Theresa Coffey: Becoming with curatorial performance practice.

Field of study: Performance Practice

How might the conditions of musical encounter be seen to explore and affect the modes of agency and subjectivity that emerge in and through performance? And how are performers’ modes of knowing and understanding entangled with such conditions?

Theresa Coffey's doctoral project explores such questions in that which it terms “curatorial performance practices”: practices in which performers both configure and situate musical works in a critical relational context and configure the conditions of encounter to activate performative contingency. The dissertation then explores how such practices make propositions of subjectivity and agency.

Three case studies combine performance and interview analysis, drawing on a diffractive reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage philosophy and Barad’s (2007) agential realism to articulate how entangled agencies, agential cuts, and lines of flight and sedimentation emerge in curatorial performance practice. A fourth case study involving artistic research inverts the theoretical framework to explore the author’s own entangled subjectivity through curatorial performance practice. The dissertation proposes a reciprocal becoming of artist and practice.

The dissertation

The dissertation is titled Becoming with curatorial performance practice. Emergence of perform(ance/er) agencies, subjectivities, and artist(ic) haecceity in curatorial music performance.

The dissertation is a monograph, and it is written in English.

The dissertation is available in NMH's digital library.