Practice-led PhD - ongoing

Embodied Performance Practices in a Digital Multi-Platform Era: the role of immersion and sensorial connection in contemporary performance praxis.

How can embodied performance practices be re-captured and reimagined in a digital age increasingly defined by mediated experience?

This research asks: what is the value of preserving embodied practices, and for whom? Are such practices fundamental to human connection, and if so, how might they be reactivated within contemporary performance contexts?

The project situates itself within a broader socio-cultural moment characterised by both the rapid expansion of digital technologies and the decline of arts funding. While digital platforms increasingly dominate cultural production and dissemination, this research proposes a counterpoint: the creation of non-digitised, embodied encounters that foreground human presence, co-presence, and sensorial experience.

Drawing on concepts such as immersion, participation, and sensory engagement—often associated with digital environments (Causey, 2006), this project seeks to re-situate these within live, embodied contexts. The central hypothesis is that participatory, embodied performance encounters can foster deeper states of connection, both intra-personal and inter-personal, than those typically facilitated through digital means.

The outputs, (A series entitled Shared Encounters with the Real ) aim to create conditions for participants to experience embodiment as an active, co-constructed process rather than a mediated simulation by foregrounding touch, contact, sensorial connections.

Such experiences may not only have artistic value but also broader social and therapeutic relevance, particularly in a context where shared, embodied interactions are increasingly rare.