The performance and politics of home: Artist-led transnational perspectives in the 21st century

This performance as research PhD examines the performance and politics of home from an artist-led transnational perspective with cases studies situated in Galway, Gaza and Mexico City. The research examines how embodied experiences of home are created and/or challenged through performance and performative action with a focus on the female body and agency, personally and politically. The thesis argues that performances of home and/or performative acts reconfigure spaces of home thus changing how these spaces may be encountered, considered or experienced. It also argues that performances of home may facilitate agency mobilizing political changes or shifts in political power on both local and global levels. The research context explores the transnational socio-political contexts of these sites that directly and significantly inscribe embodied experiences and the lived reality of home. It investigates the potential of performance and performative acts in reconfiguring spaces of home, particularly those that occur within public space and domains, encompassing an analysis of performance in public space as acts of resistance, reassurance and resilience. A performative analysis of home indicates that spaces of home must be considered along a continuum of habitat including public and digital spaces, demonstrating that public space is essential to ideas and experiences of home. Performance is thus both a methodology and a theoretical lens, and the research is founded on collaborative practice with artists from Galway and Mexico City, relationships with artists in Gaza formed over the past four years, and my practice as an independent theatre artist in Galway. Ethical frameworks based on relational experience, collaboration, respect and exchange guide this research. The central themes of home and performance encompass a wide range of topics including space, ownership, citizenship and belonging around which discourse has changed significantly due to the global pandemic of COVID-19; with the first Irish lockdown, occurring approximately 6 months after this dissertation began. The thesis investigates these changes in relation to how home may be performed through artistic practice and performative acts of home-making, exploring how meanings of home circulate culturally in each of the three sites in relation to landscape, memory and sense of place. This project argues that creating spaces of home performatively, corporeally, and materially is of particular significance to communities within contexts of precarity, injustice and violence. Fundamentally, this study proposes that by analysing home through performance, meaningful and substantial new insights are generated into how concepts of home may be constructed and experienced, which are of significant social, political and cultural value in an era when home is in crisis.

Funder

Irish Research Council

Publisher

University of Galway

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)