Seminars

Upcoming events

Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group Online Research Seminar Series 2025–26, Brunel University of London

16 February, 16 March and 7 May 2026

Curated and organised by Dr Katerina Paramana

Please join us for this academic year's online Research Seminar Series of the Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group, using the following passcode and link: https://bruneluniversity.zoom.us/j/91061288769    |     Passcode: ResSeriesP 

EVENT 1: 16 February 2026, 5pm - 6pm GMT (online via Zoom)

Dr. Caoimhe Mader McGuinness, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Kingston University:

On Not Being What One Does: Revisiting the Relationship Between Sex Work and Acting Work 

This paper will revisit the differences between two distinct studies of the relationship between prostitution and acting in Tracy C. Davis’ 1991 Actresses as Working Women and Kirsten Pullen’s 2005 Actresses and Whores. Starting from a review by Davis of Pullen’s work, I will tease out how the former eschews some of her generative observations on prostitution-as-profession made in her 1991 monograph as an angle to critique the latter. Thus I will return to some of Davis original observations alongside more recent interventions by a range of feminist and sex work scholars and activists to critique Pullen’s assertions regarding straightforward equations between sex workers and actresses at the level of identity. Rather, reconsidering acting through the forms of workplace resistance against platform capitalism and ‘gigification’ developed  in some sectors of the sex industry provides some interesting possibilities for similar resistances in aspects of the theatre and film industry –and through this a possible rejection of the romanticisation of any form of labour.

EVENT 2: 16 March, 5pm - 6pm GMT (online via Zoom)

Dr. Jaswinder (Jaz) Blackwell-Pal, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies, Queen Mary University of London

“It’s Work, So Work It”: Performance and Skills Training

From the development of early sales pitches to the invocation of businesses as theatre in modern managerial literature, drama and performance have, historically, been imbricated with management ideology and practices of work. Since the ‘aesthetic turn’ in management in the 1980s, a consultancy based industry, focusing on the exportation of drama into the corporate sector, has ballooned - with prominent examples including Steps Drama and React. More recently, in Britain, conservatoires and theatres themselves have entered the skills provision and consultancy space. RADA Business, a division of the drama school offering performance and communication workshops to businesses, individuals and corporate partners, was founded in 2001. Its model trades on the conservatoire’s reputation, brand and status to attract clients including international consultancy firms, fashion houses, diplomats’ senior civil servants, and academics. Royal Central School of Speech and Drama has a similar division called ‘Central for Business’, and theatres including Donmar Warehouse and The National Theatre Theatres, have similar offers. Tracing the historical development of corporate drama and workplace training, this paper will argue that through this work, specialist institutions like conservatoires and theatres are increasingly structurally entangled in the establishment of performance as a technology of labour management and discipline.

EVENT 3: 7 May, 5pm - 6pm BST (online via Zoom)

Dr. Marios Chatziprokopiou, Assistant Professor in Performance Studies and Writing, University of Thessaly, Greece

Speaking from the Site of the Wound: Theatre as a Ritual of Summoning the Dead

This lecture reads Carolina Bianchi’s The Bride. Good Night Cinderella through a central question: how can a survivor speak when violence is organised through sedation and black out? Literalising the logic of drug-facilitated assaults known in Brazil as Boa Noite Cinderella, Bianchi begins with a lecture-performance that unspools an archive of art and female violence—from Renaissance painting to Latin American performance lineages—while she ingests a measured dose of hypnotics and collapses onstage. The ensemble then carries the work forward, as the “witness” becomes, temporarily, a speechless body. I argue that Bianchi’s gesture mobilises theatre as a ritual of summoning the dead: a choric apparatus that calls up disappeared women and endangered artists, including Ana Mendieta and Pippa Bacca, assembling a genealogy of gendered violence across art history and performance. Against claims that performance lives only in the present, the lecture traces how the work activates traces and afterlives—documents, images, recordings, and spectators’ bodily residues—as forms of political evidence and transmission. It also examines the performance’s climactic turn to clinical visibility, where an invasive medical image is projected, exposing how regimes of proof can re-enact violence even as they secure belief. Refusing catharsis, I propose, Bianchi turns shared numbness into political affect, asking what kinds of knowledge survive the blackout and return, belatedly, from the site of the wound.

Previous events

Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group Online Research Seminar Series 2024–25, Brunel University of London

26 February, 13 March and 15 May 2025

Curated and organised by Dr Katerina Paramana

You are cordially invited to this year's online Research Seminar Series of Brunel University of London's Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group.

To join us in any of these events, please use the passcode and link below:
https://bruneluniversity.zoom.us/j/91061288769    |     Passcode: ResSeriesP 

EVENT 1: 26 February 2025, 5pm - 6pm GMT (online via Zoom)

Maipelo Gabang

Toward an Intra-Cultural Reflexivity: Belonging, Specificity and the Trappings of Tokenism when Navigating Predominantly White Institutions

Maipelo will be discussing and reflecting on an interview conducted with John-Paul Zaccarini, Professor of Performing Arts for Bodily and Vocal Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts and Director of FutureBrownSpace (FBS), an enclave conceived for individuals from the global majority navigating predominantly White fields and institutions. The interview, titled ‘TOWARD A FUTUREBROWNSPACE: Programming Strategies Embedded in Black Reality, Fantasy, and Sanctuary’ was published in TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation 3(1).

Maipelo Gabang, is a Botswana-born, South African-trained embodied practitioner, cultural facilitator and educator currently serving as a doctoral researcher (Doktorand) in Performative and Media-based Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts in Sweden. She holds a B.A. degree in Drama and Organisational Psychology alongside an MA in Choreography and Movement Research from Rhodes University in South Africa. Her current artistic research project centres the experiences and knowings from the positionality of racialised women within the southern-African diaspora situated in the Nordics and Scandinavian-ness

EVENT 2: 13 March, 5pm - 6pm GMT (online via Zoom)

Dr Shane Boyle

Performing in the Cold Chain: Water and the Extractive Logics of Artistic Production

This talk explores how contemporary initiatives to improve the sustainability of art institutions are entangled in extractive logics and infrastructures. Like nearly all human productive activities, artistic production depends on raw material. As such, the art world warrants scrutiny of its material consumption like any other sector. What distinguishes art, however, is its potential to put on display the ecological and economic problems posed by raw materials— through both its aesthetic form and direct entanglement with extractive infrastructures. To illustrate this, I will focus on the use of one raw material incontemporary performance: water. Recent works by artists such as Tavares Strachan, Florentina Holzinger, and Olafur Eliason highlight the contradictions of extraction that plague not only the art world but the capitalist world-system as well.

Shane Boyle is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London. His books include The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism (Stanford 2024) and the co-edited collection Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Methuen Bloomsbury 2019). For the 2024-25 academic year, he is a research fellow at global dis:connect, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

EVENT 3: 15 May, 5pm - 6.30pm BST (online via Zoom)

Dr Victor Ladron de Guevara and Dr Hugo Salcedo

21st Century Mexican Theatre: Violence, protests, and aesthetics — An Open Talk between Hugo Salcedo Barrios and Victor Ladron de Guevara

Hugo Salcedo Barrios and Victor Ladrón de Guevara will discuss some of the most distinctive groups and practitioners working in the Mexican Theatre scene in the 21st Century. Through an exploration of the political environment affecting the country, Salcedo Barrios and Ladrón de Guevara will explore the distinct avenues in which practitioners have responded to the violence prevailing in the country, resulting in the creation of a set of novel aesthetics and a profound examination of their local/national/global identity.

Victor Ladrón de Guevara is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University of London. His scholarly work is centred on acting training processes, the use and understanding of the body in performance, the interrelationship between theory and practice, and contemporary Mexican Theatre.

Hugo Salcedo is a scholar, essayist and playwright. He has written over sixty plays and numerous academic essays. He has won several awards, including the National Theatre Award, the Punto de Partida Competition, the International Tirso de Molina Award and the Border Cultural Projects Competition. He was a fellow of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (Mexico), and his works have been translated and performed internationally in multiple languages. In 2015, he received the Theatrical Merit Award from the Ministry of Culture of Jalisco. Currently, he is a full-time academic at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City and a member of the National Research System of Conacyt.

Addressing Contemporary Challenges Through Performance

Online Research Seminar Series 2023–24, Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group, Brunel University of London

Curated and organised by PGRs Daniel Gonzalez and Ariel Whitfield Sobel under the guidance of Dr Katerina Paramana

EVENT 1 (20 February 2024, 5pm-6:30pm GMT, online): Performance & Communities 

How Can Performance Reconfigure our Relationship to our Communities after the Covid-19 Pandemic? 

• Swati Arora, Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies, Queen Mary University of London
• Annie Webster, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Cultural and Refugee Studies, The University of Edinburgh 

EVENT 2 (12 March, 5pm-6:30pm GMT, online): Performance, Gender & Technology 

How Can Performance Challenge our Understandings of Gender through Technology? 

• Christine Prevas, PhD Candidate, Gender & Sexuality in Media, Columbia University
• Vlad Butecea, Lecturer in Digital Theatre and Performance, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh 

EVENT 3 (20 March, 5pm-6:30pm GMT, online): Performance & Climate Crisis

How Can Performance Reconfigure our Relationship to the Environment in the Midst of Climate Crisis? 

• Aylwyn Walsh, Professor in Performance and Social Change, University of Leeds 

‘Performance and Political Economy: Bodies, Politics, and Well-Being in the 21st Century’
Online Research Seminar Series 2022–23, Brunel University of London

Coordinated by Dr Katerina Paramana

This research seminar series’ main aim was to examine timely issues regarding the relationship between bodies, politics, and well-being through interdisciplinary dialogues between researchers, industry professionals, and stakeholders from the arts, politics, and health and well-being. It invited the following international speakers in three curated, interlinked, dialogical events: 

Event 1 (7 Dec 2022, 5pm-6:30pm GMT, online): Political Economy and Contemporary Performance Practices

This event examined the relation between contemporary performances practices and political economy, its effects, and the insights they can offer to one another.

• Alvin Li, Curator, Tate Modern
• Peter Thomas, Professor of Political Thought, Brunel University of London
• Tara Fatehi Irani, Artist and Writer
• Louise Owen, Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Birkbeck, University of London 

Event 2 (18 Jan 2023, 5pm-6:30pm GMT, online): Bodies and Racial Capitalism

This event examined how bodies are affected by racial capitalism at micro and macro levels.

• Erin Manning, Professor and Research Chair - Speculative Pragmatism, Art, and Pedagogy, Concordia University
• Kimberly Welch, J.D. Candidate at UCLA School of Law and PhD Performance Studies, UCLA
• Sean Metzger, Professor and Head of Performance Studies, UCLA 

Event 3 (29 Mar 2023, 5pm-6:30pm BST, online): The Growth Economic Paradigm, Human and Non-Human Bodies, and Well-Being

This event examined how the growth economic paradigm affects the well-being of human and non-human bodies (and strategies that can be employed to effect change).

• Stephen Butler, Professor of Health and Well-Being, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
• Gareth Dale, Reader in Political Economy, Brunel University London
• Marina Gržinić, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria and ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia 

Interdisciplinary Performance Research Laboratories 2018
Shadows of the Dawn: Migration and the Indeterminacy of Community and Immunity

Coordinated by Johannes Birringer

Over the past two years, a few researchers at Brunel University London formed a working group – Transcultures-Survival (Hosts and Guests) – and began to network with others equally concerned with survival politics and a critical understanding of migration and hospitality.

The aim of the 2018 research workshops was to incite debate and knowledge exchange between fields – theatre, social works, education, human geography, political science, ethnography, media arts – on pressing questions regarding notions of imagined communities (originally argued in 1983 by Benedict Anderson) during the current resurgence of ethno-nationalism, exemplified by xenophobic hostilities, divergent responses to the so-called refugee crisis, Britain voting to leave the European Union, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of right wing populism on the European continent. During two symposia-workshops in April and June 2018, participant researchers and practitioners considered interlaced thematic focal points that deal with community and immunity.

• Natural History of Migration/Immunity and Biopolitics/Racism and Patriotism/ Institutional and Systemic Sexual Violence
• Security, Nationness, Ethno-futurism, and the Theatre of Resistance

The planned activities included scholarly presentations / shorter provocations, workshops and practice-based performances or fieldwork demonstrations (film) to be presented over the two symposia in April and June 2018. The format and compositional method of the Series were intended to be open and innovative as well: curatorial propositions will be solicited from invited guests and volunteer participants. The event was open to the public and anyone interested in the subject, and it was free of charge.

Performance Research Seminar Coordinator: Johannes Birringer 

All research seminars were co-produced with dance-tech.net and the special DAP-LabTV:

• Research Seminar playlist on youtube by Marlon Barrios Solano & Johannes Birringer.
• Research Seminar on Dance TECH TV LIVE
• DAP-lab.TV