Cooking-with Algae in Performance

My Performance Studies PhD was titled ‘Towards a Theory of Algae Sympoiesis in Performance: Cooking-with Nonhuman Ecologies’. My research developed an ecodramaturgical approach to working with algae organisms in performance informed by Donna Haraway’s (2008) notion of ‘becoming-with’, which reminds us that being is always a process of becoming and as such always unfolds through acts of becoming-with multiple beings. In a series of practice-as-research experiments, my work also explored Haraway’s (2016) concept of ‘sympoiesis’, as a mode of entangled making-with nonhumans, to develop approaches to performance-making and storytelling with algae organisms through different methods of cooking as forms of relation between algae and human bodies and environments. In addition to work in theatre and performance, my research drew on theoretical fields of feminist posthumanism, new materialism and studies in the environmental humanities. My PhD developed new ways of collaborating with algae as co-cooks in performance, which revealed the creative capacities and agencies of nonhumans to nourish and transform ecologies in ways that challenge anthropocentric paradigms of consumption.