for Bristol) on developing Bristol's Resilience Strategy
Stephen Hodge (University of Exeter/Wrights and Sites) on his Arts Council of England (ACE) funded performance research project Where to build the walls that protect us
Anthony Killick (University of Leeds and CUSP) on the role that arts and cultural activities/organisations might play in fostering healthy inter-generational relations
Patrick Duggan and Stuart Andrews (University of Surrey) on findings from Performing City Resilience: New Orleans (www.performingcityresilience.wordpress.com)
The event is free but booking is essential: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-approaches-to-urban-resilience-tickets-51757402785
Part of the launch GSA's new Centre for Performance and Urban Living at the University of Surrey:
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Resilience, 10 January 2019
Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-approaches-to-urban-resilience-tickets-51757402785
(includes lunch, wine, cake, tea and coffee… banish any January blues!)
The event features an interdisciplinary workshop and talks from:
Sarah Toy (urban development consultant, ex-Chief Resilience Officer for Bristol) on developing Bristol's Resilience Strategy
Stephen Hodge (University of Exeter/Wrights and Sites) on his Arts Council of England (ACE) funded performance research project Where to build the walls that protect us
Anthony Killick (University of Leeds and CUSP) on the role that arts and cultural activities/organisations might play in fostering healthy inter-generational relations
Patrick Duggan and Stuart Andrews (University of Surrey) on findings from Performing City Resilience: New Orleans (www.performingcityresilience.wordpress.com)
The event is free but booking is essential: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-approaches-to-urban-resilience-tickets-51757402785
Research Interests:
COVID-19 has transformed city life: we now urgently need to develop imaginative ideas and creative practices to understand and address its impact on how we live and work in cities. Performance theory and practice offer innovative, proven,... more
COVID-19 has transformed city life: we now urgently need to develop imaginative ideas and creative practices to understand and address its impact on how we live and work in cities. Performance theory and practice offer innovative, proven, yet under-explored means to achieve this. This project will provide new models for understanding and practising city life, helping people cope with social distancing, both practically and emotionally. Working with strategic decision-makers in Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle City Councils (confirmed), we will investigate everyday innovations (social performances) and artistic interventions (aesthetic performances), to understand how performance can reimagine and facilitate city life in times of social distancing, and how performance theory and analysis might contribute to more nuanced, creative and sustainable strategies and practices for response and recovery across five urgent areas: social cohesion, new behaviours, community resilience, perceptions of environment, and crisis management. Working with artists, arts venues and officers from hazard mitigation, sustainability and resilience, the project will lead to new understandings of the place and function of performance, broker creative thinking on response and recovery, and make strategic recommendations for arts strategy, pandemic planning and hazard mitigation policy. Impacts will be scaled, primarily, through Core Cities, a network of eleven UK cities, and arts strategy organisations. This project builds on the investigators’ recent work in New Orleans, which led the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness to fundamentally change their hazard mitigation policy and practice, and to significant changes in strategies for major arts organisations (www.performingcityresilience.com)