People

Dr Giles Bailey

Since 2005 I have been working with performance as a central element of my practice and engaging with the international development of work in this field. Although I have produced work to be performed myself (often as a solo), increasingly, I work with others and shape projects around an interest in the way material or experience is shared performatively through social and personal relationships. Via this approach, I have put emphasis on performance as a cooperative tool to navigate and present ideas with groups of individuals. This is informed by looking to collaborative structures used in other performance disciplines such as experimental theatre, dance and musical composition.

A further extension of this research explores how performance’s social character could be used to rethink conventional approaches to assembling and recounting history. Working with texts, video fragments and choreographies, either composed myself or strategically appropriated from elsewhere, these works aim to propose a historiographic model that critically acknowledges doubt, and subjectivity as inevitable factors when making sense of past events that shape contemporary understanding. Sceptical of the idea of any ‘authentic’ account, I look to the fractured, incomplete and multilayered nature of mediations of information (via a web browser for example) as a tool to structure performances and inform the collage of their composition.

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/people/profile/gilesbailey.html