Research
I am conducting a Practice as Research PhD at East 15 Acting School [The University of Essex], whilst also being lucky enough to be the only doctoral candidate holding the prestigious AHRC CHASE award currently at East 15.
The Face as Threshold of Human Material: Ethical Encounter and Postdigital Mediation in Theatre Practice
This doctoral project develops the Face Process, a Practice as Research inquiry into how the performer's face operates as a compositional instrument in contemporary theatre making. The research treats the face not as an expressive surface for an audience to read, but as a process of transmission generated between performer and director in the rehearsal room, and conditioned by the terms of its presentation.
Two concepts structure the inquiry. Registers names the tonal and affective range of the performer's face. Exposures names the compositional and mediated conditions under which that range becomes visible and dramaturgically operational: a configuration of scale, degree of mediation, dramaturgical function, and the relational space the face produces. Working across different interdisciplinary theatre forms, and across unmediated encounter, live camera relay, and motion capture, the research tests what each exposure makes transmissible and what it forecloses.
The theoretical frame holds Emmanuel Levinas's account of ethical encounter in tension with Peter Sloterdijk's interfacial intimate sphere rather than reconciling them, and situates the theatrical face within Raymond Williams's dominant, residual, and emergent cultural processes. Matthew Causey's account of postdigital performance supplies the perceptual condition under which the argument is tested.
The project proceeds through rehearsal labs and close observation of practice by Susanne Kennedy, Forced Entertainment, and The Wooster Group. Its intended contribution is currently a transmissible toolkit of adjustable compositional variables, together with an account of what in the theatrical face resists capture.
Based at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex, and funded by an AHRC CHASE studentship.
In November 2024, I was invited as a guest speaker to the Colloquium Festival Belgium, a conference on "(New) dancing epidemics: dance by/for all?" in Charleroi, for my paper “The Grammar In The Dance - Object Embodiment in Sacred-Oriented Performance and the Erosion of Tactic Knowledge” (2024).
‘[Life] will always be anthropomorphic, that is to say, embedded and embodied, enfleshed, affective, relational” (Braidotti 2017: 35).
In 2025, I was invited as a keynote speaker to the conference ‘Gestes et processus dans les arts de la marionnette’, for my paper concerning ‘The Miniature Box’, at Strasbourg University.
How can immaterial scenography and the « Miniature Box » framework redefine spatial perception and narrative in puppetry?
The paper used my project Tracing Spaces as a case study in immaterial scenography, exploring how live projections, miniatures, and multi-camera perspectives redefine spatial perception and narrative. It examines the « miniature box » framework, blurring front stage and backstage to position the puppet as a site of visual trickery and emotional resonance. By deconstructing theatrical mechanics, it interrogates how puppetry can deepen engagement, focusing on my concept of « the outside coming in ».
The Dance Of The Intentional Object Is The Pulse Of The Puppet
“Liveness itself is exalted by its most disheartening truth: it stinks of mortality” (Herbert Blau, 1987 : 256).
Research projects : Becoming Anima 2022, Anthropocosmic 2021, Like a Horse 2022.
Filmed fragments of The Elephant’s Workshop Performance. Initially developed at Eden Studio Dock 11 with LISPA Arthaus.berlin. Further developed with Destelheide Belgium. ©NiallFallon
Since Autumn 2024, I have been the artistic director of The Playhouse Berlin. Using The Playhouse as a platform for artists to interrogate research questions and experiments in performance concepts. The large and growing community focuses on facilitating, conjuring and presenting performance lab methodologies that support the Freie Szene and shift attitudes concerning audience ontology with mytho-poetic states.
The Playhouse is a curated forum that provides a home to internal and external art, alteration, and adventure.Through experimental concepts of performance, movement rituals, connection exercises, or finding a space to lusciously play in mind, body, and spirit, the Playhouse Berlin creates emotional spaces of embodiment, ecstatic theatricality, and dynamic Play