Stephen Greer

Polio monologues: translating ethnographic text into verbatim theatre:

Mass vaccination programmes mean that poliomyelitis is almost a forgotten memory in the Global North. But in reality its effects continue as many people who contracted paralytic polio in childhood may develop functional deterioration (Post-Polio Syndrome or PPS) in later adulthood; mass migration and escape from violence means that it is also re-emerging in contemporary societies. Thus it is crucial for different audiences to have opportunities to engage with, and understand the life histories of polio survivors and their personal experiences of disease and disability across biographical and historical time. This article discusses the process of using recorded delivery verbatim techniques, with disabled and non-disabled actors, to translate ethnographic research about social history of polio into a creative accessible medium for new generation audiences to learn about the hidden, often contested, histories of disability and disease that may collide with professional, medical and public discourse. Our contention is that ethnodrama can give a voice to the voiceless, and enable them to contribute to the production of new knowledge, health interventions and policy instruments that affect their lives.

Between care and self-care: dramaturgies of mindfulness in the work of the vacuum cleaner

Since 2009, the performance work of ‘art and activist collective of one’ James Leadbitter—better known as the vacuum cleaner—has repeatedly engaged with issues surrounding mental illness, ‘madness’ and mental health discrimination. This paper explores the relationship of that work to the discourse of ‘mindfulness’, a form of cognitive therapy centred on cultivating a non-judgmental and present-focused attentiveness to one’s own mental state. While an increasing body of evidence suggests the potential health benefits of mindfulness, its broader application has been challenged for invoking forms of self-critique which elide the social factors that undermine well-being. In response, this paper examines how Leadbitter’s staging of the relationships between care and self-care might challenge the imperatives of individuated responsibility that are characteristic of neoliberal discourses. Rather than reproducing existing social relations, Leadbitter’s dramaturgies of mindfulness suggest how an attentiveness to one’s own wellbeing may be extended outwards as a response to others in prefigurative encounters which allow us to imagine and rehearse alternatives.

After documentary theatre: exceptionality in National Theatre Wales ' The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning

Raised in the US, educated as a teenager in Wales and now imprisoned as an adult in the country of her birth, the life of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning has become a site of global, political contention. What can performed interventions for and about a life made exceptional tell us about the relationship between local and global resistances? The first part of this discussion briefly considers the Bradley Manning Support Network’s (BMSN) online campaign I Am Bradley Manning as a collaborative project intended to activate a public in support of Manning’s actions and, simultaneously, to mobilise Manning in service of broader, international activist interventions including issues of freedom of speech, governmental transparency and gay rights.1 The second part turns from an explicitly activist model to examine the dramaturgy of National Theatre Wales’ (NTW) production of Tim Price’s The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning (TRBM), focusing on the play’s juxtaposition of imagined scenes from Manning’s childhood with historic incidents of popular Welsh radicalism. Through both, I consider the interventionist politics described by the rendering of Manning as a space of identification and a place of public resistance: a singular subject whose individual, local circumstances make possible a queerly plural collective action.

'Even if we do not take things seriously… we are still doing them': Disidentification, ideology, and queer performance

The queer potential for drag is its willingness to take fantasy seriously: to stage fictions of gender, sexuality and the body to which we remain firmly attached, despite seemingly determined disavowal. Yet, as Slavoj Žižek argues, the nature of ideological interpellation is such that we persist in it, whether we choose to take it seriously or not: ‘Cynical distance is just one way — one of many ways — to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy’.1 How, then, should we understand the radical potential of queer performance if an investment in a dominant discourse is the precondition of its existence? How might Žižek’s critique of ideological relations — and of Judith Butler’s account of performative resistance — drive a new and productive understanding of complicity in queer praxis?

Review of: Martin Sherman: Skipping over Quicksand, Trish Dace (2012)

Tish Dace’s Skipping Over Quicksand offers a timely and scrupulously-researched study of the career and works of Martin Sherman; a dialogue between those who directed, designed or appeared within Sherman’s work on the one hand and professional theatre and film critics on the other.

Collaborative performance and asynchronous action: World Without Oil's fragmented forum

ABSTRACT This article considers how the politically engaged forum theatre of Augusto Boal may drive an understanding of networked collaboration and identity in recent participatory web dramas. Focussing on the recent web drama World Without Oil (2007), this discussion considers how theatrical and political logics within Boals work — grounded in synchronicity and embodiment — may be challenged by practice that is distributed, asynchronous and fragmented. Accordingly, this article proposes where strategies within World Without Oil that echo Boalian dramaturgy (such as the notion of play as rehearsal for change within the real world, and the potential of individuated, local expertise) may be transformed by the operation of mixed and alternate reality gaming. As this discussion will argue, such thinking — which. in challenging the centrality of synchronicity seeks to extend the account of mediation presented by Phillip Auslanders Liveness — involves a re-examination of claims made to the political potential of hypertext and hypermedia