Exchange Talk: Dr Jo Ronan - In conversation with Fatima Rateb: Does performance offer ways to reconfigure the competing claims of difference and equality?

This talk takes the form of performance, lecture and interview. Dr Jo Ronan founded BloodWater Theatre (BWT) to challenge assumptions of economic and cultural ownership of theatre processes and products. BWT experiments with multiple identities of self and staged self via character, with the audience experiencing both, during the performance. We bring characters from different parts of the world into the rehearsal room although our residential identities are localised to the UK.

The motivation for this is to share multiple stories born out of different cultural and ethnic origins in one setting so that stories that are not often heard in this setting can be heard. Our rehearsal pedagogy is premised on Bial’s theory of double coding where “what works for one audience on a universal level works for another audience specifically”. While the ethics of representation is troubling, interrogations of the value of all life necessitate an engagement with representation. During this talk you will get to meet Fatima Rateb, see Jo perform, and hear her talk about the dialogic creative processes of BWT. You will be invited to ask questions of Fatima or Jo.

Jo is Head of Contemporary Performance Practice at the RCS as well as an artist and practice-based researcher. Her research published in Routledge, Intellect and Taylor & Francis proposes a new dialectical model for non-hierarchical collaborative performance-making and spectatorship. She is the originator of Dialectical Collaborative Theatre. She was Associate Director with 7:84 (Scotland) directing productions such as Eclipse by Haresh Sharma and The Algebra of Freedom by Raman Mundair, based on the unlawful shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Jo pioneered new writing in Singapore, co-founding The Necessary Stage Theatre Company in 1987 and was its Associate Director till 1994 when she settled in Scotland.

Image credit: Jamie Walker