In addition to my more discipline-specific research, I am an enthusiastic interdisciplinary and collaborative scholar, always keen to pursue alternative research areas and methodologies. Current and recent interdisciplinary and collaborative research projects include:
"As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye": Comic Catharsis in The Comedy of Errors
A collaborative practice-led research project with Dr Chris Hay (UQ). Funded by the Australian Research Council through the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
The Comedy of Errors, while not performed as often as other Shakespearean comedies, is a particularly useful case study for a practice-focused exploration of stagecraft and emotion. The plot, as the title attests, depends on a series of unlikely coincidences, mistakes and misunderstandings brought about by the actions of two sets of identical twins in one town. There are two compelling hypotheses for the staging techniques employed to realise this play in its original performance context, developed through rigorous textual analysis and interdisciplinary enquiry. This project tests and compares these hypotheses, using them to explore Elizabethan stagecraft conventions and notions of comic catharsis.
This project will lead to two or three published articles in 2020-1.
Distributed Cognition: Studying Theatre in the Wild
A book chapter co-written with Professor Evelyn Tribble (Otago), in Richard Kemp and Bruce McConachie (eds). The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science (Routledge, 2018).
Distributed cognition posits that a complex activity such as performance is spread or smeared across resources such as attention, perception, and memory; the experience of training as it is sedimented in the body; social structures, and the material environment. The related idea of a “cognitive ecology” emphasizes the interplay of internal cognitive mechanisms and social and physical environment. Cognitive ecologies are dynamic, changing to accommodate new circumstances: some systems will place more or less weight on internal mechanisms, on central control, or on particular forms of cognitive artifacts and social systems. This approach lends itself to a variety of historical and theoretical approaches to performance. It predicts historical change and variation as new configurations of material and social practices emerge. For example, technical innovations in theatre such as lighting and sound boards in turn trigger fundamental shifts in how actors move in a space, therefore altering rehearsal practices, and in turn generating new ways of engaging audience affect and attention.
This chapter explores the historical and theoretical lineages of Distributed Cognition and argues that it is a productive model through which to explore performance history. Four case studies from across Western theatre history are examined, each illustrating the value of a different aspect of cognitive theory to this disciplinary area.
Creating commedia: cognition, composition-in-performance and the commedia dell’arte (with Professor Tim Fitzpatrick, University of Sydney)
Published in Sabine-Salima Chaouche (ed.) “The Stage and its Creative Processes, volume 1.” European Drama and Performance Studies 2:13
Commedia dell’arte dominated continental European stages for over two centuries, but several aspects of the form remain obscure to contemporary historians. Our understanding of how commedia worked in performance is improving all the time, a clear example of the benefits of blending historical inquiry, textual analysis and practice-led research methods. However, despite the incorporation of commedia-inspired skills into acting curricula at institutions across the world, the original rehearsal methods and training techniques utilised by performers have not received due scholarly attention.
This oversight may be attributable to the overwhelming lack of direct evidence for offstage practices, in addition to common misunderstandings of how the improvisatory processes characteristic of the form actually worked in performance. Rather than prompting spontaneously created, unrepeatable narratives and interactions (modern ‘improvisation’), commedia scenarios guided a process of composition-in-performance that achieved flexible but repeatable (and therefore transferable) performance sequences. This flexible creative process made unusual cognitive demands of the actors, who needed a specific set of skills and –more importantly – a training regime that would equip them with such skills.
Fitzpatrick’s 1995 monograph, The Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes in the Commedia dell'Arte: Beyond the Improvisation/Memorisation Divide, suggests that commedia provides an important case study for the developing interdisciplinary field of distributed cognition, and this theoretical framework enables us to identify and analyse a range of enskilment practices possibly utilised in the historical commedia dell’arte.
We identify a number of concrete ways in which the cognitive burden of composition-in-performance could have been reduced by specific ‘decentralising’ practices: role distribution, ‘shepherding’ of supernumerary roles, training in the use of masks, conventions governing the arrangement of performance spaces, and most importantly the ways in which actors can train and rehearse for improvisatory composition-in-performance, both in solo and in group scenes.
This discussion draws illuminating parallels with analogous, contemporaneous and better-attested performance (and performance preparation) practices.
Narrative Machines: A Ludological approach to Narrative Design (with Malcolm Ryan and Esther MacCallum-Stewart)
Published in Douglas Brown and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (eds), Rerolling Boardgames: Essays on Themes, Systems and Ideologies (McFarland & Co., 2020)
In this chapter, we discuss the design of games as narrative machines – mechanical systems that create narrative experiences. The role of narrative in games has been a hotly discussed topic in Game Studies, and indeed there are many ways that play and story can come together, from static scripts authored by the designer to improvised scenes freely role-played by players. We wish to address a middle-ground of particular interest to boardgame design: the emergent narratives that result from the interaction between the players and the rules.
We argue for the deployment of systemic narrative – stories that are the result of carefully designed systems and which employ emergent play as a viable design tool, based on a close analysis by Malcolm Ryan (the lead author). We outline an approach that Ryan calls narrative-driven design, in which the designer begins by analysing the desired narrative as if it were a game being played. We ask ourselves: “Who are the players in this scene? What actions are available to them? What are their incentives? What conflict are they experiencing?” When this is understood, we can begin to recreate the same situation through the mechanics of our game.
To illustrate this process, Ryan presents within the chapter an account of their own design process in creating The Road (Ryan 2015), a zombie-survival card game set in the Australian outback. The Road is a game of heroism, hope, betrayal, tragedy and revenge. The game has no scripted encounters, instead the mechanics are designed so that familiar post-apocalyptic narratives play out of their own accord, driven by the players’ own desires. To demonstrate how this is achieved, we present a close reading of the game mechanics, an overview of some of the surrounding critical concepts, and comparable insights from the design and playtesting process.
The Academic Lives of Student Actors: Conservatoire training as degree-level study (with Chris Hay)
Published in About Performance, No. 13, 2015: 115-136.
This article offers a justification for the place of ‘history and theory’ units of study within the contemporary conservatoire BFA, contextualised by the accreditation process in which both authors assisted at NIDA.
The Modernist Chorus
A proposed monograph co-written with Dr Chris Hay (UQ) and Dr Alys Moody (Bard College), examining the use of choruses in several landmark works of Modernist drama. Work on this monograph will commence after 2021.
Medea in Australia
A proposed monograph co-written with Dr Laura Ginters (University of Sydney) and Dr Chris Hay (UQ) on productions, receptions and adaptations of Euripides’ Medea in Australian theatre history. Work on this monograph will commence after 2021.