Performance Research Forum hosts a range of events, talks and presentations by established and early-career researchers and practitioners in theatre and performance.

"Julia Bardsley’s ‘garments of disease’: Decadence, scenography, and the performing body"

Tubes stretch from a pregnant womb to a gasmask worn about the face, sores glow, codpieces protrude from the groins of androgynous beings who revel atop an apocalyptic catwalk: these are the Plagues populating Julia Bardsley’s 2009 performance Aftermaths: a tear in the meat of vision, and are my subject in this paper – specifically the care given to the crafting of blemishes, abjection and devilry in the design of their costumes. What are we to make of this care, and of a troop of Plagues who revel in the end times? I’ll be arguing that Bardsley’s ‘garments of disease’ lend themselves to a study of decadence in several senses of that word, including the cultivation of a taste for the distasteful, lusting after ruination, perverting productivism, and undermining the myth of eternal growth. Ultimately, I argue that Bardsley’s decadent scenography forms a compelling basis for an anti-productivist recalibration of taste, desire and propriety, which can help with thinking through the politics and appeal of decadence in moments when societies and the economies that shape them seem to be falling apart.

Dr Adam Alston is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London. https://bit.ly/a_alston

This presentation investigates the Turner Prize nominated artist Sin Wai Kin’s (單 慧 乾) speculative drag through the prism of ‘trans-assemblage’. Combining trans studies perspectives on transness with new materialist readings of assemblage, the concept of trans-assemblage is proposed as a critical framework to identify, critique, and negotiate the more-than-human processes of transgendering. Building upon Jasbir Puar’s critique of intersectionality, Sin’s drag is argued as investigating their trans non-binary and mixed-race identity to speculate renewed discourses, actions, and expectations for bodily practices. The scenographics of Sin’s drag, with reference to the overt use of breast forms and make up, are proposed as irritating the normative identity-assemblages that define historically produced representational identity categories, such as gender and race. In approaching the more-than-human processes of transgendering as assemblage, Sin’s drag is argued as revealing the assemblages of assemblages that underlines the potential of scenographics to study gender-assemblages more broadly.

Dr Rachel Hann is a cultural scenographer and Assistant Professor in Performance and Design at Northumbria University. https://bit.ly/r_hann

Fig. 1: Plague in Gold Restraint Gown. Designed by Julia Bardsley for Aftermaths: a tear in the meat of vision. SPILL Festival, London 2009. Photo by Simon Annand.

Fig. 2: Sin Wai Kin, A View from Elsewhere, Act 1 Part 1, 2018, film still. Courtesy: the artist.

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