Dr Lara Shalson is Senior Lecturer in Theatre & Performance Studies, King’s College London. She is the author of Theatre & Protest (2017), a member of the Performance Research Group at King’s, and a member of the board of Performance Studies international (PSi), for which she is co-chair of the Emerging Scholars Committee.
Lara Shalson’s research is interdisciplinary both in its objects and methods of study. Focusing primarily on the period of the late 1950s to the present, she writes about a range of art forms, including theatre, performance art, live art, film, photography, and conceptual art. She is interested in the relationships between these forms as well as in the languages we use to describe them, and much of her work is concerned with investigating how the discourses coming out of theatre, performance studies, art history, and related disciplines differently frame and understand these art practices.
Dr Shalson is additionally interested in how theories of performance can help us to understand the social world—from the performativity of everyday life to the staging of particular events including political protest actions. One thing that unites her research is a concern with the politics and ethics of the relations produced by works in particular contexts—whether the relations between audience and performer, viewer and artwork, or object and surrounding environment. This extends to an interest in the ethics of the critical relationship itself—a concern that she has pursued in different ways in articles on the status of judgment in Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” essay, and on the relationship between critics and artists in the Women’s One World Festivals of the early 1980s. Dr Shalson works on and with a range of theoretical discourses including performance theory, feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology.
Theatre and Performance Publications
Books
Theatre & Protest. / Shalson, Lara Simone.Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. (Theatre &).
Articles and Book Chapters
Enduring documents : Re-Documentation in Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces. / Shalson, Lara.In: Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 23, No. 3, N/A, 08.2013, p. 432-441.
On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art. / Shalson, Lara.Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK. ed. / Dominic Johnson. Routledge, 2013.
Waiting. / Shalson, Lara.In: Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2013, p. 80-82.
On Duration and Multiplicity. / Shalson, Lara.In: Performance Research Journal, Vol. 17, No. 5, N/A, 10.2012, p. 98-106.
On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art. / Shalson, Lara.In: Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 22, No. 1, N/A, 03.2012, p. 106-119.
Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh. / Shalson, Lara.In: Tdr-The Drama Review-A Journal Of Performance Studies, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2010, p. 174 – 176.
Theatre & Politics. / Shalson, Lara.In: Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2010, p. 235 – 237.
The Ethics of Interpretation : Toward Critique Without Judgement. / Shalson, Lara.In: Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, Vol. 2008, No. 16, 12.2008, p. 131 – 145.
Creating Community, Constructing Criticism: The Women’s One World Festival 1980-1981. / Shalson, Lara.In: Theatre Topics, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2005, p. 221 – 239.