DISSERTATION
Department of Theatre & Film | UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
My doctoral project, “Mad Auralities: Sound and Sense in Contemporary Performance,” explores the theatrical relationship between sound and mental health differences. In particular, I examine a range of case studies in which audience members are immersed in auditory simulations of madness. Ultimately, my work investigates the shortcomings of simulation as a representational practice.
ARTICLES
This essay examines audio latency as a metaphor for feeling out-of-sync with the present moment, highlighting various forms of cultural asynchronicity. With reference to media theorist Boris Groys' concept of being "con-temporary," the essay explores the experience of trying to move with the breakneck pace of capitalist acceleration and perpetually feeling “behind.” By inhabiting the microsecond delay between audio input and output as reflective of larger societal disruptions, the essay describes latency as a shared temporal disjunction, both in music production and everyday life, with creative and political potential.
SOUNDING OUT! | 2024
Vol.3, No.1 | CAPACIOUS: JOURNAL FOR EMERGING AFFECT INQUIRY | 2023
This audio essay is an attempt to illustrate my lifelong experience of non-normative listening, which sometimes takes the form of an active practice (in listening “against the grain” of psychonormativity) and, at other times, comes on suddenly in a moment of disturbance and disorientation. By depathologizing and demedicalizing madness, my goal is to emphasize the persistent ambiguities, slippages, and thresholds of auditory perception that are not so easy to taxonomize.
Vol. 41, No. 2 | THEATRE RESEARCH IN CANADA | 2020
From the introduction, by editors Neil Brooks and Sarah Blanchette: “Cast-off Casts: The Orthopedic Imagination in Dear Evan Hansen and Lady Bird” looks at two very influential recent coming-of-age stories, the stage musical Dear Evan Hansen (2015) and the film Ladybird (2018), and how both problematically use the image of a cast to imply that the healing of a physical injury can suggest the recovery from some sort of adolescence-induced psychological injury.
Cast-off Casts
Narrative Art and the Politics of Health | ANTHEM PRESS | 2021
This forum article critically examines a play for young audiences called Still/Falling (2016) and its role in local high-school curriculum. The article argues that a number of elements—including questions posed to students in the play’s study guide, symbols chosen to represent mental illness in the play, and mental health discourse surrounding the production—work against the company’s mandate to challenge stigma around mental illness.
The Back-Body in Performance
Vol. 5 No. 1: Backspace: A Special Issue on Dance Studies | PERFORMANCE MATTERS | 2019
This essay concerns the dialectical dance between the front-body and back-body in contemporary dance performances. It asks: how should we think about the dynamic between front and back in a way that recognizes the agency of both orientations? Perhaps we should consider how support is distributed between bodies. If one body is doing the lifting, for example, how is the lifted body supporting the lifter? Methodologically, rather than asking “how to approach the back” this essay asks how backs do the approaching.
Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster | *FORTHCOMING*| 2024
With Dr. Jason Lieblang from UBC’s Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, we are in the process of completing the first English-language translation of Hans Henny Jahnn’s first play, Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1919), which won the Weimar Republic’s most prestigious literary prize in 1920 (the Kleist Prize). An excerpt from the work was staged online in April 2021.