Lois Weaver’s Research
Weaver’s research starts from a place of radical listening and community. Her research interests include live art, solo performance, feminist and lesbian theatre, aging, performance and human rights, and relationships between performance and public engagement.
Lois is a 2016-2019 Engaging Science Fellow with the Wellcome Trust, an academic and researcher with Queen Mary University of London, International Chair at Artec Paris 8 University at the National Institute for the History of Art, and recipient of the Queen Mary Centre for Public Engagement Hawking Award for Developed Understanding of Public Engagement.
2016-2019 Wellcome Trust Engaging Science Fellowship
With this fellowship Lois combines her projects Public Address Systems, Methodologies for Public Conversation, and Know How to experiment with and create comfortable spaces for public discussion, such as Long Tables and Porch Sittings, which resist hierarchies, foster inclusion and value lived experience as expertise. She engages with the public and creates hospitable and interpersonal infrastructures that model alternatives for public discourse. Institutional spaces are appropriated to host conversations around gender, sexuality, human rights, urban planning and other crucial flash points for public activism. New public spaces are enacted for egalitarian participation, political action, and to question ingrained institutional boundaries. Using the scaffolding of familiar places coupled with clear protocols for engagement, a recognized framework for social (inter)action is enacted to lend a sense of comfort and safety for those who choose to engage.
Protocols are open source, and serve as guidelines for how space is setup and conversation unfolds. Protocols were designed starting from a place of perceived need, looking at public discourse, public gathering, and public space. The projects manipulate the experiential expectation provided by known places to both play into and subvert the ways participants assume they will act. Lois used the unbuilt architecture of domestic space, often considered a ‘feminized’ realm, to intersect and interrupt stilted modes of conversation and intimidating institutions.
Current Primary Research Projects
New Methodologies for Public Conversation
This project investigates methods in public address, asking how to promote conversation and knowledge exchange using performance techniques. Protocols render marginalized voices audible, facilitate different kinds of expertise, and make interventions in areas of health and wellbeing, challenging institutional spatial hierarchies and protocols. Two interlinking projects provide the scaffolding for this project: Public Address Systems and Know How.
Public Address Systems involves experimenting with creating comfortable spaces for public discussion, such as Long Tables, Care Cafes, Public Studios, and Porch Sittings, which resist hierarchies, foster inclusion, and value lived experience as expertise. Using the unbuilt architecture of domestic space, often considered a ‘feminized’ realm, Weaver intersects and interrupts stilted modes of conversation and intimidating institutions.
With the performance project Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) Weaver explores the ways performance can facilitate public conversation, creating a new Public Address Systems protocol called the Situation Room.
She is currently developing ‘Care Radio’ which uses radio as a format for podcasts, audio segments and live events to interrogate issues of care. Originally created for HANDLE WITH CARE, a Wellcome Collection Late Night Extravaganza, July 2018 and now adapted for Radio Local in collaboration with artists, Hunt and Darton, (Manchester and St Helens) and as podcasts on the Tammy WhyNot YouTube Channel.
Know How uses the ethics of care as a theoretical basis for dialogic work and is a series of performance based research projects that seek to research the nature of embodied knowledge and lived experience in relation to academic research. This research is applied to develop egalitarian dialogue frameworks in order to democratize and enhance cross-class and cross disciplinary communication.
Performance as a Tool for Stroke Recovery
Performance as a Tool for Stroke Recovery couples participatory performance methods with interactive technology to help stroke survivors explore physical and social identities, allowing them to imagine new ways of being. The project frames disability as a source for technological and performative innovation, an ethos which has wide-ranging applications for radical technological and therapeutic advancement, and shifted paradigms around neurodiversity.
This project began in 2011, employing the loss of memory and experience incurred from a stroke by Peggy Shaw, Weaver’s collaborator, as an aesthetic framework to create a new performance work, Ruff (2011-present). In 2017, serious development and application of a workshop structure and interactive scenography began, approaching the project with the intention to merge interaction design, cognitive science, performance practices, and qualitative research.
The project seeks to help Stroke Survivors envisage and enact their future after their stroke through movement and expressive, performative therapy assisted by live motion capture, using Chroma-key technologies. Abstract representation in scenography is used to boost active imagination. Interactive digital scenography was used as a real-time adaptive tool for interactive performance. This works to physically and mentally engage stroke survivors in enacting fantasy scenes of new possible worlds for their lives after a stroke.
Past Projects
In 2014 Weaver submitted two projects to the UK’s national research assessment exercise (Research Excellence Framework, or REF), Democratising Technology and Public Address Systems. Democratising Technology investigated how performance methodology can: facilitate elder engagement with transformations engendered by technology; contribute to methodologies of participatory design. Public Address Systems worked to identify, develop and disseminate performance based methods for effective public engagement and knowledge exchange, and to develop public enquiry into age, gender, sexuality, urban redevelopment and participatory democracy. These projects assisted the Drama Department at QMUL in achieving the position as the top-ranked Drama Department in the UK for the quality of research.
Additional past research projects by Weaver include:
The Library of Performing Rights (2006)
This ongoing project focuses on the importance of human rights activism in the context of globalization and violent conflict. The library form connects diverse geographical contexts while insisting on the importance of context-specificity. The Library of Performing Rights contains publications, videos, DVDs, CD-ROMs, brochures, digital and web-based initiatives. All of these materials can be transported, reassembled and re-contextualized in each location they are installed.
The Library of Performing Rights is a traveling archive. It collects materials related to human rights activism, but it also provides a context for dialogue and face-to-face encounter. It is a deeply collaborative project with international scope. Recently, the Library traveled to Brazil, in a collaboration with Rio-based Videoteca Panorama. The project was initiated in 2006 at Performance Studies international #12: Performing Rights, held at Queen Mary, University of London. It was developed in collaboration with Lois Weaver and the Live Art Development Agency.
The Manifesto Room (2006)
The Manifesto Room is a space for polemics to be both generated and disseminated. Initially designed to accompany conferences or events, the Manifesto Room joins action with more reflective or analytical activities. It is also a model for collaboration, which allows artists/thinkers/activists to co-curate the space and address both form and content. The Manifesto Room was initiated at Performance Studies international 12: Performing Rights, at Queen Mary, University of London.
FeMUSEum (2011)
Simultaneously entertaining, seductive and challenging of received ideas about what femininity is and can do, the FeMUSEum brings together four generations of ultra femme performance artists (Lois Weaver, Bird la Bird, Amy Lamé and Carmelita Tropicana) through a series of public dialogues, workshops, and online initiatives in order to compile an archive of feminist performance, to build a pop-up museum of feminine influence, and to pay tribute to the lineage and legacy of performance and femininity. With exhibits of each artists’ individual femme muses on display, the FeMUSEum shows how femme visibility is a public issue.
FeMUSEum is both a live event and an exhibition project. Individually and as a group, the four ‘curators’ of the FemMUSEum tells us what femininity and performance means to them. These meanings are often complex and unexpected, but always lively and compelling. Even when alone onstage, none of these legendary performers is ever alone; a legion of femme muses cheers from the wings. From Dolly Parton to Marlene Dietrich, Kate Bornstein to Polly Styrene, a community of challenging and queer inspiration emerges.
The FeMUSEum was commissioned for the Trashing Performance symposium by the AHRC-funded project Performance Matters, a three-year creative research project (2009 –2012) that was a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, Roehampton University, and the Live Art Development Agency and financially assisted by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK. FeMUSEum has travelled to New York’s Dixon Place. FeMUSEum opened with a ribbon cutting ceremony and public performance (Musing Muses) at the Trashing Performance Symposium in London, October 2012.