About

performance, possession + automation (pp+a) is a collaborative research project led by Nicholas Ridout, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), Dhanveer Singh Brar, University of Leeds and Orlagh Woods (creative producer), in partnership with Fierce Festival (Birmingham) and Transform Festival (Leeds) and with the collaboration of performingborders (London).

The project brings together academics and artists to investigate, through the practice and study of performance: the resistant power of ‘spirit possession’, the contemporary rise of automation, and their entanglement with histories of colonial slavery. We aim to produce an understanding of contemporary performance that is properly attentive to the colonial and racialising dimensions of the history from which it has emerged.

We are exploring automation and possession as two ways of thinking about what happens to human subjects who act in ways that they do not themselves fully control. How can making and thinking about artistic practice contribute to thinking about and through these ideas collectively.

core team

Nicholas Ridout is a writer, researcher, teacher, with interests in theatre, labour, politics and critical theory.

Dhanveer Singh Brar is a writer, researcher, and teacher focussing on questions of race, culture, aesthetics, politics and theory.

Orlagh Woods is a freelance curator and creative producer working across the visual and performing arts.

advisors

Mojisola Adebayo is a performer, playwright, director, producer, facilitator, teacher and researcher, and has worked internationally in theatre, television and radio for over twenty-five years, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe.

Lois Keidan is the co-founder and was director of the Live Art Development Agency until 2021. She was Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London from 1992 to 1997 where she devised a year-round programme of new performance and initiated numerous new ventures for established and emerging artists.

Ronald Rose-Antoinette is a writer, scholar, and independent curator, whose research is currently devoted to Black Queer cultural expressions and aesthetics in the Caribbean.

Rebecca Schneider is a writer, researcher and teacher of performance studies, decolonial methods in media and live arts, prehistories of the screen, and theories of intermedia.

Deborah Thomas is a writer, teacher, researcher and documentary filmmaker, working in anthropology, gender, sexuality and women’s studies. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.

partners

Fierce is a youthful and joy-filled festival of international theatre, performance and experiences which takes place in and around Birmingham (UK) every two years.

Transform is an engine room for powerful performance in Leeds. They create exhilarating international festivals and work year-round to catalyse future-gazing artists and creatives to reimagine what theatre can be.

In collaboration with performing borders, a curatorial research-platform that explores the relations between Live Art and notions and lived experiences of intersectional and transnational borders.

Joe Kelleher, Fiona Templeton and Simon Vincenzi were vital collaborators in the initial development of this project.