Dr Karen Quigley

Karen’s research interests include: critical approaches to staging and stageability, contemporary performance practices in Britain and Ireland, feminist theatre, site-specific and interactive performance, research and development practices in theatre and performance.

Karen’s research wonders about moments of unstageability at the theatre. Her most recent project attempts to provide a counter-dialogue to conventional modern theatre histories, which tend to focus on what the theatre has been able to stage at any particular time, but rarely on what it has not. Her monograph on this subject, Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure, articulates a new and innovative framework for thinking through impossibility and unstageability in contemporary theatre and performance, and will be published by Bloomsbury in 2020.

She is also interested in site-based performance practices, particularly in terms of spectatorship and pedagogies. With funding from the HRC at York, she has completed a pilot study on teaching site-based performance practices, which involved a short series of longform, site-based research interviews with prominent scholar-practitioners in this area.

Alongside other colleagues at York, Karen is currently investigating how research and development (R&D) processes enrich and enliven theatre and performance practices, even when these processes are distinct from rehearsal and/or production.