Poppy Corbett, who is in her final year of study for a PhD in the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance, had an article published in the journal Performance Research earlier this year. The title of the journal issue is ‘On Proximity’ and it is co-edited by Ben Cranfield and Louise Owen. The issue follows a symposium organised by Cranfield and Owen titled ‘Conventions of Proximity in Art, Theatre and Performance’ at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2016.

Poppy’s article, titled ‘When “Lady in Red” plays, Dance with the Person Next to You’: The politics of proximity in Kim Noble’s “You’re Not Alone”’, analyses the dramaturgies of proximity employed by the performance artist Kim Noble in his show You’re Not Alone. The article focuses on how Noble uses moments of abjection and precarity to explore loneliness in contemporary neoliberal society and turns to the work of Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Imogen Tyler, amongst others.

Poppy’s doctoral research addresses contemporary theatre’s current fascination with investigating ‘the real’ and looks at how current practitioners explore and stage ‘the real’. This work investigates three case studies: Alecky Blythe, Tim Crouch and Kim Noble.

Performance Research is a prominent theatre journal with a focus on contemporary performance arts. The journal was founded in 1995 by Ric Allsopp, Richard Gough and Claire MacDonald and conjoins artistic and theoretical research. Also included in the journal issue is an article by Dr Liam Jarvis, who completed his PhD at Royal Holloway and is now a Lecturer at the University of Essex.

You can read the article here.