Editorial: Volume 2, Issue 2

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2006

Central Asian Survey, 31/3, 239-249, 2012

NJ - Drama Australia Journal, 2018

Dorothy Heathcote’s perspectives concerning ‘role-shifted discourse’ within what she latterly called ‘Model 1: Drama used to explore people’ exhibits a strong alignment with the didactic purposes of ‘living history’ performances at heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Baz Kershaw’s ‘points of process’ concerning the ‘radical in performance’ are introduced as a proposition for analysing and reconceptualising both the character of ‘living history’ performances and the fundamentally radical nature of Dorothy Heathcote’s pioneering innovations for drama-based learning and teaching. This line of ‘theoretical/conceptual’ inquiry offers new propositions about intersections between Dorothy Heathcote’s insights concerning role performance within ‘the drama frame’ and Richard Schechner’s perspectives concerning the dramatic tensions that reside within liminal/liminoid, threshold-crossing experiences for participant/observers of living history performances at museums and heritage sites.

Estudis Escènics, 43, 2018

Which aspects of cultural and personal identity most influence current theatrical creation? How are certain signs of identity configured in a mise-en-scène and how does the audience perceive them? How can artistic research inform a doctoral study on identity? The thesis project "Identity Configurations in the Contemporary Experimental Basque Theatre Scene" is developed based on these questions with a cross-disciplinary framework that encompasses the historical, sociological, psychological and anthropological approach to the object of study plus comparative case studies and, among them, the PhD candidate's own artistic research. The article focuses on comparing two examples that highlight certain identity aspects relevant to the subject and the methodological approach of the doctoral thesis project. I will compare the experimental work of two women: Rakel Mazón and her durational performance Raketa Brokobitx on the rocks and Rakel Ezpeleta, the writer, and her contemporary cabaret Er-beste. Although very formally different, these two pieces share some characteristics: a questioning of the identity of their creators, the use of an alter ego to overcome traumatic experiences related to their experience as women, and the empowerment of the actresses-now authors-through the direct interaction with the audience. These cases will be used to reflect on cultural identity and the personal, related to a certain feminist and de-colonialising criticism. Moreover, these ideas are linked to the pertinence of Performance as Research (PaR) as the ideal methodological focus to confront the conceptual challenges of an open project like this.

Theatre Survey, 2013

2011

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2014