White Experiments:
Performing Arts Research in Late Neoliberalism
ResearchWorks Series
28 May 2026
Guildhall School of Music & Drama
London
For those of us who have spent decades critiquing logocentrism, the present moment is full of contradictions. The rise of techno-fascist attacks on the arts and humanities, higher education, and critical thinking in general demand that we defend formerly hegemonic concepts like teaching and research, training and discipline, art and democracy, against this onslaught. Yet we do so at great peril if we thereby abandon the profound critiques of those same concepts that have been developed in performance studies and related fields. When logocentrism is being actively demolished from the right, how should critically oriented practitioner-researchers reorient ourselves?
This presentation draws on critical black studies, critical whiteness studies, and performance studies to rethink the role of the university in the current crisis of “white writing.” I will discuss three broad approaches, defined in my recent book, that are often taken by predominantly white institutions: inclusion, escape, and experimentation. While all three have value as part of a broad strategy, I will emphasise the need for radical formal experimentation informed by trans/queer, critical, decolonial readings of modernity. In this moment, every time we find ourselves defending the arts for their economic value and soft power, we must also continue the work of relinking them to that which has been abjected from the university and its forms of knowledge: the embodied practices, from urban kink and sex work to planetary ritual and culture, that are the essential source of what we might still call performing arts.
Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the School and its guests with students, staff and the public.