Metamodern Theatre Symposium

Postmodern theatre is dead. A new theatre is rising – one that combines the well-worn postmodern aesthetics of irony, detachment, and deconstruction with a paradoxical interest in authenticity, engagement, and re-construction. Whilst recent scholarship has treated these evolving interests as unrelated shifts in performance aesthetics, [we propose] a new understanding: that these are part of a wider emerging cultural paradigm – metamodernism.*

As a post-postmodern structure of feeling, metamodernism is characterised by an oscillation between disparate polarities; art that is simultaneously sincere and sarcastic, ironic and enthusiastic, hopeful and hopeless. The Metamodern Theatre Symposium coincides with and builds upon the publication of Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre: A Politics of Hope/lessness (Bloomsbury 2024) which offers a pioneering framework by which to identify and understand metamodern theatre. By drawing critical links between the works of performance theorists such as Anne Bogart and Andy Lavender and the metamodern as defined by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, the book makes a clear, vital, and urgent case for the use of the term metamodernism within mainstream theatre scholarship in order to understand emergent developments in post-millennial theatre practice.

The Metamodern Theatre Symposium aims to explore this new understanding of post-postmodern performance through an informal, discursive and accessible half-day programme comprised of presentations, panels, performances and a book launch. This will be a hybrid event running synchronously in person at The University of East London’s USS Campus in Stratford (East London) and online via Microsoft Teams.

You can reserve your ticket for in-person or online access now. Links for online access will be provided the week before the event.

SCHEDULE

13:30 – Arrival and Coffee

14:00 GMT (PST 06:00 / EST 09:00) – Welcome

14:15 – Introduction: ‘Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre’ – Tom Drayton

15:00 – Keynote: ‘Say Hello to Metamodernism’ - Greg Dember

15:30 – Comfort Break

15:45 – 'A Metamodern View on Circus' - Katharine Kavanagh

16:15 – ‘Meta(Early)modern: Creation Theatre’s lockdown digital productions of  The Duchess of Malfi and The Witch of Edmonton’ - Benjamin Broadribb

16:45 – Comfort Break

17:00 – ‘Immediacy and British Metamodern Monodrama’ - Alex Watson

17:30 – ‘The Next One Hundred Years as Metamodern Intimate Theatrical Epic’  - Caridad Svich & Dermot Daly

18:00 – Comfort Break

18:15 – Performance Screening

19:15 – Chapter Excerpt: ‘I Want to Believe (All of This is True)’ - Tom Drayton

19:30 – Open discussion / Book launch

20:00 – Drinks at local pub

Abstracts & Bios

Introduction: Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre – Dr Tom Drayton

Postmodern theatre is dead. A new theatre is rising – one that combines the well-worn postmodern aesthetics of irony, detachment, and deconstruction with a paradoxical interest in authenticity, engagement, and re-construction. Whilst recent scholarship has treated these evolving interests as unrelated shifts in performance aesthetics, I propose a new understanding: that these are part of a wider emerging cultural paradigm – metamodernism. Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre (Bloomsbury 2024) is the first book to focus on metamodernism and performance, offering a pioneering framework by which to identify and understand metamodern theatre. This opening talk lays the framework for which to understand how theatre has shifted beyond postmodernism, offers a summation of the elements that make theatre metamodern as detailed within the book, and makes a clear, vital, and urgent case for the use of the term metamodernism within mainstream theatre scholarship.

Dr Tom Drayton is Senior Lecturer in Acting, Performance and Directing at the University of East London. His primary research interests focus on metamodern cultural forms, theatre of the millennial generation, and contemporary political performance. Tom’s writing has been published in Performance Philosophy, ArtsPraxis and The European Journal of Theatre & Performance. He is currently co-writing Performance and Postdigital Extremism: Conspiracy, Influencers and Gaming (Bloomsbury 2026) with Dr Joseph Dunne-Howrie which uses metamodern and participatory performance methodologies as critical lenses in order to interrogate how extremist ideologies are performed in postdigital spaces. He is also co-editing My Impossible Soul: The Metamodern Music of Sufjan Stevens (Bloomsbury 2026), which will be the first academic volume dedicated to the work of ‘canonically’ metamodern (Damico 2017; Dember 2017; McCampbell, 2021) multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens.

Keynote: Say Hello to Metamodernism – Greg Dember

Greg Dember’s Say Hello to Metamodernism (Exact Rush 2024) offers general readers a guided tour of one of the newer “isms” on the block, metamodernism – the cultural period many say began emerging around the turn of the millennium, after postmodernism had lost much of its charm. By emphasizing qualities such as individual felt experience, and by braiding playful irony and experimentation with an unabashed delight in the intricacies of being human, metamodern artworks both reflect and help generate a new cultural sensibility. To understand it is to come to understand something about ourselves in today’s world.

Greg Dember is an independent researcher and co-founder of the What Is Metamodern? website with Linda Ceriello PhD. Greg’s writing on metamodernism in popular culture - with a specific emphasis on music - has helped popularize the terminology outside of academic discourse through accessible writing. He is the author of the oft-cited article “Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts” (2019) and the general audience book Say Hello To Metamodernism (2024). He co-coordinated the Seattle Metamodernism Summit in 2022, and has presented several papers on metamodernism at academic conferences.

A Metamodern View on Circus - Dr Katharine Kavanagh

Outside of the narrow emerging field of Circus Studies, circus forms and practices are largely overlooked in conventional scholarship. This is arguably a result both of cultural hierarchies in the Global North, and a mid-20th Century reification of circus as a fixed, immutable icon (Carmeli, 1995; 1996). This talk situates 21st Century circus in relation to the expanding cultural feeling of metamodernism. I propose that metamodernism is an especially useful frame for interrogating the confusion of "essentially incompatible ideas about, and representations of, circus circulating in our culture" (Barltrop, 2013:88), whereby they can be explored as 'generative paradoxes' (Abramson, 2017). As Ward (2023:16) has written, "that world is both real and illusory at the same time. The circus embraces both elements. They are not diametrically opposed, and one does not necessarily exclude the other." Metamodern thought allows us to analyse these paradoxical relationships in a way that previous cultural paradigms did not, expanding upon and adding nuance to our understanding of the circus field.

Dr Katharine Kavanagh is a circus writer and researcher who is interested in the communicative space between practitioners, publics and institutions. She founded the online platform The Circus Diaries (www.thecircusdiaries.com) in 2013, and teaches courses in circus review and analysis, both at circus schools and independently. She is also a Teaching Associate at Cardiff University working across the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, and the School of English, Communication and Philosophy. She is driven to raise the profile of the 21st-century circus wherever possible. 

Meta(Early)modern: Creation Theatre’s lockdown digital productions of The Duchess of Malfi and The Witch of Edmonton - Dr Benjamin Broadribb

This paper explores two digital theatre productions by Oxford-based company Creation Theatre, who performed multiple early modern plays online under lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. My particular focus is on Creation’s production of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (dirs Wright and Rickman, March 2021), and Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton, (dir. Wright, March 2022). These productions were haunted not only by Creation’s digital productions that came before them, but also by the wider influences incorporated into each adaptation. By reading these productions through a metamodern lens, I demonstrate how Creation’s performance and adaptation choices engendered a reconnection to the cultural position they inhabited during the early modern period: encouraging audiences to lose themselves in the emotional depths of these plays, whilst also remaining conscious of the inherent artifice of their performance and adaptation. Performed as they were at different points during the pandemic, I also consider how both productions were inherently tied to the cultural moment of lockdown.

Dr Benjamin Broadribb completed his PhD at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. His article, “‘Very tragical mirth’: Performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Screen(s) During Lockdown” was published in Shakespeare Survey 76. He has also contributed chapters to Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet (eds Bladen, Hatchuel and Vienne-Guerrin, CUP, 2023) and Shakespearean Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen (eds Semple and Hatfull, Bloomsbury Arden 2023). With Gemma Kate Allred and Erin Sullivan, Benjamin co-edited Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation (Bloomsbury Arden 2022). Since April 2023, Benjamin has served as Performance Reviews Co-Editor for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Immediacy and British Metamodern Monodrama - Dr Alex Watson

It is increasingly evident that the one-person performance (or “monodrama”) has become a dominant form in contemporary British theatre; no doubt informed by an underfunded arts sector increasingly unable to sustain productions with larger casts. Yet these testimonial, virtuoso, fictional, and autofictional individual performances also reflect a growing trend present across all contemporary media identified by Anna Kornbluh as “immediacy:” a defining term for post-millennial art, where ‘[d]irectness and literalism are the techniques; immersiveness and surety are the effects’ (Kornbluh 2023: 5). This has significant overlap with the concept of metamodernism, with recent monodramas utilising techniques of meta-theatricality for immersion with a character (a la Fleabag’s direct address, for example) rather than critical distance. This paper, then, explores the interconnection of immediacy and metamodernism in recent examples of British monodrama, representing the early stages of a new research project into contemporary one-person performances.

Dr Alex Watson is a Principal Lecturer in academic studies at Performers College, BIMM University (formerly ICTheatre Brighton). He is published in Theatre Notebook, JCDE, Contemporary Theatre Review, and his monograph — Staging Systemic Violence: British Theatre 2010-2019 (Bloomsbury 2024) — is published in the Methuen Engage series. He is currently working on two projects: the first being the next volume of Methuen’s Modern British Playwriting series (which focuses on the 2010s), and the second exploring contemporary Anglophone one-person performance, which is the subject of this paper.

The Next One Hundred Years as Metamodern Intimate Theatrical Epic - Caridad Svich & Dermot Daly

The Next One Hundred Years (2024) is a metamodern intimate theatrical epic. Spoken by a chorus of voices - rehearsed, unrehearsed and possibly somewhere in between - the play stages a collective consciousness that spans time and distance, interior and exterior, public and private spaces, as it charts the imagined trajectory of people on this planet in the next 100 years. Written intentionally as open text - unassigned characters - designated only by numbers - the piece asks actors and collaborators working on it to imagine a future by imagining the now of performance. Is the piece audio only? In person? Hybrid? Digital? Dance with voiceover text? Scored to music? All of the above? In effect it is a performance score made to be conducted. Built compositionally as a series of motifs, themes and variations, refrains and loops, the text asks and demands expansive and inventive staging, and asks performers to bring a presentation of themselves (almost as instruments) to this orchestral text rendering for the stage. How is shared struggle and plural democracy staged? How are we all in a chorus and not silo’d into individual hero’s journeys? How is class solidarity in action something theatre can achieve? How can the communality of theatre be rekindled in the information age? This session will offer an opportunity to engage with the text (pro)actively, give space for a Q&A with Caridad and Dermot, and fiish with an opportunity to engage with the text (re)actively.

Caridad Svich (text builder, playwright, screenwriter, translator, lyricist, editor): is a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in Drama. She has received many honours including an Obie for Lifetime Achievement and the Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement from ATHE, a Harvard/Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and she has been a Visiting Fellow at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Plays include 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls…, Red Bike and The House of the Spirits (based on Isabel Allende’s novel). Recent books include Toward a Future Theatre (Methuen Drama), Audience Revolution (TCG/Nick Hern), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Routledge) and The Hour of All Things and other plays (Intellect Books). As screenwriter, the feature film “Fugitive Dreams,” based on her play, is on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and more. Forthcoming book from Methuen in 2025: Transmedia Theatre Plays. They are an editor at Contemporary Theatre Review (Taylor & Francis), and Drama Editor at Asymptote literary journal, and on the advisory board of Global Performance Studies journal. She is also Artistic Director of New Play Development at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York City.

Dermot Daly (performance facilitator): is a director, dramaturg, actor, researcher, writer and lecturer. His work spans many areas of live and recorded performance, and does so in many roles. Directing work includes Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz (Ellie Keel Productions / Paines Plough / Royal Court; Best Director nomination Black British Theatre Awards), Luna Loves Library Day: The Musical, (Little Seeds / Z-Arts) The ImPossible Family Reunion in RPG Space Chapter 4: Looking Back to Look Forward to Look Back Again (Yaku / Paul Smith Foundation / London Fashion Week), Rise (Naked Productions / BBC Radio 4). His academic work includes publications in Theatre Dance and Performance Training (Taylor & Francis), ArtsPraxis (NYU), Scene (Intellect), Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). He sits on the editorial board of The Journal of Class & Culture (Intellect).

[*] Drayton, Tom (2024) Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre: A Politics of Hopelessness. London: Bloomsbury. Back cover.