Mary Fulkerson

Audio documentation of a lecture given by Malik Nashad Sharpe, on the subject ‘Horror for the Live Context’ on 8th March 2025 at The Garrett Centre.

Culminating his Study Room residency, this talk highlighted some of the utility of making horror as a performance practice, and explored the genre’s potential as a framework for seeing, reading and working with contemporary live performance. During his residency he approached horror as a research tool to tease out an alternative tradition of choreographic practice that contains social resonance and fantastical outcomes, and constitutes a suggestive and speculative lens through which performance can be contextualised.

Artworks referenced and shared in this talk:

‘Shoot’, Chris Burden, 1971, ‘Carcasse’, Piotr Pavlensky, 2013, ‘Rhythm 0’, Marina Abramovic, 1974, ‘American Psycho’, directed by Mary Harron, 2000, ‘Nope’, Directed by Jordan Peele, 2022, ’10 Cloverfield Lane’, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, 2016,  ‘Saw’, directed by James Wan, 2004, ‘Le Manoir de Diable’, directed by George Meillies, 1890, ‘All of us are Dead’, directed by Lee Jae-kyoo; Kim Nam-su, 2022, ‘Untitled Nostalgia 3’, Tiraan Willemse, 2025, ‘Presage’, Elie Autins, 2022, ‘Goner’, Malik Nashad Sharpe, 2024

This is an audio file. For a version with closed captions, please visit our vimeo channel

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

pg. 59-67

In Acts of Affect, siren eun young jung returns to the disappearing Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatre. In her discussion of the project, Ashley Chang examines how masculinity is produced by women.

shado Issue 2 : Global Womxnhood

Feature on poet and performer Tolu Agbelusi.

This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker’s career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, ‘How to Live’ and ‘Diary Drawings’ – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners.

This title offers the gender-bending performances of Dlane Torr, creator of the Man for a Day workshops. This book documents and contextualizes the development of Torr’s internationally celebrated workshops, as well as her own ongoing experiments in performing gender-play in theaters, galleries, and clubs.

Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 31 Issue Number 3 August 2021

Applying a queer phenomenology to unpack the importance of a multiplicity of Self/s, the book guides readers to be academically rigorous when capturing embodied experiences, featuring exercises to activate their practices and clear introductory definitions to key phenomenological terms. Includes interviews and insights from some of the best examples of transgressive performance art practice of this century help to help unpack the application of phenomenology as Bacon calls for a queer reimagining of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’

Featuring conversations, essays, drawings and photographs, Bodies of Knowledge(Ed. Laura Purseglove) reflects and builds on an interdisciplinary project involving artists, amateur and professional dancers, wrestlers, members of a trans community group and academic researchers interrogating how our bodies are both produced by and productive of knowledges.

Book in English with translations to Serbian and French language
With essays by Dr Marina Grzinic, Dr Suzana Milevska and Tanja Ostojić

On hybridity, drag and performance in Bolivian folklore

Performance Research pg 98-106, On Hybridity Volume 25, No 4, June 2020.