Over the past couple of years I have attempted to develop my approach to performance research by thinking about the ways in which my personal experiences feed into my reading of plays, and my writing about them. For me this is a political act. Far too much performance scholarship still fails to explicitly acknowledge the subject position of the writer, or to think through ways in which our understanding of artworks is conditioned by our social, cultural and ethnic positions. In their excellent book Habitus of The Hood, Chris Richardson and Hans Skott-Myhre argue that our habitus – that is our classed, embodied learned behaviours – structure our interpretations. We will all read a play, novel, film or painting differently depending on our personal embodied experiences and the ways in which the artwork operates to evoke these.

In my latest publication ‘Ruin Lust and the Council Estate: Nostalgia and Ruin in Arinze Kene’s God’s Property’, I use the discourse of ruin to think through ways in which Kene’s play – set in Deptford in 1981 – evoked my experiences as white, South East London native. I discuss how the ‘dialectal landscape’ (Smithson) of the play produced a ‘paradoxical site’ where nostalgia and ruin intertwined to give way to critique of racism.

You can read my article in the special issue of Performance Research, On Ruins and Ruination, by clicking here.