I finished my PhD at Monash University in October 2020

This research interrogates four years of “Weekly Ticket Footscray,” a weekly improvised participatory performance by David Wells at Footscray Train Station (with 185 performances to date), described in this research as “slow theatre.” Drawing from Jacques Rancière and Nicholas Bourriaud’s theories of equity between performer and audience, this thesis asks: In the context of slow theatre, what might a dramaturgical research framework and critical performance ethnographic methodology reveal about relational encounters between performer and audience?

 Participation is increasingly a stated objective of artists working within multimodal arts practices. And while funding bodies, local and state governments and philanthropists seek to “activate” public space with performance and public art, there is little understanding of the relations produced by this type of participatory public performance. Additionally, there is a need to understand what methods can usefully be used to interrogate and understand these relations. In this practice-led research I gather four years of photographs, social media artefacts, recorded and overheard conversations and interviews. These are analysed using a dramaturgical research process to develop the new frameworks of “slow theatre,” “feral conversations” and “contagious audience”. I discuss how the artist disrupts behaviours within social space, in turn creating a complex dialogical “web,” including live and feral conversations. I define how an ethos of play and mutuality creates contagious audience and use these frameworks to offer provocations and principles for slow theatre projects.

project website:

www.weeklyticket.org

click here to read article I wrote for Australasian Drama and Theatre Studies Journal April 2018 about Weekly Ticket Footscray