Dr. Kate Adams
School of Arts and Media
Current positions
Lecturer in Drama
I am a performance maker, dramaturg and a university lecturer at the University of Salford. I graduated with a PhD in contemporary theatre and the rise of the spectacle from the University of Hull and worked full time at the University of Salford for several years before shifting to part time to focus more on practice and practice-based research.
My current work is Water is Attracted to Water, an Arts Council funded project about the human relationship with water. I am working on ways of facilitating the difficult encounter with climate change through performance and how to weave celebration and lamentation into theatre. Previous work And By the Way the Cat is Dead explored our struggle to find rituals and modes of expressing grief and my short solo performance Μα Ποια Παπια (or I’m not a Pheasant Plucker) explored vulnerability, foolishness and miscommunication across languages and cultures.
I have worked as dramaturg and performer in collaboration with Medie Megas for Trapped co-produced by the Onassis Cultural Foundation and the National Theatre of Greece and as dramaturg with a number of different directors.
More information about my work can be found on my website.
Areas of research
Dramaturgy, Interdisciplinary performance, Climate Change, Mythopoeisis
I am the module leader for Professional Writing for the Culture Industries at level 5; and Performance and the Postdramatic at level 6. I also teach on the MA module Approaches to Contemporary Performance.
I teach a combination of practice and theory, and my teaching assumes that practice and research are always intertwined.
Having started from a concern with the politics of form, I am interested in how the theatre event can open up spaces for practiced vulnerability and can encounter with difficult territories such as the climate crisis. I have a strong focus on spectatorship, participation, and the transformative in performance and performance process. My framing of both research and practice draws on the work of Bracha Ettinger to underpin how we theorise the encounter in performance.
I write and perform my own work as part of my practice-based research into vulnerability and intimacy in performance and I am currently examining how this can contribute to the spectator experience and the workings of the piece on a dramaturgical level. In my collaborative work, I am also working across textual, performative and choreographic practices as a director, dramaturg and performer.
At PhD level, I am interested in supervising applicants with a wide range of interests in contemporary performance and particularly working on ecology or climate performance, the boundary of fiction and nonfiction, the transformative in performance, experiential theatre and spectatorship, time and performance, dramaturgy, the text in performance and more broadly the politics of form.
Qualifications
- PhD : “From Narrative to Spectacle: An examination of Contemporary Theatre performance”, University of Hull, 2009.
- PGCert: Research, University of Hull, 2006.
- PGCE: Secondary English and Drama, Institute of Education, 2001
- BA (Hons) English Studies, University of Nottingham, 1999
Memberships
- Theatre and Performance Research Network (TaPRA)
- Contemporary Performance Network
- Climate Psychology Alliance