Oo Condit explores the position of the actor and embodied agency within theatrical structures
Actor and doctoral researcher Oo Condit invites anyone interested in the relationship between the actor and the theatre, and in artistic research, to put on their headphones and take a walk with the doctoral publication How to Be a Medium as their companion.
What originally got you interested in your research topic?
I’m a professional actor and have been working in theatre for over twenty years, in different ensembles and structures, as actors often do. My research was sparked partly by my observation as an actor on how the everyday material, social, and technological arrangements of the theatre apparatus–i.e. themes we convened around, texts, dress design, ways of working, place, expected audience, the kind of gaze the work invited or embodied–would affect my corporeal possibilities as an actor. For instance, my experience of freedom or capacity to act could radically shift from project to project. At the same time, a kind of slippery inconsistency of bodily experience was also part of my queer way of inhabiting the world. So, I began to artistically and experientially explore these bodily shifts and malleability.
Why is it important to research acting?
I think that acting as an art can sensitise its practitioners to shifts within and between language and embodiment, to material and social relations and affects, and their bodily manifestations. For that reason, I also think that all manner of social, corporeal and worldly phenomena could be approached in meaningful ways through artistic research done by actors without limiting the scope of the research to the artform or theatre. My own research sets off from an actorly position to critically examine the habitual relations and arrangements of theatre, but it also reaches beyond to think with bodily relationality and bodily becoming.
Your doctoral publication or commentary consists mainly of sound works. Why?
Well, I wanted to write it for myself to act! I wanted the doctoral publication to also be an artwork, so that the agency of art and artistic practice would be as strong in this final outcome as it was in the artistic parts of the research. I also wanted to have fun with it. We made the part dealing with theatre into an audio play, while the part concerning technogenesis and the malleability of bodily experience we made into a kind of through-composed meditation, which seeks to seep into the listener’s experience to mould it. Also, making theatre tends to be collective, where-as research is often lonely. The commentary was sound designed by Rosie Swayne, and it has been lovely to be able to share this process with her.
Who do you think should read or listen to your commentary?
I obviously think everyone should! But particularly, if you’re interested in the entanglements of bodies and technologies, or the performances of the theatre apparatus on actorly bodies, you might find my research interesting. I hope that actors and acting students, but also directors and directing students as well as other theatre makers will find their way to my research, and that it might offer perspectives for critically examining and rethinking habitual arrangements and structures in theatre. And of course, I would like everyone interested in artistic research and the agency of artistic practice in research to put on earphones and take my commentary for a walk!