Dr Laura Cull
Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies and Director of Postgraduate Research for the School of Arts
Email: l.cull@surrey.ac.uk
Phone: Work: 01483 68 6451
Room no: 03 NC 01
Further information
Biography
Laura Cull is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies and Director of Postgraduate Research for the School of Arts.
She is author of 'Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance' (forthcoming with Palgrave in November 2012); editor of 'Deleuze and Performance' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009); and co-editor with Karoline Gritzner of “On Philosophy and Participation” (Routledge, 2011): an issue of the journal Performance Research. Laura has also published a number of articles and book chapters on a variety of topics but particularly on the implications of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze for theatre and performance.
Laura is also Secretary of the professional association, Performance Studies international (PSi) and in 2008 she founded the PSi Performance & Philosophy working group of which she was Chair from 2008-2012. She is now one of the founding convenors of Performance Philosophy – a new professional association for researchers interested in the intersection of performance and philosophy (http://performancephilosophy.ning.com/ )
Publications
Journal articles
- . (2012) 'Affect in Deleuze, Hijikata, and Coates: The Politics of Becoming-Animal in Performance'. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 26 (2), pp. 189-203.
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(2012) 'Performance as Philosophy: Responding to the
Problem of ‘Application’'. Cambridge University Press Theatre Research International, 37 (1), pp. 20-27.Full text is available at: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/730262/
Abstract
This article begins from the premise that a ‘critical turning point’ has been reached in terms of the relationship between performance and philosophy. Theatre and performance scholars are becoming increasingly engaged in philosophical discourse and there are growing amounts of work that take philosophy – from the work of Plato to Heidegger and Deleuze – as their guiding methodology for performance analysis. However, this article argues that we need to go further in questioning how we use philosophy in relation to performance, and that theatre and performance scholarship should attempt to go beyond merely applying philosophical concepts to performance ‘examples’. One way to do this, the article suggests, is by questioning the very distinction between performance and philosophy, for instance by exploring the idea of performance as philosophy. The article concludes by drawing from the work of figures such as Allan Kaprow, Henri Bergson, François Laruelle and John Mullarkey to argue that philosophers and performance scholars alike might extend their conception of what counts as thinking to include not only activities like performance, but embodied experiences and material processes of all kinds.
- . (2011) 'On Participation. Editorial to the Special Issue.'. Taylor & Francis Performance Research: a journal of the performing arts, 16 (4), pp. 1-6.
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(2011) 'Attention-training: Immanence and
ontological participation in Kaprow,
Deleuze & Bergson'. Taylor & Francis Performance Research: a journal of the performing arts, 16 (4), pp. 80-91.Full text is available at: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/745974/
Abstract
In this essay I want to look at the works that the American artist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) referred to as ‘Activities’, alongside the philosophy of immanence propounded by Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and with reference to the notion of ‘attention’ developed by Henri Bergson (1859–1941).
- . (2011) 'On Participation. Editorial to the Special Issue.'. Taylor & Francis Performance Research: a journal of the performing arts, 16 (4), pp. 1-6.
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(2009) 'How Do You Make Yourself a Theatre without
Organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the Concept of
Differential Presence'. Cambridge University Press Theatre Research International, 34 (3), pp. 243-255.Full text is available at: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/730258/
Abstract
This article provides an exposition of four key concepts emerging in the encounter between the philosophical man of the theatre, Antonin Artaud, and the theatrical philosopher, Gilles Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, the destratified voice and differential presence. The article proposes that Artaud’s 1947 censored radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Drawing from various works by Deleuze, including Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus and ‘One LessManifesto’, I conceive differential presence as an encounter with difference, or perpetual variation, as that which exceeds the representational consciousness of a subject, forcing thought through rupture rather than communicating meanings through sameness. Contra the dismissal of Artaud’s project as paradoxical or impossible, the article suggests that his nonrepresentational theatre seeks to affirm a new kind of presence as difference, rather than aiming to transcend difference in order to reach the self-identical presence of Western metaphysics.
Conference papers
- . 'Each one is already several… Collaboration in the context of the differential self. Notes on Goat Island & Deleuze & Guattari'. Middlesex University: On Collaboration
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'Schizo-theatre: Guattari, Deleuze, performance and “madness”'. Northumbria University: Situating and Interpreting States of Mind
[ Status: Unpublished ] - .
'Performance-Philosophy: A ‘philosophical turn’ in Performance Studies (and a non-philosophical turn in Philosophy)'. Central School of Speech and Drama: Performing Research: Creative Exchanges
[ Status: Unpublished ]
Books
- . (2012) Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan , pp. viii-291.
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(2009) Deleuze and Performance. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press Full text is available at: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/730260/
Abstract
Was performance important to Deleuze? Is Deleuze important to performance; to its practical, as well as theoretical, research? What are the implications of Deleuze's philosophy of difference, process and becoming, for Performance Studies, a field in which many continue to privilege the notion of performance as representation, as anchored by its imitation of an identity: 'the world', 'the play', 'the self'? Deleuze and Performance is a collection of new essays dedicated to Deleuze's writing on theatre and to the productivity of his philosophy for (re)thinking performance. This book provides rigorous analyses of Deleuze's writings on theatre practitioners such as Artaud, Beckett and Carmelo Bene, as well as offering innovative readings of historical and contemporary performance including performance art, dance, new media performance, theatre and opera, which use Deleuze's concepts in exciting new ways. Can philosophy follow Deleuze in overcoming the antitheatrical tradition embedded in its history, perhaps even reconsidering what it means to think in the light of the embodied insights of performance's practitioners? Experts from the fields of Performance Studies and Deleuze Studies come together in this volume and strive to examine these and other issues in a manner that will be challenging, yet accessible to students and established scholars alike.
Book chapters
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(2013) 'Performance Studies'. in Leonard A, Shephard T (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture
[ Status: Submitted ] - . (2011) 'While remaining on the shore: Ethics in Deleuze’s encounter with Antonin Artaud'. in Jun N, Smith DW (eds.) Deleuze and Ethics Edinburgh University Press , pp. 44-62.
- . (2011) 'Performing presence, affirming difference: Deleuze and the minor theatre of Georges Lavaudant and Carmelo Bene'. in Lavery C, Finburgh C (eds.) Contemporary French Theatre and Performance Palgrave Macmillan , pp. 99-110.
- . (2009) 'sub specie durationis'. in Cull L (ed.) Deleuze and Performance Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press Article number 7 , pp. 126-146.
- . (2009) 'Introduction'. in Cull LK (ed.) Deleuze and Performance Edinburgh University Press
