- Normate I Mien: This project, a SSHRC-funded collaboration with dance artist Rob Kitsos and sound artist Nancy Tam, seeks to develop new modes of interdisciplinary artistic collaboration and research/creation by investigating how aesthetic strategies related to the creation and performance of gesture, language, and sound might help to challenge our preconceived notions of normal self-expression in everyday life. It emerges out of our interest in the compositional strategies shared by dance, theatre and music, and is based on a series of participant interviews conducted by Rob. Our goal is to use the transcripts from these interviews to workshop a performance, asking how the different ways of making and reading meaning across artistic disciplines can speak to questions of neurodiversity.
- Talking Back to the Anthropocene: Lecture Performance and the Discourse of Artistic Critique: This very new project, in seeking to theorize lecture-performance as an interdisciplinary art form that mixes consciously aesthetic techniques and performance practices with a pedagogical focus on institutional and social critique, aims to trace the history of lecture-performance as a genre, from its "pre-history" in the nineteenth-century artist lecture circuit to its "post-Internet" proliferation via digital platforms like Ted Talks. It also will attempt to show how this history, coinciding with the intensification of the effects of the Anthropocene, calls attention to the ways in which contemporary artists working across the disciplines of visual and performance art, theatre, dance, film, and music have increasingly turned to the discursive methods of lecture-performance to comment on some of our current epoch's most egregious human-created catastrophes, including colonialism, war, an global climate change.
- Performing Vancouver: This project continues my place-based investigations of Vancouver’s performance ecology (broadly defined), exploring over a series of essays (that may or may not eventually cohere into a book) the local contours of site, the national networks of scale, and the global relays of social difference that help to define the city’s contemporary cultural geography. Publications related to this project include:
- "Choreographies of Place: Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn," in Performance Studies in Canada, eds. Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 90-114.
- "Vancouverism and its Cultural Amenities: The View from Here," Canadian Theatre Review 167 (Summer 2016): 40-47.
- With Kirsty Johnston and Keren Zaiontz, "Vancouver after 2010: An Introduction," Canadian Theatre Review 164 (2015): 5-9.
- "Showing Support: Some Reflections on Vancouver's Dance Economies," Canadian Theatre Review 162 (2015): 10-15.
- "Murdered and Missing Women: Performing Indigenous Cultural Memory in British Columbia and Beyond," Theatre Survey 55.2 (2014): 202-232.
- "PuShing Performance Brands in Vancouver," Theatre Research in Canada 35.2 (2014): 130-150.
- Procedures for a Rescue: A new play that presents a series of vignettes set on different beaches around the globe over the course of the last two centuries. The scenes unfold in reverse chronological order, providing a window onto different male relationships—from the platonic to the martial to the romantic—via the perspectives of two time-traveling female lifeguards.
- French Lessons: Another new play-in-progress, this one a two-hander that unfolds as a series of alternating monologues. It tells the story of a Canadian businesswoman’s vacation to Paris, and the surprising discoveries she makes about the city and herself as a result of a succession of oblique encounters with different women—some fictional contemporaries, others historical personages—named Marie. Along the way, the audience receives instruction in: aspects of the French language; Gallic cooking and wine; the connection between the House of Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud and women’s sexual pleasure; French colonial history and continental philosophy; the secular foundations of the modern Republic; and the film oeuvre of Catherine Deneuve.