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Professor Adrian Heathfield

Professor of Performance and Visual Culture

Telephone : +44 (0)20 8392 3297
Email : A.Heathfield@roehampton.ac.uk
Department : Drama, Theatre and Performance
Office location : Jubilee 211

Send a message to Professor Adrian Heathfield

About

Adrian is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Roehampton, based in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance. He is the co-director, with Gavin Butt and Lois Keidan, of Performance Matters, a three-year creative research project on the cultural value of performance. He supervises numerous PhD students and convenes the MRes in Performance and Creative Research.

Adrian has taught performance practice and theory and he has given research lectures in many different contexts internationally. He has received research, arts and publication awards from the AHRC, the British Academy, the Arts Council of England, the Millennium Commission, arts trusts and regional arts boards. He was President of Performance Studies international (2004-2007).

The critical anthology he recently co-edited with Amelia Jones, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, is available from Intellect Books and the University of Chicago Press. A Chinese translation of his recent monograph Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (MIT Press and the Live Art Development Agency 2009) will be published by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum later this year.

Research Interests

Adrian's research on live art and performance spans critical theory, creative and curatorial practice. His work questions the ethics of the encounter between the spectator and the artwork, elaborating its significance through debates on the status of sensory experience within cultural knowledge, the politics of commemoration and shifts in the perception and presentation of mortality.

Consultancies Undertaken

Adrian co-curated the Live Culture events at Tate Modern, London (2003) and a number of other performance and durational events at cultural centres in European cities over the last ten years. His work as an educator has extended beyond university environments into the cultural sector internationally, where he often creates practical workshops involving established and emerging artists. He has worked in numerous arts institutions and locations including: Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt; Theater Academy of Finland, Helsinki; Impulstanz and Tanzquartier, Vienna; Nordscen in Vilnius, Lithuania, Danish National Theatre School Copenhagen and Bergen, Norway; Goat Island Summer School in Chicago and Bristol; and Tate Modern, London. He has run collaborative workshops with Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment), Lloyd Newson (DV8) and the choreographer Jonathan Burrows.

Teaching Interests

Adrian has supervised numerous research degrees, with PhD and MRes students completing theses in areas as diverse as: the clown and laughter, trauma theory and testimony in arts practice, feminist performance and catharsis, space and dance-theatre, the relations between photography and performance, medical discourse and the performing body, masochism and performance, and national identity in post-colonial theatre. He is currently supervising theses on dramaturgy and surprise, performance and the life of objects, live art and theatricality, choreographies of exposure and the emotions in performance. He welcomes applications from research students wishing to study in any area of contemporary live, performance and interdisciplinary art, particularly projects focused around issues of embodiment, time, performative writing, mortality, and the liminal. Adrian has supervised eight doctoral theses to completion and currently supervises eleven PhD researchers working across practice and theory.

Publications

‘Dramaturgy without a Dramaturge’, Rethinking Dramaturgy: Errancy and Transformation, Centro Parraga & CENDEAC, (in English & Spanish) 2010.
‘Intangibles of Performance’, Babylon Europe: Boundless 
Languages, Marsilio, 2008.
‘Impossible Return’,On Magic Cabinet 26, Summer, New York, 2007.
‘Risk in Intimacy’ and ‘Saying the Unsayable’, interviews in Bobby 
Baker Ed. Michelle Barrett, Routledge, 2007.
‘Writing of Performance’, A Performance Cosmology, Eds. Richard 
Gough, Daniel Watt, Judie Christie, Routledge 2006.
‘After the Fall: Dance-Theatre and Dance-Performance’, Contemporary 
Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, Eds. Joe Kelleher and Nicholas 
Ridout, Routledge, 2006.
‘End Time Now’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Vol. 3, 
No. 4, Winter, Art & Collection Group Ltd, (in English & Chinese) 2004.
‘In Memory of Little Things’,La Ribot, Merz and Centre National De 
La Danse (in English & French) 2004.
‘as if things got more real’, interview inNot Even A Game Anymore: The Theatre of 
Forced Entertainment, Eds. Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher, Alexander 
Verlag, (in English & German) 2004.
‘Last Laughs’, On Correspondence, Performance Research, Vol. 9, No. 
2, 2004.
‘Drawing In Thin Air’, dialogue in Frakcija, Vol. 24/25, (in English & Croatian) 2002.
‘Coming Undone’, It’s an Earthquake in My Heart: A Reading 
Companion, Goat Island, 2001.
‘Facing the Other: The Performance Encounter and Death’, 
Assemblages/Love and Mourning/Dialogues, Space and Culture, No. 7/8/9 2001.
‘Archived Presence’, Connect 2: Technology, New York 2001.
‘Blood Math’, dialogue in The Performance of Love, Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, 
No. 2, April 2001.
‘Out of Sight: Forced Entertainment and the Limits of Vision’, Void 
Spaces, Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2000.
Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, Intellect Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2012. Co-editor with Amelia Jones.
Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, MIT Press and the Live Art Development Agency, 2009.
Live: Art and Performance, Tate Publishing and Routledge, 2004. Editor.
Small Acts: Performance, the Millennium, and the Marking of Time, Black Dog Publishing, 2000. Editor.
On Memory, Performance Research, Vol. 5 No. 3, Routledge, December, 2000. Guest Co-editor with Andrew Quick.
Shattered Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance, Arnolfini Live, 1997. Co-editor with Fiona Templeton and Andrew Quick.

DVDs:

Writing not yet Thought, Hélène Cixous in conversation with Adrian 
Heathfield, filmed by Hugo Glendinning, Performance Matters, 2011. 



Somewhere Near Variety, dialogue with Tim Etchells, Live Art 
Development Agency in collaboration with Forced Entertainment, 2006.
© Roehampton University