Joseph Dunne-HowrieRose Bruford College | Bruford · Postgraduate School
Joseph Dunne-Howrie
PhD in Drama
Teaching MA Languages of Practice
About
38
Publications
3,676
Reads
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21
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I specialise in researching the politics of digital culture within performance. My work interrogates the performativity of online media, performances of rightwing culture war discourse, and theatre’s role in supporting and opposing far-right movements in Europe and the USA. I teach modules in performative writing, live art, participatory theatre, postdramatic theatre, and intermediality.
Additional affiliations
October 2017 - September 2020
September 2017 - September 2020
January 2017 - present
ZU-UK
Position
- Research Associate
Education
September 2011 - July 2015
October 2008 - July 2009
October 2003 - July 2006
Publications
Publications (38)
The war on woke is the latest iteration of a decades-long rightwing culture war. The performative affectivity of woke functions to marginalize, exclude and ultimately erase those who search for a new language to "render imaginable, and thus tangible, alternative rearticulations" (Mercer 29) of identity. Drawing on critical theories that situate Enl...
The chapter looks at Barker’s legacy in the context of East London’s cultural ecology. I returned to my PhD audiowalk ‘Voices from the Village’ to consider how versions of Joan Littlewood’s fun palaces can be created digitally to transform public spaces into playful and theatrical environments. I also discuss these ideas with reference to work by Z...
The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality and virtuality structured by the materialism of the Internet. Internet theatre created during the pandemic functions as a m...
Where are we in the story of British democracy? Was the 2016 EU Referendum a rehearsal for a new political system of direct democracy that ultimately benefits the far right? Or will the Internet replace the conventional machinery of government with a radical new form of network power where people discursively experiment with new political realities...
This article addresses how the coordinates of the real have altered during the Covid-19 pandemic through the interrogative lens of Internet theatre. The performance aesthetics that have emerged from the convergence of corporeal and virtual realities is explored with reference to To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All...
Over the past decade, ‘immersive’ has arguably been one of the most overused terms to describe theatre productions that aim to involve audiences in unconventional ways. With the mainstream success of specific ‘immersive’ productions, this trend goes beyond the theatre and arts industry. From games distributors to Westfield shopping centres, just ab...
The DocPerform Project addresses issues relating to the ways performance can be considered a document and, more broadly, the performance cultures and practices that are emerging in the information age. Library and Information scholar and co-leader of DocPerform Lyn Robinson foresees a plausible evolution in documents as entities which produce embod...
The DocPerform Project addresses issues relating to the ways performance can be considered a document and, more broadly, the performance cultures and practices that are emerging in the information age. Library and Information scholar and co-leader of DocPerform Lyn Robinson foresees a plausible evolution in documents as entities which produce embod...
The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant epi...
This paper appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political lexicon to analyse how interacting with media distorts perceptions of reality into a performance of users’ identities. Crisis acting is a conspiracy most famously propagated by the alt-right
propagandist Alex Jones, host of the online broadcaster InfoWars. Jones spread a...
Immersive has become one of the most common but nebulous terms in the UK theatre scene over the past two decades. Promising a special or merely novel experience for audiences, the lexicon of immersion has entered many different social spheres. Shopping centres like Westfield (Stratford, East London) promise shoppers a leisure experience that transc...
Good Night, Sleep Tight is an interactive virtual reality performance created by theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. It was previewed at Gerry’s Kitchen in July 2017. Combining VR and binaural technologies, participants are put to bed and transported to a dreamscape composed of childhood imagery and aerial cityscapes. This artistic position rem...
ZU-UK have been making interactive and participatory artworks for over a decade now. In that time, ‘immersion’ has entered into the popular lexicon to describe any event that dispenses with the proscenium stage. This evidences the desire from audiences to experience more sensuous, arguably more live, artworks, and is therefore to be welcomed at a t...
DocPerform is an interdisciplinary research project based at the Library & Information Science department at City, University of London. In asking how, in the context of digital culture, audiences read live performances as documents the project investigators are exploring the embodied qualities of information. In other words, the ways we experience...
In his 1992 essay Eftermaele: ‘That which will be said afterwards’ Eugenio Barba states that ‘[i]n the age of electronic memory, of films, and of reproducibility … performance … defines itself through the work that living memory, which is not museum but metamorphosis, is obliged to do’ (78). His mention of memory is an acknowledgement of a spectato...
This article gives a brief history of the Beckett collection at the University of Reading archive and gives an indication of the scholarly disciplines it is most relevant to.
PhD Thesis. Examining the ways documentation engenders audience participation and how such a dramaturgy necessitates a re-validation of the 'live' in performance that counters notions of transience and disappearance.
Performance must reclaim the language of the image and the sensorium in a practice-as-research context.
The foundation in 2007 of The Stanislavski Centre, the parent organization of the Stanislavski Studies journal, came about directly through the work of the late Professor Jean Benedetti (1930–2012) which originated when he was the Principal of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance from 1970 to 1987. Starting with the publication of Stanis...
Prelude: Welcome Hello… I would like to welcome you to our disrupted landscape ...There is a sense of place, of topography, and identity, but through the passage of time, through the iterant nature of our experiences, we have all arrived here to this time and space. Present and absent we tell to you only an essence of our experience, of the traces...
Questions
Questions (2)
Trans- implies a set of complex relations between people, histories, political affiliations etc. I am exploring how audience participation can be trans-ed in the same way that we can play multiple identities online.
I am loking for artists who incorporate visual arts research into their theatre-making process. I am interested in the relationship between the document and the artist: What is it they are looking for? How do they approach these materials - as artefacts, as stimuli, as traces, as collaborators? I have a good understanding of the theoretical background to this debate and of the various innovations in performance documentation, but I want to learn about the ways archival material circulates in professional theatre as active tools.
Projects
Projects (3)
The Gaming Democracy project brings together a wide variety of artists, academics and activists to investigate how participatory performance, social media and democracy interact in the contemporary political and online landscapes. In direct contrast to the online gamification of conflict by the far-right through the use of memes, role-play and alternative world-building, we want to explore the untapped potential for more egalitarian and progressive forms of online (and onstage) political engagement. Through collaborative conversations and experiments between a variety of creatives and researchers, the project aims to develop new, interdisciplinary perspectives and ways of working together. With Web 2.0 becoming an engine of radicalisation, how can we combat fascist and white-supremacist ideologies through investigating and participating in alternative political realities built from the fields of political science, game design, and interactive theatre?
The questions relating to the nature of documents and the processes of documentation are of core interest to researchers in the Department of Library & Information Science, (CityLIS), at City, University of London. One of our projects, DocPerform, aims to consider the documentation of performance and the extent to which performance may itself be considered as a document, from a multidisciplinary perspective. The project is part of the wider consideration of the nature/future of documents undertaken by members of CityLIS.
