Dr Jem Kelly BA, MA, PGCE (Post 16) (original) (raw)

I am a freelance performance researcher / practitioner and teacher with specialisms in screen acting, directing and performing cyberformance, music and sound-driven performance design.
My practice-led research interrogates issues around cyberformance and the kinds of embodiment emerging in this field. I recently staged Black Gold, an interactive headphone performance as part of a T@PRA Interim event: Inter-faces. Black Gold (2018), Phantoms of the Aperture: Consubstantial with the Father (2015) and Phantoms of the Aperture: The Hidden Jem (2016) comprise a trio of intermedial performances staged at Bucks New University, Manchester Metropolitan University and in Brighton. These practice as research performances tested-out issues around superimposition of live video, photography, sound and tactility in autobiographical performance.
I am engaged in ongoing practice as research collaboration with Station House Opera on a number of cyberformance projects, the most recent of which, At Home In London and Gaza (2018), I documented and presented a paper at the Royal Geographical Society, August 31 2021. Another performance was central to a research symposium entitled The Doors (2014), creating a durational telematic performance at Royal central School of Speech and Drama and Bucks New University simultaneously. The Doors uses electro-mechanical doors to reconfigure spaces in both locations, constraining or liberating the performers represented in 3 dimensional video projection in each location.
Selected Printed Publications

2025 Auditory Spaces: Intermedialities of Music and Sound-driven Performance - from the Popular to the Postdramatic. Book length, solo authored publication (Forthcoming).
2025 Performing Virtual Borders and Acts of Intersubjectivity: interrogating Station House Opera’s cyberformance, At Home In London and Gaza
2020 - Black Gold, an immersive binaural performance taking participant on an audio journey into an early C20th coal mine, this performance is based on family recollection passed through 3 generations. Co- devised with Dr Ger Gormley, staged as part of a Performance and New Technologies WG, TAPRA at Buckinghamshire New University.
2018 Touched By Your Presence, re-locating bodies in telematic performances, Nowhere (2013) and Dissolved (2014) article in Art and Design Review, (Forthcoming, 2018)
2016 Remediating Childhood Recollection – teaching remediation as a process to facilitate devised autobiographical performance in Higher Education. (Research in Drama Education: Responding to Intermediality 2016).
2010 ‘Three-Way Interplay: devising processes and critical issues in Station House Opera’s, The Other Is You.’ Chapter in Smart, J & Mirmikedes, A (Eds.) Devising in Process, Routledge (May 2010)
2007 ‘Pop Music, Multimedia and Live Performance.’ Chapter in Sexton, Jamie (ed.) Music, Sound and Multimedia: from the live to the virtual. Pub. Edinburgh University Press, 2007
2005 ‘Auditory Space: emergent modes of apprehension and historical re-presentations in
Three Tales.’ International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, Vol. 1:3, Pub. Intellect.
ART WORKS
2018 Black Gold: an interactive headphone performance staged at T@PRA Interim event, Inter-Faces
2016 Phantoms of the Aperture: The Hidden Jem - an autobiographical, intermedial performance interrogating photography and memory.
2015 Phantoms of the Aperture: Consubstantial with the Father, an intermedial solo performance staged at Bucks New University (31 March 2015) and Manchester Metropolitan University (01 April 2015). This PaR performance tested-out issues around superimposition of live video and photography in an autobiographical performance.
2014 The Doors project –telematic performance linking Buckinghamshire New University with Royal Central School of Speech and Drama via electro-mechanically operated doors and live, two-way video transmission.
2013 Nowhere - the second version of a site-specific telematic performance interrogating 360° audio-visual space by linking two remote locations using mobile Internet technologies. Interactions of performers located in Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and BNU is made possible by rehearsed movement sequences.
2011 Inter-Views II, a practice-led telematic performance interrogating issues of time, memory and virtuality. This was a collaborative research project, co-devised with Dr Andrea Davidson. This is a re-working of a past performance staged in Istanbul Bilgi University, May 2011, allowing for inter-cultural exchanges to take place.
Digital Theatres Project, produced a transmission of live theatre performances staged at The ShowRoom, Chichester. Performances of contemporary companies including Paper Birds, Stan’s Café and Lila Dance were webcast from The ShowRoom to remote locations and simultaneously stored as data.

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