Performance Research Group

Research Centres

Research Group Details


The Department supports scholarly study, field research and practice-led enquiry in theatre and performance, and welcomes interdisciplinary approaches. The Department supports scholarly study, field research and practice-led enquiry in performance, and welcomes interdisciplinary approaches.  Current collaboartions include the Performance and Politics distinguished speaker series, co-hosted with the Department of International Politics, and  Living Landscapes, an interdisciplinary conference supported by the AHRC.  Several members of staff are award-winning artists and emphasis is upon processes of making, reading and analysing theatre and performance in local, regional, national and trans-national contexts.

Current research themes include:

• Landscape, environment and site-specific performance
• Space, place and the cultural dynamic of performance
• Performance, ecology and sustainability
• Theatre, performance and Location
• Performance, politics and ethics
• Scenography, performance installation and the theatre of images
• Post-dramatic theatre
• Performance documentation and archiving
• Disability and performance
• Contemporary European Theatre;
• British, French and Irish drama;
• Critical theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy;
• Theatre ethics and aesthetics;
• Applied theatre.


Members of staff with particular interests in performance research are:

The Department has strong links with Frankfurt University and Professor Hans-Thies Lehmann, who coined the term post-dramatic theatre, is a regular visitor to Aberystwyth. The Department also benefits from close association with National Theatre Wales, Music Theatre Wales and the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Its Honorary Professors, Howard Barker, Ed Thomas and David Rudkin, are in close contact, enabling insight into their writing and rehearsal processes and their involvement in Departmental productions and symposia.  We also benefit from the integration of practice-based research through productions of the associate theatre company, Lurking Truth.   

The Department edits and supports Performance Research, the principal journal in the field, and played a significant role in the foundation of Performance Studies international, the disciplinary membership organisation.

As examples of the scope of staff-led projects, Dr Heike Roms was recently awarded a large research grant (worth £165,779) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The grant supported a two-year research project, entitled “'It was forty years ago today…': Locating the Early History of Performance Art in Wales 1965-1979”. The project examined how performance art histories are constructed, paying particular attention to the development of the art form in the context of Wales.   Also, 2007, Professor Mike Pearson was awarded an AHRC research grant to create three hour-long audio-works for the Ancholme Valley in North Lincolnshire. These combinations of text and music are available as mp3 files free to download and access at the Carrlands site.  Jill Greenhalgh, founder of The Magdalena Project: international network of women in contemporary theatre, received a prestigious Arts Council of Wales Creative Fellowship to further develop her own performance work.

Some recent important publications by the department include Mike Pearson’s Site-Specific Performance (2010) and  Mickery Theater: An Imperfect Archaeology (2011); Alison Forsyth’s  Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (2009); Karoline Grizner’s Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance (2010); Carl Lavery’s The Politics of Jean Genet’s Late Theatre: Spaces of Revolution (2010), ‘Good Luck Everybody’. Lone Twin: Journeys, Performances and Conversation (2011), and Contemporary French Theatre and Performance (2011); David Ian Rabey’s 2 volume study of Howard Barker’s theatre  Ecstasy and Death and Politics and Desire (2009), and Heike Rom’s What’s Welsh for Performance: An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales 1968-2008 (2008) and  Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (2010).


The scenographers Simon Banham and Mike Brookes won a Theatre Design Award for their work on Mike Pearson’s and Mike Brookes’ production of The Persians (2010) for National Theatre Wales; and Simon Banham designed Greek for Music Theatre Wales which won an outstanding achievement in opera at the 2011 Theatre Awards.


Current PhD projects include place and performance; performace, location and National Theatre of Wales (NTW); reenactment and relational aesthetics; the politics of disidentification in contemporary british drama;  digital documentation of physical theatre; lecture performance; the performativity of disease with reference to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis; the object as post-dramatic gesture; Clifford McLucas and performance design in Wales; exploring rural identities through scenographic practice; theatre audience reception study; new media technologies and the reception of modern theatrical performance, dramaturgies of social exchange; performance art documentation.