Graduate Student, English
School of English
Thesis Title: Performing returns: contested stories and the audience
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Steve Bottoms
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About
I am a writer, researcher, lecturer and artist living and working in Leeds, particularly interested in theatre writing and performance, photography, walking practice, storytelling and the city.
In my PhD research, I am looking at two examples of art as case studies that in some way create a return to a political situation for the spectator. These case studies are Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, and Graeme Miller’s Linked. Both address situations that arose for specific groups of local people as a result of Conservative policy under the Thatcher Government of 1979-1990.
I suggest that these pieces of work use different processes of storytelling to perform aspects pertinent to a specific group of people and in doing so uncover an alternative history to the accepted story of the events at the time. Deller’s Orgreave in re-enacting a key battle enabled access to an alternate perspective of the miners’ strike. Miller’s Linked enabled the narrators of a particular piece of cultural resistance to the road-building scheme of the Thatcher government to be heard anew. In each chapter, I will consider how each artwork employs different kinds of storytelling, and how each might affect spectators.
My work is currently looking at the following completely unrelated areas: geographies of fear, ethics of speech, the work and poetry of Nick Cave and the significance of the document in performance.
My current art practice is concerned with making the familar strange using large scale format cameras. I am also working on adapting a version of one of my earlier plays into a comic format.
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