Mischa Twitchin
Mischa Twitchin teaches on the MA Performance Making course and on the BA “Modernisms and Post-Modernity” and “Culture and Performance” courses, as well as the Polish Theatre option. He is a founder member of the performance collective, Shunt, and a freelance lighting designer. He also makes his own performance projects, material from which can be accessed at: www.shunt.co.uk/mischa_twitchin. Mischa is also on the editorial advisory board of Journeys Across Media Postgraduate Journal and Total Theatre.
Research interests
Mischa’s research interests mostly address modernist theatre practices, in particular the relation between visual art and theatre practice, puppetry, the relation between voice and gesture, and “post-dramatic” theatres (in, for example, the work of Antonin Artaud, Tadeusz Kantor, Marguerite Duras, Gina Pane, Peter Weibel, and Romeo Castellucci). His current PhD research is concerned with mimesis and iconography – with particular reference to Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Georges Didi-Huberman.
Selected recent research and practice
As a founder-member of the London performance collective, Shunt, projects include: the award-winning Ballad of Bobby Francois and Dance Bear Dance, and The Tennis Show, Tropicana, Amato Saltone, and Money. Mischa was also a regular curator of the Shunt Lounge.
As a freelance lighting designer projects include: Ridiculusmus’ Tough Time, Nice Time and Total Football, both at the Barbican and touring; and Athletes of the Heart’s Don Juan, who? at the Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana, and at Riverside Studios, London.
His own performance projects include:
Thanatoscope: A Portrait of the Thought of Death;
The Children’s Emperor and The Pianist at the Tarumba Festival, Lisbon (2011);
1945: A Passion at the Manipulate Festival, Edinburgh (2009);
I Wonder Sometimes Who I Am at the Forest Fringe, Edinburgh (2009), and at the Little Angel’s Suspense Festival, London (2009);
Is Art Lighthearted? shown at the Art Claims Impulse gallery, Berlin (2008);
Two plays, Klamm’s Dream (a dialogue between Kafka and his doubles) and Interjections (a dialogue between Artaud and André Breton), both performed in London and in Reykjavik;
The Ecstatic Truth of Bruno S. will be presented at the Little Angel’s Suspense Festival 2011, and another new piece, Bernhard Bagatelles, is also in progress.
Publications include:
“Kantor after Duchamp”, in Polish Theatre Perspectives (forthcoming);
“On the Dreamwork of Hearing” and “The Invisible Theatre of Antonin Artaud”, both in Liminalities;
“Heiner Müller and the Impress of Time” in 3t;
“What do we see in theatre?”, in Body, Space, and Technology Journal;
“Smoke and Noise: Dada Puppets” in Puppet Notebook.