Theatre - Doctoral Theses
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Item Grieving with Forests: an improvisational work toward (re)wilding arts practices(University College Cork, 2026-07-22) Wagner, Josh; O'Gorman, Roisin; O'Connor, Maureen; O'Connell, Daniel; University College CorkGrieving with Forests is an autoethnographic practice-research project investigating the perceptual and creative affordances that emerge when a grieving body sustains multi-modal arts practices in minimally managed forest spaces. Rather than prioritising the production of novel artworks or the development of innovative technique, this project articulates a conceptual and methodological ecology of (re)wilding—a term used here to describe the loosening of creative and grieving practices from anthropocentric, extractivist, and prescriptive frameworks. The central research question asks how a (re)wilding of arts and grief practices can activate shifts in a practitioner’s perceptions of and relations with more-than-human ecologies. (Re)wilding challenges dominant Western models of grief that emphasise closure, severance, and the restoration of a coherent subject. Drawing inspiration from habitat rewilding and resonant practices, theories, and methodologies, the thesis adapts core principles such as embodiment, improvisation, and interspecies collaboration toward creative and grief-affective practices. Through an articulation of ‘peripheral’ awareness as it arises in sustained practice, the project takes an onto- epistemological stance that complexity and unknowability are not obstacles to knowing, but generative conditions for relational and perceptual possibilities. This thesis draws from ecofeminist and posthumanist thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, and Jack Halberstam to build upon Nina Lykke’s imminent materialist account of grief-related anomalous or ‘miraculous’ experience. My forest-based practice, emerging after the loss of my mother to suicide, is read through Lykke’s framework not to determine an ontology for such experiences but to examine their affective, perceptual, and transformative capacities. These encounters, whether subtle or extraordinary, are considered for their role in reorganising attention and reconfiguring the practitioner’s sense of ecological relation. With or without the overtly ‘miraculous’, a (re)wilding of grief and creative practice can abide with bewilderment and disorientation in ways that enliven sensory attunement, deepen interspecies reciprocity, and cultivate a re-enchantment of ecological perception. The project demonstrates— through analysis of practice outputs and techniques—how sustained encounters with decomposition, decay, spectrality, and more-than-human species can transform aesthetic sensibility at the level of abjection, offering new perspectives on death, ecology, and creative processes. Grieving with Forests contributes to ongoing conversations in new materialisms, grief studies, queer death, and environmental humanities. It offers contributions to conceptual, methodological, and practice-based frameworks—including a Seasons of Practice model for (re)wilding approaches to grief, creativity, interspecies research, and ecological ethics. Ultimately, the thesis argues for grief-affective practice as a mode of reconnecting humans to more-than-human worlds by dwelling within the generative potentials of rupture, bewilderment, and entangled becoming.Item Animal-Woman journey(s): posthuman embodiment of zoomorphic folk tales(University College Cork, 2024) Niewadzisz, Roksana; Buffery, Helena; O'Gorman, Roisin; Irish Research CouncilDiverse folktales passed down across the generations in different languages tell of Seal Women, Selkies, Mermaids, Dove Girls, She-Wolves, Swan Women: all zoomorphic or semi-zoomorphic beings able to remove their animal coats or skins and take on human shape. Liminal creatures capable of transformation, they embrace the wild and the civilized, animal and human, aquatic, aerial and terrestrial, natural and supernatural, archetypal and individual. They have the ability to move between worlds. Across a vast range of stories, these creaturely women are deprived of their animal skin; losing their integrity and ability to transform, they are doomed to incompleteness, foreignness, otherness and longing. They get “stuck” in human form and are forced to function according to imposed human rules. They are trapped somewhere between subject and object, “I” and “Other”, between their body and its image. Such tales offer rich territory for performative exploration of the normalized processes of oppression underpinning both human exceptionalism and the environmental crises associated with the Anthropocene, as well as compelling alternative formulations of our relational co-existence with non-human others and “othered” humans. This thesis re-imagines these tales, in and through processes of carefully researched and documented performance practice, not as warnings to instruct women to behave, but as sites of remembrance, mourning and even liberatory enactment of other ways of being. Adopting a broadly eco-critical perspective sensitive to place, resilience and relatedness, this thesis attends to post-human-animality through a process of literal and figurative interrogation of skin and language, translating these stories of Animal-Woman transformations as markers of otherness and vehicles of change. Alongside careful attention to the ethno-linguistic, socio-cultural and environmental specificity of these tales, the core of this thesis explores performative research modes capable of weaving an alternative post-humanistic discourse into embodied practice. It employs an original iterative methodology, deployed across each of the tales and their psychic, social and environmental territories in a spiral journey that interweaves reading, theoretical reflection and different forms of artistic research and performance practice. In the process my/the performer’s body becomes both a potent site of multiple identities and an experimental laboratory for exploring affective, relational and political processes of othering, introducing polyvocality through interdisciplinary arts practice, and traversing bodily, linguistic, cultural and geopolitical borders.Item Converging for a moment: an overview of immersion in imaginative space in The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow and All Along the Echo(University College Cork, 2024) Denton, Danny; Gilson, Jools; Corcoran, MirandaThis PhD Thesis by Prior Publication is comprised of two parts: the creative component and the critical component. The creative component consists of the novels I have published to date: The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow (2018) and All Along the Echo (2022), supplied separately. The critical component is contained in this document, along with a brief appendix. The critical component is entitled “Converging for a moment: a critical overview of immersion in imaginative space in The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow and All Along the Echo.” It explores the life experiences, practice processes and thematic concerns (often intertwining) that produced the creative component, with a focus on the importance of language, materiality and embodiment in real and imagined spaces. Drawing on writing by Marc Augé, Dora Massey, Virginia Woolf, Sondra Perl, Guy Debord and Lisa Clughen, among others, senses of place, and indeed felt bodily senses, and how writing can approach them, form a fundamental core of that exploration. The thesis also discusses the roles of the reader and the writer in conjuring imaginative work. Using a wide frame of reference, appropriate to the life, work and research of a fiction writer, the aim of the critical component is to chart a path through my life experience and my writing process to my published work, with a focus on theories of place and non-place as a lens for that path. Excluding its prelude, introduction and conclusion, the critical component is formed of four major parts. “The Terms” explains what writing means to me, as an act, and from there builds in how that affects the process by which my work can be produced. “The Process” deals with the evolution of my writing process, with a focus on its materiality and physicality. “The Ideas” probes concepts of place and non-place as presented in Marc Augé’s Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1997), and “The Work” links these theories about writing and place to my life experience, my creative practice and, ultimately, the creative output that forms the creative component of the thesis.Item Will you stay and watch me dying? Hybridising transmedia and bricolage as a means of staging the post-traumatic(University College Cork, 2022-08-19) McQueen, Patricia Darling; Cronin, Bernadette; Kelly, Marie; Irish Research CouncilAs technology increasingly dominates lived experience in the 21st-century, theatre artists are moving beyond traditional boundaries, harnessing the energy of popular media to tell stories in innovative ways. The aesthetic languages of these works often fragment, distort, or magnify layers of meaning to produce profound, novel expression of theatrical experiences that cannot be separated from their media elements. This dissertation explores an original hybridisation of transmedia technologies and bricolage scripting in order to interrogate how a combination of live performance and transmediated images can deepen the representational capacity of the portrayal of post-traumatic experience in the process of creating theatrical artworks. Exploring how theatre performance can harness the communicative power of technologies in imagistic, symbolic, and metaphorical ways – with the intention of offering distinct strategies for the exploration of the representation of post- traumatic experience – this dissertation further reflects on the process of hybridisation, the relationship between desired aesthetic outcomes, and the various elements connected to the process of bricolage creation. The practical components of this research project explored the reliance of live theatre on physical presence in conjunction with ephemeral technologies which, despite their lack of tangible substance, constitute much of our daily lives. The development of practical dramaturgical strategies, such as bricolage scripting and transmedia storytelling, contributed to the production of a full-length theatrical artwork-in-progress: Will You Stay and Watch Me Dying? The process involved in the creation of this production concentrated on excavating psychological dynamics in a sociological historical context and metaphorically staging the complexity of those dynamics through the physical assemblage of text, images, and live bodies on stage.Item Enchanting things: cultural object performance and practice encounters with material performatives(University College Cork, 2022) Burton, Leslie; O'Gorman, Roisin; Kelly, Marie; Irish Research CouncilWithin the neoliberal, capitalist Anthropocene, over-saturation in material culture and passive acceptance of the overwhelming circulation of objects has led, quite literally, to a toxic relationship with (supposedly) disenchanted materiality. In this thesis, I argue that, in addition to being a performance practice that generates sites of potentially reparative enchantment, object performance also offers a neglected entry point for observation and analysis of the multiplicity of hidden material enchantments at work in contemporary culture. In all its forms, material performance, object theatre, puppetry – the performative animation of things – offers blatantly, and, sometimes, subversively, naive alternatives to hegemonic, largely digitized practices of representation. While its ubiquity renders puppetry arts forever familiar, providing points of profound connection between people (and their material-cultural environments), puppetry’s drama in performance relies on its inherent uncanniness, on its strange ability to unsettle us even when we know how it “works.” Despite its apparent simplicity as an art form, object performance presents us with the collapse of some of the primary binary oppositions upon which Western culture rests: subject and object, mind and matter, visible and invisible, truth and trickery, dead and alive. Grounded in new materialist ethics and the interdisciplinary imperatives of performance studies, this practice-led research travels transverse paths of creative arts practice and cultural analysis in the development of a critical approach to object performance that I call puppeting. Puppeting is a way of seeing and thinking that arises from engaging with materiality to make and perform with puppets. Puppeting therefore takes as given that making is itself a kind of thinking, that objects and materials are active collaborators in the thought process, and that the union of imagination and material, as negotiated through movement, produces physical manifestations of thought that influence their surroundings by virtue of their presence. With these givens in place, puppeting allows us to understand the enchantments of particularly situated objects and performances, and furthermore to recognize that such performances are going on all around us all the time. Indeed, between the specialized space of the theatre, where artistic puppets inspire affective experience, and the “normal” space of daily life, where functional objects regulate lived experience (traffic cones come to mind), there is the in-between space of cultural performance (the political rally, religious ritual, community celebration, etc.), where performing objects like effigies, relics, and fetishes do both. Through participant observation, autoethnography, and critical analysis, this study identifies different modes of enchantment, both “good” and “bad,” as revealed by puppeting. By participating in alternative, even utopian, practices of world-making in a marionette workshop in Prague, on a Vermont farm with the Bread and Puppet theatre, in her own studio in Ireland, and along the route of the All Souls Procession in southern Arizona, the puppetry artist encounters enchantments of liberatory interconnection conjured in the course of creating and performing puppetry. As anyone who has ever read a fairytale can tell, however, not all enchantments are delightful; the latter half of the study focuses on the puppetry scholar's analyses as she identifies oppressive, divisive enchantments in cultural performances including the historical European practice of effigy destruction, the hangings-in-effigy of President Barack Obama across the USA after 2008, and the display of fetish-like plastic fetuses by anti-choice activist groups, particularly in Ireland's 2018 Abortion Rights Campaign. In each of these sites, puppeting offers a new lens through which to analyse the performative power of objects in performance, exposing the reflective and constitutive messages hidden in their depths, in the hope that understanding how these kinds of enchantments work will help us to produce more of the “good” enchantments and to avoid falling for the “bad” ones.