Rehearsals of the Weird: Julia Bardsley’s Almost the Same (Feral Rehearsals for Violent Acts of Culture)

Abstract

This article examines the innovative work of British visual and theatre artist Julia Bardsley and more specifically her performance Almost the same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of cultures). Bardsley’s work operates on the cusp of theatre and the gallery and questions the vocabularies and conceptual frameworks available to us to discuss difficult theatrical experiences. While her work seems to render these frameworks obsolete, it also opens up a space for new vocabularies. Using a re-purposed critical language drawing from literary studies, film and science fiction (Mark Fisher on the weird, Eve Oishi on visual perversity and Jack Halberstam on wildness), this article proposes the weird as a fundamental category for unpacking Bardsley’s work. The weird is understood here as a type of aesthetic experience or affect, a space of critical potential for reading and making theatre work as well as a critical trope for articulating what lies beyond normative understandings of sexuality, identity and desire. This article considers the types of unruly and excessive desires that appear as the driving forces in Bardsley’s work and considers articulating the experience it engenders by reaching beyond the threshold of ordinary experience and into the world of the weird.