Molly McPhee

My research comprises three themes relating to performance practice and social justice:

Theatre, atmosphere and carceral society
This research addresses community performance, public perception and public policy in the criminal justice system. My monograph in progress, ‘Miasmatic Performance: staging and contesting carceral society through atmosphere’, investigates how theatre creates atmospheric interventions on hyper-incarceration and racialised violence in the UK, USA and Australia. I propose that to tackle the reach of carceral conditioning, studies into how carceral power works through atmosphere are required. I theorise the aesthetics and politics of carceral atmospheres through the ancient concept of miasma. I designate a distinct type of theatre-making and theatre-spectating–miasmatic performance–which expands on definitions of miasma as a disease etiology by returning to miasma’s disciplinary heritage as an atmospheric apparatus endowed with the power to police social, civic and theatrical spaces.

Theatre in health education
This research emerges from work on mis-/over-/under-diagnosis of health conditions in the Global South; with Australian theatre company ILBIJERRI and University of Melbourne, I undertook research into performing arts practice addressing healthcare, social and gendered violence in Papua New Guinea, Far North Queensland/Torres Strait Australia, Samoa, Aotearoa, Southern African practices in KwaZulu-Natal, Zandspruit and Malawi, and decolonial health education in Canadian First Nations tribal council bands.

Sensory performance archives
I am currently curating the producing company Fuel’s twenty-year archive, addressing Fuel’s role in developing the practice and position of the independent producer in the expansion of theatre beyond its conventional institutions, audiences and practices over the last twenty years. With Fuel, I am developing several public engagement projects, including a sensory archive using XR technologies.