Doing Theatre in a Queer Way: The Queering Potential of Affect in Contemporary Performance
Guest Lecture by Alyson Campbell
October 20, 2026, 6 - 8 pm | IKM, Gr. Seminarraum E0101, mdw-Campus#Guest Lecture
In this paper I am arguing for a practitioner approach to considerations of shaping affect in performance-making to queer (political) ends. In my earliest work on affect and performance, as a practitioner, I turned to cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert’s proposal of an ‘affective analysis’, that argued for the importance of considering affect alongside signifying qualities of performance when analysing it. I built on this model to propose an active ‘affective approach’ as a maker, thinking dramaturgically about ways to ‘shape affect’ as well as organise meaning in the making and rehearsal process.
Over the last decade or so, I have been attempting to make a queer threesome out of that ‘affect and performance’ couple by adding queerness into the mix. The paper sets out my central methodology of reading aesthetic ‘affective specificity’ (Gilbert) alongside lived/cultural ‘affective particularity’ (Muñoz) – queerness, understood as intersectional – to see how it might work to create affective communities. How, as queer makers, might we take an affective approach and build on this alchemy of affective specificity and affective particularity to make something that feels queer, that does its politics, and theatre, in a queer way? In short, to see what it reveals about queer performance and queerness more broadly; and consider what queer performance can do to, and for, queer people.
Alyson Campbell is a director and dramaturg whose work spans a broad range of companies and venues in Australia, the UK and the US over the last 30+ years. Works include Bison, 4.48 Psychosis, Fewer Emergencies, The Trouble with Harry, Catapult, GL RY, Cake Daddy, DFLTLX and HOMO FOMO. https://www.alyson-campbell.com/ She is co-creator and lead artist of Feral Queer Camp: https://feralqueercamp.com/
Alyson is Professor of Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, where her research, artistic practice as a director, teaching and activism converge around gender and sexuality, particularly queer performance and dramaturgies and contemporary representations of HIV and AIDS. She has published widely on these areas, most notably co-editing the collections Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (with Stephen Farrier, Palgrave, 2016) and Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the 21st Century (with Dirk Gindt, Palgrave, 2018). She likes to write about feral pedagogies and is passionate about going feral with academic resources.