[ZOOM link for lecture will be emailed 24hrs in advance]

In this presentation, I will reflect on twenty years of making practice-research performances in a variety of form and formats. These include touring productions as director and performer with Lusty Juventus Physical Theatre; the dancefilm Heaven Is a Place (2014); and solo performances that might be described variously as re-enactments, stand-up, live art, and storytelling. With the benefit of hindsight and taken as a whole, it is possible to see how they attempt to generate insight that not only combines methodologically but is also about familial, aesthetic and cultural histories and genealogies; that interrogate how one prepares for intersubjective exchanges in moments of performance, characterised always as an event; and that acknowledge how the present includes absence, what is no longer (or perhaps has never been). This ‘body of work’ has both been shaped by a/my body working in specific professional, cultural and scholarly contexts, and has shaped a deeper understanding of this body. As such, I will consider how the expectation of “assessable” research outputs operates in tension with the sense that my research findings are cumulatively manifest in and inseparable from my body’s materiality, extended spatio-temporality, and tacit knowledge in ways that are not assimilable to technique nor skill.

Roberta Mock is Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Plymouth where she is also the founding Director of the Doctoral College. She is the author or editor of five books – most recently, Joshua Sofaer: Performance/Objects/Participation (co-edited with Mary Paterson; Intellect Books, 2020). She is currently Co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded project “Sustainable Materials in the Creative Industries” and the Chair of the Theatre & Performance Research Association (TaPRA).