The performing mobilities network aims to further creative research exploring the intersections of performance and mobility by generating projects, events and forums and building resources for artists and researchers.
In an era of varied forms and degrees of global mobility of people, labour, goods, services, capital and information, the performance of such movements demonstrate revealing cultural characteristics. There is much dynamic tension in the range of mobilities currently being performed. It is clear that opportunities for movement and capabilities of movement are distributed unevenly, are contested, and create precarious conditions.
Concurrent with this trend is how modes of performative work are being conditioned by new relationships to motion. Arts projects are departing from located site-specific sites to enact the performing of such mobilities. We witness a field of performative art works increasingly situated in transit: by boat, tram, truck, shipping container and on-foot, to name but a few, whilst old and new mobile figures are being thought through performance. Tourists, migrants, traders, walkers, guides, contemporary artists, and travelling folk artists, students and researchers are encountering variously interconnected but differentiated ways of moving and being moved through local and global networks.
performative research into mobility
How are performative modes of creative inquiry and production demonstrating what is at stake in the contemporary ‘mobility paradigm’?
How can performativity shift and relocate the economic, cultural, social and environmental value attributed to mobility and immobility?
contemporary (im)mobility and the formation of new performativity
How are the differentiated mobilities of people in local and global networks constituting particular modes of performative agency and performance encounters?
What critical opportunities might emerge from the way mobile sites and practices can condition new dynamics in performance experience?
ethics, empowerment and (im)mobility
How is the performance of mobility able to produce desired forms of social recognition for contemporary migrants, folk artists, culturally and regionally located creative practitioners?
In what ways are the uneven distribution of mobility opportunities manifesting new performances of contestation, conflict and the structuring of inequity?
In what ways are new performance practices negotiating the aesthetics and politics of making mobile performance encounters that are informed by domains of mobility, such as tourism, labour markets, transportation cultures and irregular migration?
How might performance works make critical contribution to local, national and global debates concerning mobilities?