I have been frankly terrible at keeping up this news section of my website, and a full year has now gone by since I last updated it.  Below is archived “News.”  But of course, given that I didn’t really keep up the news site for the last year, a lot has happened that I haven’t mentioned, and a lot is happening that I haven’t mentioned.  But Frankly, Internet, I don’t give a Dame.  Or something like that.  At least that’s how I feel today, and that’s all that all the internet news sites of every professional website ever are, really.  A record of how that person felt about chronicling and validating their professional achievements on that particular day.

A lot of lovely things have happened.  I will write them all down one day.

November 2014 – At the beginning of the month I was in Budapest, finishing up a research trip for a series of residencies with Art Quarter Budapest in 2015, for a large scale project about history, revolution and cinema.

Throughout November and December, I worked as dramaturg for Made in China‘s piece Tonight I’m Going to Be the New Me which premiered in August of 2015 at Forest Fringe.

Along with digital concepts by Rhiannon Armstrong and Ben Pacey, my digital concept “Another You” was selected to go through to the second phase of scratch development for Battersea Arts Centre’s Scratch-on-the-space project. Rhiannon Armstrong’s beautiful piece was ultimately chosen for the full commission but programmer Oscar Wyatt and I had a great time working on our project.  You can see some of what we did by following @deborahpearsona on twitter.

On November 13th I  co-presented “Narrative Realness and the Illusion of Now” with Kathryn Siegel at the London Action Resource Centre. I read out an old work-in-progress script of The Future Show and Kathryn will be discussing her research on anti-narrative, anti-illusionistic American film and video practice in the 1970s.

On November 20th I prepared and then performed the 25th full length version of The Future Show at the Marlborough Theatre in Brighton. This was be the end of the UK tour of the full length version of The Future Show and the beginning of a break from re-writing the script for the foreseeable.  The full version of the show was since performed at the Malta Poznan Festival in June of 2015, curated by Tim Etchells for the New World Order series.

Disclosed Location with Vlatka Horvat

March – I returned from Bergen, Norway, where I was fortunate enough to take part in Vlatka Horvat’s project Disclosed Location, produced by Volt, along with Augusto Corrieri, Wendy Houston and Pedro Gomez Egena. Vlatka asked four artists to each create an imaginary tour of a real abandoned shopfront in downtown Bergen. I created a ghost tour that slowly morphed into a lecture on ghosts and the paranormal, in which I based all my research on my own irrational hunches and superstitions. No video documentation is available, but Volt will be putting audio documentation and photographs online soon.

April 13th I presented a paper on curation as a form of artistic practice in Montreal at the 2014 Symposium for ACAQ – a conference hosted by the Association of Arts Curators, Quebec.

May 5th I ran the fifth edition of InForming Content with Volcano in Canada, at the Jackman Humanities Institute. InForming Content is an annual weekend intensive workshop, in which a group of artists working in theatre and performance collaborate with students to respond to an academic’s lecture by making a site specific piece of performance in the same offices where they do their research. It is a workshop that seeks a creative dialogue between artists and academic researchers. Read more about it here.

May 7th – 10thI was at the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, Australia, with my performance research project Drifting Right. On May 11th I presented my “findings” at a Breakfast Club event at the Wheeler Centre, where we discussed the possibility of dialogue between those on the political left and those on the right.

May 21st and 22nd and June 15th – The Future Show was on at Mayfest and NIGHTWATCH. Read an interview with me about the show here and a review from the wonderful Ed Rapley here.

May 31st – I presented at the British Theatre Consortium’s “Roar of the Crowd” conference on audiences and spectatorship, on a panel with Colin from Punchdrunk, Annette Mees from Coney, Tim Crouch, and Ramin Gray, director of David Greig’s The Events.

July – I did dramaturgy for two different projects by artists whose work I deeply admire – the choreographer and maker Dan Canham at the National Theatre Studio, and Canadian writer performer Haley McGee during the making of a piece called “I’m Doing This For You” at Battersea Arts Centre. Haley created the Edinburgh sleeper hit Oh My Irma which was on at the Hill Street Theatre last year.

September 3rd – I performed The Future Show as part of TaPra (The Theatre and Performance Research Association Conference) at Royal Holloway in Egham.

September 26th, 27th and 28th – The Future Show at Culturgest in Lisbon. It was a total privilege to be double billed with Tim Crouch and Andy Smith’s brilliant What Happens to the Hope at the End of the Evening.
How I ended up in such great company I’ll never know.

October 4th – 6th – The Future Show at Abron Arts Centre in Manhattan was part of a Forest Fringe microfestival. Made in China, Brian Lobel and Andy Field and Ira Brand also featured in the programme.