Performance Studies Commons^™

Drawing As Continuance: What Insists On Being Heard, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article extends She-Hero through an inquiry into drawing as a creation-centred practice of continuance. Five drawings are engaged as aesthetic encounters through which relational and perceptual shifts become perceptible, allowing inner authority to emerge as a cultivated capacity to remain responsive to what is unfolding. Drawing is approached as a site of metramorphic reconfiguration where imagination, memory, and embodied sensing participate in the decolonizing of perceptual habits and the restoration of relational ways of knowing.

Showing It! Art Matters. But Why? How?, Holly Edwards

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article addresses the agency of art with reference to an exhibition entitled “The Nature of Spirit”.  That show appeared in the local public library, resonating strongly with notions of “heartwork”.  My first Artizein publication was written in response to 9/11, and this one maintains comparable urgency, seeking solace in art precisely when the world seems to be sliding into lunacy. The prose explores the powers of art in traumatizing times with words, while the images offer the reader insight and support energetically.

Text/Ures, Kathy Mantas

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

By entwining the voices of other co-creators, text and images, I share a brief site-specific photo-reverie of my life-long allure to trees—in this instance, by attending to the trees near my home. This offering is rooted in peripatetic aesthetic practices that embrace a slower creative approach and more spellbinding ways of living, learning and knowing. In essence, this is an invitation to have an artful encounter with text/ures of trees.

Attending The Way Of The Crane: Centring Our Lives Through Creative-Centred Work, Alexandra Fidyk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

A dreamscape using pastiche is used for reflecting upon the value of creative-centred practice and research. Attending to the image through reflection and circumambulation offers entry to a centring practice. In holding both, a new image emerged. The dreamscape—an unexpected scene of cranes in joyous dance—unfolds as actual dream and offers a metaphor for understanding an arc within the dreamer’s life. In this condensed yet nuanced rumination, personal and professional, poetic and haptic, participating and witnessing blur. This practice, the way of the Crane, is timely because it introduces relational pedagogy and testimonial teaching for our times—while touching the pulse …

Mapping The Legacy Of Cinnabar Mining In California's Santa Ynez River, Lorrie Blair

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This essay is a reflection of an artist residency focused on the environmental legacy of California’s cinnabar mining. The mineral cinnabar is a primary source of mercury that was used to mine gold in California in the 1800s, and is still used globally. For this residency, I asked, “How can I creatively map the emotional and sensory landscapes of Cinnabar mining sites?” “How can art making serve to expose elements of an ecological crisis?” To answer these questions, I created cyanotypes made in and with the Santa Ynez River, which flowed through two abandoned cinnabar mines. Cyanotypes are made by …

Teaching The Eye To Slow Down: Attentive Noticing As Ecological Practice, Sara Ko

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This visual essay unfolds through acts of careful noticing. Drawing from materials encountered through repeated walks across forested landscapes on Vancouver Island, it translates moss, soil, plant matter, and animal traces into immersive digital environments. Working through atmosphere, texture, and shifting forms rather than fixed representation, the project explores how perception is shaped by time spent with what is often overlooked. Digital processes are used not to stabilize or explain, but to hold uncertainty, fragility, and partial presence. The work invites readers to slow their looking and consider how learning, relation, and meaning can emerge through sustained attention.

Red Thread Projects For Placentary Peace, Nané Jordan

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Red Thread Projects are aesthetic expressions of my placental, eco-birthing philosophies as an artisteducator- scholar with lifelong roots reclaiming midwifery, and compassionate mother-centred birth care. Uplifting “birth” within embodied, feminist epistemologies, I aim to re-vision with the Mother, writ large and small. Since 1997, I have been creating textile artworks with red thread, activating these through performances in nature, where artwork, body, and place become interwoven texts, gifting gratitude to and with Mother Earth. My arts-centred research contributes to community education that empowers birth-givers, while advocating for the embodied, love-infused potentials of birth for human thriving.

Moving Forward: The Pulse Of Arts-Centred Research [Editorial], Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial

Artizein Editorial Team: Movements And Transitions, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial overview of movements and transitions taking place with the Artizein editorial team.

About The Cover Art: Pulsing Renewal, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

“Pulsing Renewal,” featured on the cover of this issue, is part of River’s Invocations, a creation-centred inquiry exploring River's ecologies, relationality, and creation. The painting was chosen for its close affinity with the issue theme, The Pulse of Arts-Centred Research. The visual language of Pulsing Renewal—its movement, rhythm, and emergence—echoes the vitality, responsiveness, and ongoing renewal evident across the articles, artworks, and conversations assembled in this volume. The work is presented here as a thematic point of entry into the diverse inquiries that follow.

Full Issue_Artizein Arts And Teaching Journal, Darlene St. Georges, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Full Issue

Auxiliary Damage, Aiyi Cheng

Masters Theses

AuxiliarY DamagE asks what happens to pain when it is moved outside the body and given material form. Pain is not treated here as an image to be represented, but as something processed through repetition, pressure, exposure, and care. It is handled. Washed. Arranged. Pulled out. Swallowed back in.

Hair became the material that allowed this question to stay unstable. While attached to the body, it is intimate and ordinary. Once detached, it becomes residue, evidence, discomfort, value, and loss. In the studio, I washed collected hair, untangled it, threaded it through metal, placed it near flame, held it in …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Shimmer Methodology: May 2026 Cultural Studies Association Of Australasia, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This webinar presents an overview of the contemporary state of creative-practice research and autotheory before introducing Shimmer, an emerging methodological framework developed through creative practice, postgraduate supervision, and reflective inquiry. The presentation argues that while creative-practice research has successfully established creative work as a legitimate form of knowledge production, and autotheory has legitimised lived experience as theoretical material, both traditions leave relatively under-theorised the embodied moment through which insight first emerges.

The significance of the work lies in its contribution to ongoing debates around embodiment, affect, intuition, and knowledge production within creative-practice research. Shimmer proposes a language for understanding …

Accessible Theatre In The Face Of Transition: A Collaborator's Journey Through Sarah Ruhl's Orlando, Ty R. Robbins

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the various types of accessibility observed in practice during a production of Orlando by Sarah Ruhl at the University of New Orleans. Throughout

the chapters to come, I will focus on gathering theatrical dramaturgy, my process as a company

actor, the successes and setbacks of accessibility in theatre, and reflections from community

artists on how they view accessibility in the workplace. I will evaluate my findings and those of

fellow theatre makers to outline the strengths and weaknesses of accessibility in relation to

collaboration in theatre, an art form that is continually given a cold shoulder in …

Notes On Rhythm, Maya Lee-Parritz

Theses and Dissertations

Line meets impulse, association meets sign. I weave the eye towards the smudge and sublime—a fractal lineage flowing through the brush, my body, space itself. I walk toward reality in serial successions, allowing what is fragmentary to move me, to cohere in shards, murky and strange inside of me. My body is a repository of images, of broken rhythms and dissonant ideologies. All of these flow and stutter onto the surface, dripping and blurring over each other. Through all of this, I always try to make something whole, perfect, and true.

A Crown In Death: An (Expanded) Dramaturgical Approach To The Trojan Women Of Euripides, Stephanie Lester

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

In the action-packed, visually-oriented market for modern media, some may assume a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy to be slightly past its expiration date, especially if it features little to no action onstage like in Euripides’ The Trojan Women. However, it is important to remember that literature is lost when the world fails to cherish it, so if a text survives that long, it may be worth another cursory glance. In this case, that glance involved a full dramaturgical study featuring qualitative script analysis of multiple translations of The Trojan Women with related texts to explore context, themes, common literary devices, and …

"Let Your Body Do The Talkin'": An Investigation Of Aesthetic Experience Through Phenomenological Psychology, Tone Roald, Anders Essom-Stenz

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

How does the experience of one’s own body contribute to aesthetic experience? This article answers the question from the point of view of phenomenological psychology by portraying how the body is lived from within in intense experiences with works of visual art. Based on descriptions of aesthetic experiences juxtaposed with phenomenological insights about the body and, in particular, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on concrete and abstract movement, it is shown how the lived body gives form to the experience. The experience of one’s own body reflects the expressions of the works of art and comprises not only movement, and with it …

Emotions As Work Material: On Dancers' Refined Use Of Affectivity, Camille S. Buttingsrud

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

As part of their professional practice, dancers allow their affectivity to enhance their kinesthetic work. Their intentional and disciplined use of personal, emotional resources ensures both creativity, interpretation, absorption, and connections in ways that extend beyond the traditional phenomenological understanding of affectivity as pre-reflectively based. The affective regulations dancers employ can be seen as an “artistic epoché,” and their layered performance awareness corresponds with Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of “image-consciousness.” Through qualitative interviews with three professional dancers, phenomenological theory, and additional supportive literature, this article shows how affectivity can be experienced through high-order levels of Leib, constituting states of “bodily …

Participatory Presence In Aesthetic Experiences Of Performance, Sophie Morrissey, Shaun Gallagher

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

In the context of the performing arts, presence can generally be thought of as an experienced connection between performer and audience that heightens the affective impact of the performance. Explorations of how presence is experienced during live performance contribute to our understanding of the relation of presence to participants’ overall aesthetic experience and participation in the performance. However, they also reveal the complex phenomenology of presence and the challenge of offering a unified framework that can account for its various phenomenal manifestations. In this article, we conceive of presence as a recursive dynamical feedback loop that emerges through and modulates …

Rapture "At A Distance": Searching For Pathic-Atmospheric Aesthetics, Tonino Griffero

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

The paper proposes a rethinking of the role of aesthetics as a theory of sensory experience as it is encountered in the lifeworld (and only secondarily in relation to art). Accordingly, pathic and atmospheric (bottom-up) aesthetics, which centers on the ability to expose oneself to intense experiences without attempting to control them and conceives feelings as atmospheric powers that permeate a particular space without being reduced to projections of the perceiver’s moods, should replace the idealistic (top-down) approach.

A Burlesque: The Shimmering Body Of Revealing, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

A Burlesque: The Shimmer Manuscript is a hybrid critical–creative work that examines burlesque as an embodied methodology and a mode of knowledge production. Drawing from my two decades as a performer–scholar, the work reframes glamour, desire, and adornment as epistemological practices rather than theatrical ornamentation. The project is significant in that it expands understandings of performance studies, autotheory, and feminist aesthetics by foregrounding the performer’s body as an intelligent, sensing, world-making apparatus.

The methodology is creative practice research and archive-driven, integrating backstage documentation, AI-assisted photomontage, and theoretical reflection. The work draws from poststructuralist and feminist frameworks (Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Dust To Dust, Emma Ask

SPARK Symposium Presentations

"Dust to Dust" is a small group dance composition inspired by Genesis 3:19 and other passages referring to the human experience as that which is Earthly (dust). In this piece, the scripture is used as a framework for telling the story of life and the cyclical nature of being molded and created by God, the interweaving pathways of life in Creation and the eventual return to that which we were created from. In this piece, we are offered a chance reflect on the juxtaposition of the intricacy of our individual lives and the vastness and beauty of the collective human …

Inherited Fervor: Maternal Archive, Maria Angela Talavera Tejeda

Theses and Dissertations

Inherited Fervor: Maternal Archive investigates the deconstruction of the non-verbal language of Catholic ecstasy rituals to develop a choreographic language. Through the piece Doves Don’t Fly at Night, it explores the expansion of dancers’ physical range, positioning the body as an archive that embodies memories and mirrors the audience’s humanity.

The Intersectionality Of Dance And Poetry, Isabelle Howerton

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Often times, a creative work utilizes multiple creative mediums. For example, many poetry books feature visual art to enhance the original work. Dance performance is, arguably, always multidisciplinary This leaves room for many questions regarding unique ways that creative work can be developed and what sources of inspiration can be used as contributors. The final project comprises a collection of five choreographic works and five poems that correlate with each other in various ways. These five creative works were created using multiple prompts that dictated the correlation level between the two mediums. These works were then filmed to transform the …

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

Queer-Keying: Performing Video Processes As [Trans]Gressive Resistance, Wren Tiffany

Theses and Dissertations

As part of the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), I transformed the 'Sponge' gallery on the top floor of The Anderson, VCU’s historic thesis exhibition home, into The Green Room, a neon green, immersive video and performance space featuring mirrors, disco lights, a foam tile dance floor, makeup stations, and a functioning green-screen editing suite. This hybrid drag rehearsal and ‘Chroma-key’ green video production room deepened both my understandings of Queer performance art and process-based art making during the Spring of 2025, through two public performance activation …

Teaching Ettingerian Matrixial Theory, R. Michael Fisher

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Utilizing an adapted scoping review of the literature on Bracha L. Ettinger and Education (2008-2024), the author reveals the specific ways that Ettingerian Matrixial Theory (EMT) and its pedagogies are taught and can be taught in the future. EMT is argued to be a new branch of Critical Theory. The current literature shows there is mostly engagement with EMT in academic settings. As well, the literature reviewed shows EMT is used readily in arts and with artists as teachers and teachings for adults. However, the author unveils diverse other possibilities of teaching EMT. A few major themes from the literature …

Gestating And Co-Becoming With Ettingerian Maxtrixial Pedagogy, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article seeks to infuse and enrich the spheres of Arts and Education through a nascent introduction of Ettingerian Matrixial Pedagogy. To articulate this, I weave together the practices of Gestare Art Collective, which we describe as “matrixial infused education,” the “placental thinking” of Nané Jordan with my own thinking, art making and teaching. This article unfolds through interlacing theory and reflections on teachings found within art practices of Ma Poses, Womb Walking, Nap-Ins, and Spontaneous Creation-Making, along with examples of pedagogical artworkings: Metramorphosis and Muted Colours of Grief. The article closes with a poetic métissage inquiry that became—a Matrixial …