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Theatre and Performance History and Theory
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Cultural Theory
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Science, Nature and Performance, including Medicine and Psychiatry
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Dance
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Heritage
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Institutions
My work is interdisciplinary, drawing from the medical humanities, history, philosophy, and cultural theory. I am currently completing a book on dance manias in nineteenth-century medical literature, in which I describe the emergence of the "choreomania” (“dance mania”) diagnosis in medical and anthropological circles in Europe and the colonial world. My research on zoanthropy, including lycanthropy and tarantism, was supported by an Audrey and William H Helfand Fellowship in the Medical Humanities at the New York Academy of Medicine, and forms part of a larger project on ethnofiction, translation and theatre. I have a longstanding interest in “world” cultures and the institutional structures that “house” them; current projects involve dance tourism and cultural policy, including tango in Buenos Aires. I am also interested in heritage, including Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), and concepts of history, home and “authenticity".
I run a working session on “the dancing-place” for the American Society for Theatre Research, adapting this notion from cultural geography to consider concepts of history and place in performance research. I serve on the steering committee for the Performing Medicine project, and am actively interested in aspects of movement, health and disease. I am also actively involved in developing an international and interdisciplinary theatre and performance research network at King’s, to facilitate collaboration between artists and scholars across areas. I have been involved with contemporary art and art theory (Parachute), business strategy (Mitchell Madison Group), and arts consultancy (Festival International de Nouvelle Danse/International New Dance Festival, FIND, Montreal; Misnomer Dance Theatre, New York; English National Opera Baylis, London).
I have over twenty years’ experience as an actor, dancer, director, dramaturge, translator, designer, and movement coach, working in physical theatre, corporeal (Decrousian) mime, classical ballet, modern dance (Cunningham), butoh, and tango, collaborating on projects in the USA, the UK, Canada and Belgium. I am an artistic associate of Witness Relocation Company in New York, for whom I translated Charles Mee’s Heaven on Earth (NYC premiere 2010, Lyon premiere 2011), and Racine’s Andromaque (as In A Hall in the Palace of Pyrrhus, Ohio Theatre, NYC, 2005). Other productions include Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (Drama Desk Award nominee, 2006); Lorca’s Amor de Don Perlimplín… con Belisa en su jardín at Repertorio Español (2004, in Spanish); Olivier Cadiot’s AWOL at 59E59 Theatres (Act French Festival) (2005); Bone, soundtrack by Jerry Snell, choreographed by Nadine Thouin for the Beijing Modern Dance Company (2003); and the UK premiere of John Cage’s Variations IV (Oxford Festival of Contemporary Music, 1999).
Post-show and round-table discussions include Fabulous Dance Theatre’s Rite of Spring at the English National Opera/London Coliseum, Barclay’s Besides, You Lose Your Soul… or the History of Western Civilisation at the Camden People’s Theatre, and events at the New York Theatre Workshop, and the French-American Theater Dialogue Series at the Martin E. Segal Theatre.
My poetry is anthologized in Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry (1998) and Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry (2003). I translated Félix Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers (Semiotext(e)/The MIT Press, 2006), and maintain an active interest in contemporary theory and anti-psychiatry. Articles, translations and reviews have appeared in PAJ, TDR, Theatre Journal, Parachute, Conversations across the Field of Dance Studies, and Choreographic Practices.
I have given papers at the Epilepsy Brain, and Mind Congress (Prague), the Institute for the History of Psychiatry Research Seminar at the Weill Cornell Medical College/New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the New York Academy of Medicine, UPenn, Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, Emory, Brown, QMUL and the University of Manchester, among others.
I am on the organising committee for the Making Sense II colloquium in Paris, at the Centre Pompidou/IRI and the Institut Télécom. Prior to joining King’s, I taught performance, writing, cultural theory, literature, and liberal arts at Columbia University; The Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts, The New School; and the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard.