The artist interrogates violence: A Practice-as-research project considering the efficacy of different forms and styles of theatre through a portfolio approach which articulates and animates narratives of violence in private and public domains.

A creative and theoretical interrogation into the symbiosis between violence as a matrixed systemic and individual act. My practice-as-research involves using the relationships founded in live performance to interrogate the interdependence of private and public displays of violence, generating an ‘archive of the permissible’. The critical commentary begins by articulating my research questions as to the interplay between intimate and extimate violence, before moving to document and evaluate such representations in my creative practice. Each of the four-performance works presented aims to disrupt societal address to images of violence, using theatre as a dialogical tool, playing with imagery to sensitise audiences to explicit and sensitive subjects. Each creative work is animated by one of my research questions, and experiments with form and modes of receivership to create a suite of interlocking works aiming to add to the wider debate and ownership over narratives of violence. The critical section of this thesis opens by exploring the socio-cultural intertextualities that have informed my practice-as-research, and I enrich this context by then identifying works of performance artists, playwrights, and theorists as influencers and case-studies. The second part of my commentary focusses on artistic process, unpicking the problematics of ethical but effective representation of images and narratives of violence, to create activated response for social change within the audience. I identify the artistic challenges of approaching discussions of violence and the precarious co-existence of sensitising and desensitising audiences to these subjects, namely; pornography as a cultural shaper on heteronormative identity and intimate relationship behaviours, the pervasive presence of workplace violence, and the frequency of domestic violence in relationships, theorising these as a co-dependent interexchange of violence. The thesis details my methodology as an artist; script-writing, rehearsal process and performance, whilst acknowledging and evaluating my research findings according to the overarching research questions.