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Dr Tim Cowbury
Lecturer in TheatreResearch Overview
Research
My research is grounded in my theatre-making and playwriting practice, which blends autofiction and (post)dramatic writing with collaboration and co-creation. Since co-founding my theatre company in 2009, I’ve worked with a diverse range of artists and communities to examine the increasingly precarious and mediatized way that many people live and work. Recent research has connected the politics of theatre-makers’ experiences ‘offstage’ with the politics that shows up ‘onstage’, unearthing histories that shape current conditions. I’m interested in what makes (and breaks) a good ‘scene’: a setting in which people feel able to move and connect with others in ways that are socially and politically productive.
I’ve looked, for example, at how the neoliberal creative economy context develops structures of feeling that intensify pressure on theatre-makers to reperform now-established ‘alternative’ tropes stemming from the 1960s. I’ve charted how this reperformance is resisted in my own performances and in recent work by theatre-makers including Lucy McCormick, Sleepwalk Collective and In Bed With My Brother. In 2027 I'm beginning a new project on the modernist legacy within contemporary theatre-making done in the shadow of big tech and far right ‘disruptor’ culture. This project continues my interest in combining practice and scholarly research to investigate how past forms of dissenting politics and experimental aesthetics can be renovated to build solidarity amongst diversely precarious people.
PhD Supervision Interests
I'm interested in supervising PhD projects connected to the politics of performance, cultural materialist and affect theory, neoliberalism and precarity, twentieth century theatre and art histories, and intersections of playwriting, devising and co-creation in contemporary theatre-making.