Institute of Dance, Drama and Performance Studies international associate research fellows
The Drama, Dance and Performance Studies Research Institute has appointed seven International Associate Research Fellows who have established links to our research.
Dr Ha Young Hwang
Ha Young Hwang is currently Professor of Theatre for Young Audiences at Korea National University of Arts. Before returning to Seoul in 2012, she was Assistant Professor on the Theatre Studies programme at National University of Singapore. Her areas of research include embodiment and space in socially engaged theatre, the issues of interactivity in TYA and the intercultural dimensions of contemporary TYA in Korea and other parts of Asian region. She is currently a board member of ITYARN (International Theatre for Young Audiences Research Network) and Korean Editor of A|S|I|A (Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive).
Dr Hanna Järvinen
With postgraduate degrees from New York University and University of Turku, Finland, Dr Hanna Järvinen currently works as a University Lecturer at the Performing Arts Research Centre of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland; and a Senior Researcher in the Academy of Finland research project How to Do Things with Performance?, 2016-2020, led by Annette Arlander. She is also a co-PI with Cecilia Lagerström in the Swedish Research Council workshop project Spectral Collaborations, led by Karmenlara Ely Seidman. Apart from her affiliation with CIRID, she is docent in dance history at the University of Turku.
Research interests:
A specialist in early twentieth-century dance, Dr Järvinen has been contesting canonised perspectives on dance history. She has published on the Orientalisation and Orientalism of the Ballets Russes company, on postmodern dance from the periphery, and on feminist critiques of theories of authorship and genius. Her interests lie in the decolonisation of canons, on epistemology and ontology of dance, and artistic research in the performing arts. Besides works in her native Finnish, she is the author of Dancing Genius (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and her articles have appeared in e.g. Avant, Dance Research, Ruukku, The Senses and Society and Dance Research Journal.
Dr Dani Ploeger
Dani Ploeger explores situations of conflict and crisis on the fringes of the world of high-tech consumerism. His objects, videos, and apps emphasize both the fragility and rawness of the materiality of everyday technologies, while questioning the sanitized, utopian marketing around innovation and its implications for local and global power dynamics. In this context, Quasi-journalistic journeys often provide the starting point for the development of his work. He has made a VR installation while embedded with frontline troops in East Ukraine, travelled to dump sites in Nigeria to collect electronic waste originating from Europe, stole razor wire from the Hungarian anti-immigration fence, and interviewed witnesses of US drone attacks in Pakistan for a project around sound and technologies of violence.
Dani’s artwork is exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals worldwide and he has received commissions from ZKM Center for Culture and Media in Karlsruhe, New Society for Fine Arts Berlin, V2_Lab for unstable media in Rotterdam and the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, among others. His VR installation The Grass Smells So Sweet was awarded the 2018 jury prize of the VRHAM Festival for art and virtual reality in Hamburg. His work is in the public collections of the WRO Art Center in Wroclaw and ZKM in Karlsruhe, as well as private collections across Europe. His work ASSAULT (2016), encompassing an iPad shot with an assault rifle, led to a preliminary investigation for radicalization and extremism by the Dutch public prosecution service.
In his eclectic body of written work, Dani has introduced the concept of ‘digitized planned obsolescence’ (Leonardo, 2017), presented a critical history of computer operating system sounds (The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, 2019) and critiqued English Higher Education as a form of objective violence (Ice Hole Journal, 2016).
He is currently a Research Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, Artistic Researcher at Leiden University and Associate Research Fellow at De Montfort University in Leicester. He lives and works between London, Berlin and Flushing (NL), mostly on trains and ferries.
Photograph by Alexia Manzano.
Duncan Jamieson
Duncan Jamieson is an independent researcher, digital humanities practitioner, translator, and editor. He has taught at Rose Bruford College (2003–04), the University of Exeter (2006–09), and been a resident scholar at the Grotowski Institute (2008–12). In 2012, he co-founded the nonprofit organizations TAPAC: Theatre and Performance Across Cultures (www.tapac.co) and Culture Hub, which have both led and collaborated on a range of Polish and EU-funded cultural heritage and research projects, including as part of the European Capital of Culture 2016. He is co-editor of the peer-reviewed series Polish Theatre Perspectives (www.ptp.press) and co-curator and designer of the new research website OPeRe: Open Performance Resource (in Beta). He has organized several conferences and his articles, edited texts, and translations have appeared in journals such as Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research, Performer (in Polish), and in books published by Bloomsbury, Routledge, and the Grotowski Institute, among others. Most recently, he has written a series of articles on ethics, agency, language, and technology in performance process and research (in press 2020–21).
Dr Adela Karsznia
Adela Karsznia is an independent researcher, translator, and editor. She received her PhD in Theatre from the University of Wrocław, and professional diplomas in Translation (UNESCO centre for Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication) and in Cultural Management (Association Marcel Hicter/Polish National Centre for Culture). She is a former international publishing coordinator and acting head archivist at the Grotowski Institute (2005–12), where she also managed the Icarus-Routledge book series, and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed resource Polish Theatre Perspectives (www.ptp.press) and the digital humanities website OPeRe: Open Performance Resource (in Beta). Her research writing and translations have appeared in Didaskalia, Performer, Performance Research, and in several academic books, films, and edited collections. She is co-founder of the nonprofit organizations TAPAC: Theatre and Performance Across Cultures (www.tapac.co) and Culture Hub, where she has realized several funded multilingual research projects. She has translated, co-translated, or edited for publication between languages more than 600 articles and source texts. She is currently writing about the training and rehearsal process for Apocalypsis cum figuris at Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre, and about the dynamics of cross-cultural/translingual exchange in performance studies.
First and second image, two print publications from the Polish Theatre Perspectives series edited by Duncan Jamieson and Adela Karsznia. Third image, OPeRe: Open Performance Resource site, built by Duncan Jamieson and Adela Karsznia
Dr Traci Kelly
Dr Traci Kelly is an independent artist-scholar with a research led practice that values collaboration as a decentralising and contaminating process. Kelly gained her doctorate from The University of Reading (Performing Intersubjectivity2009) with a project investigating intersubjectivity and collaboration in live art practice. From 2012-14 she formed part of the international research initiative Topographies of the Obsolete (Bergen Academy of Art & Design), which looked at the politics, material residue and performativity of the post-industrial landscape on the site of a deteriorating ceramics factory in Stoke-on-Trent, UK. 2014 saw the publication of her book Feeling It For You (Perspective) with Seers in Residence, an innovative model for a decentralised approach to research dynamics, published by Nottingham Trent University. Her writing and work is published in UK and Norwegian contexts including collaborative writing with Richard Hancock in Artists in the Archive: Creative and Curatorial Engagements with Documents of Art and Performance; Eds. Paul Clark, Simon Jones, Nick Kaye and Johanna Linsley (Routledge 2018) and On Coal, Labour, Collaboration, and UNION: An interview with Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly, Jennie Klein; (Contemporary Theatre Review 2019).
Kelly has developed her own approach to academia and teaches independently across the Higher Education sector including Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway 2020; Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA, 2019; Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Ireland 2018 and the University of Évora, Portugal, 2009.
Within an interdisciplinary practice that values liminal, transitional and over-looked spaces in making and thinking, she engages with the skin boundary and ideas of skin and skinning to create open and evolving dialogues. Works often unsettle notions of corporeal and socio/political subjectivity questioning the status of the lived and material body. Intuitive work with hauntological qualities emerges in relation to specific contexts and sites, the vernacular of place and a poetic turn of materials.
Her shared work with Richard Hancock explores the interstices between their differing subjectivities and investigates collaboration as a site of political ‘becoming’ through co-operative, viral and responsive devising models. Kelly has collaborated with Hancock for almost 20 years as the performance project hancock & kelly, and many of her solo works reference the absence of her long-time co-maker. She also collaborates with artists Rhiannon Jones (Kelly + Jones), UK and Rita Marhaug (KELLY/MARHAUG), Norway. She has performed and exhibited solo and collaborative work internationally in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North and Central America at venues including Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, USA; The Museum of Antiquities, Évora, Portugal and The Leprosy Museum, Bergen, Norway.
From left to right: hancock & kelly (2017), UNION (Part III: A Labour of Images). hancock & kelly (2017) UNION (Part IV: The Gilded Cage). hancock & kelly (2017) UNION (Part IV: The Gilded Cage). All photographs by Paul Samuel White, for ]performance s p a c e [
Dr Kerry Francksen
Kerry Francksen is an experienced educator, artist-researcher, and practitioner, with over two decades of experience in both the University sector and within the creative industries. She continues to work as a professional dancer and choreographer and works as an arts facilitator with cross-sector organisations and institutions.
Her artistic interests focus on ideas relating to intimacy, presence, and embodiment, and her work centres on the complexities of engaging with bodies and new media technologies to create sensuous and intimate performance works. She is a collaborator at heart and has worked with long-term creative partners, composer Simon Atkinson, filmmaker Laura McGregor, and award-winning media artist Mark Coniglio, variously over the past 15 years. Her works, which comprise of live-mediated performance, installation, improvisation in performance, and dance for screen, attempt to fuse body-based movement practices, moving-image projection, and electroacoustic sound to create meditative and sensuous environments. In the past, she has created large-scale one-to-one dance video installations, as well as exploring intimate performative situations where performers, projections, sounds, and audience members are placed in close proximity to one another. Through the convergence of these various practices, her continuing artistic ambition is to engage with a greater sense of responsiveness to live and digital materiality and she is fascinated by the fragility of bodies and the transcendent qualities of images and sounds. Her most recent piece, made in collaboration with Atkinson and McGregor was screened at Screen.Dance, Scotland’s international festival of dance on screen in June 2020. Further details can be found here.
As an educator, Kerry has worked as a Senior Lecturer (most recently at De Montfort University [DMU]) as well as working as an independent artist-researcher. Kerry is a Senior Fellow of the HEA (Higher Education Academy) and holds an MA in Dance Video Installation Art and a PhD in Performance and Digital Art. She is also an experienced HE external examiner and has worked as an advisor for both BA and MA programmes across a range of University courses. She also serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and was Guest Editor for a special issue in 2018. Whilst teaching at DMU she was awarded the title of Teacher Fellow of DMU (2013-2016), in recognition of her approaches to innovative learning and teaching environments. Beyond her experiences in HE, she is regularly involved in cross-sector projects – Kerry is Co-Founder of DAPPER (Digital arts performance practices – emerging research) who brings together experts from both education and industry – as well as having worked for arts organisations such as Creative Leicestershire. Her artistic work has been screened and performed nationally and internationally and she is also published in books and in esteemed journals, such as Leonardo Transactions.
Image of Kerry Francksen on her own: ‘Nocturne’ is a collaborative work by Kerry Francksen, Laura McGregor and Simon Atkinson, which explores the rhythmic encounters between camera, sound, and body in motion. Embraced by sound and obscured by a sense of infinite darkness, the form of the dancer’s body slowly becomes visible as she begins to move closer to the edges of the light. Journeying within the rich, textural depths of the sound pulsing within the darkness, we are navigated through the dimensions of the nocturnal space she inhabits. Photograph by Laura McGregor.
Image of Kerry Francksen and Mark: Kerry Francksen and Mark Coniglio’s performance, "Darling, Darling… You're Fantastic" (2016), places the audience on stage with the performers to explore notions of presence and intimacy, pitting an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness text against a fiercely sensitive dance improvisation. Photograph by Sean Goldthorpe.