Marcus Bell
Staff details
Marcus is a queer dance(r)-scholar investigating the relationality of ancient, postmodern, and contemporary performance.
Marcus teaches ancient Greek Theatre and critical theatre histories. They are a dancer and queer theatre maker working towards a PhD on choreographing tragedy at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Considering work by Akram Khan, Pina Bausch, and Dimitris Papaioannou--among others--they are aligning queer theory and practice in theatre and performance studies with critical new materialisms. They explore the tangles of human and non-human objects, gestures, power relationships, and affects in lived and embodied performance receptions of ancient worlds. This work is situated within a broader movement to decolonise the study of ancient Greece and Rome through theory and practice, which Marcus does with a collaborative network: Critical Ancient World Studies. They are also one of the co-conveners of a research network ("https://queerandtheclassical.org"), whose objective is to generate radical imaginaries, methodologies, and feelings with/against the Classical, broadly defined.
Academic qualifications
- BA Classical Studies, King's College London 2017
- MA The Classical World and its Reception, King's College London 2018
Teaching and supervision
I am committed to an equitable pedagogy, which understands that students enter the classroom with a vibrant repertoire of prior knowledge. I work to develop a community of learners and knowers who all contribute to the development and sharing of ideas, hypothesis, theories, and methods for critically analysis and discussion.
Elements of Theatre History: Classical Greek Drama
Research interests
As well as my specific focus on Tragedy and the reception of Ancient Greek performance I work on and am interested in a few core intersecting areas of study and practice: new materialism, queer studies, disability studies and queer crip studies, decoloniality, liberation studies, live art, post-/anti-/un-/humanisms, multi-media studies, moving image, deconstruction, assemblage-theory, embodied knowledges, and practice-based/practice-as-research. As might be evident, I am interested in ways of knowing and being that attend to the complexity of living with each other (both humans and non-humans) on a damaged planet under late-carceral-capitalism. And I am committed to practices of research and teaching which go some way to imagining/making a fairer world.
In my work as a researcher and teacher I acknowledge that the University, as a set of institutions, was founded through exclusionary and extractive practices (colonialism, racism, ableism, and sexism). As such I am dedicated to working with students, colleagues, and activists to create an accessible, anti-colonial, queer, and anti-racist University.
Broadly, I am happy to work with folks interested in contemporary dance, Screendance, dance theatre, postmodern dance, theatre and performance in relation with ancient worlds and/or radical futures, queer theatre and performance, live art and/or performance art.
Featured publications
2021:
Bell, M. (2021) INFERNO: Catastrophically Queer, Agôn, 9 | 2021 Agon: revue de les arts de la scene 2021-09 | journal- article
Queer lives are in constant conversation with failure. But what use is this to queer folk? This paper considers the queer performance rave INFERNO and its takeover of the Institute of Contemporary Art
2021:
Bell, M (2021) 'Daphnis and Chloe at a rave last summer', in Harris, C. and L. Markaki (Eds.) Love Spells & Rituals for Another World'
An auto-theoretical and future justice focused act of Classical Reception. This queer performance studies driven chapter thinks back to Daphnis and Chloe's appearances the rave.
Publications and research outputs
Article
Bell, Marcus. 2023. “Dance Against the Void”: Derek Jarman, dance, and queer classical receptions. Classical Receptions Journal, ISSN 1759-5134
Bell, Marcus. 2022. Bell, M. (2022) Review of Gianvittorio-Ungar, L. and K. Schlapbach (eds.) Choreonarratives: dancing stories in Greek and Roman antiquity and beyond. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, ISSN 1055-7660
Bell, Marcus. 2021. INFERNO: Catastrophically Queer. Agôn. Revue des arts de la scène, 9, ISSN 1961-8581
Book Section
Bell, Marcus. 2023. Encountering Absence: Queer Traces, Ghosts, and Performance Otherwise. In: Ella Haselswerdt; Sara H. Lindheim and Kirk Ormand, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 138-152. ISBN 9781032026794
Professional projects
In addition to my work in research and teaching, I co-convene a set of research networks which aim to further interdisciplinary study on Dance, and Theatre and Performance. I am also working with a collective to write a book on Critical Ancient World Studies (forthcoming). And I am a co-convener of the Queer and Classical network, a community knowledge exchange project. Together we are working towards our second stage of growth and investigation which will include an edited collection, a digital resource for students, and another series of (online) events.
Research projects
2020: Queer and the Classical
Conferences and talks
2021:
Dimitris Papaioannou: Notation, Gesture, Reenactment , Response
DANSOX Summer School 2021: Unfolding Gesture: Movement, Inscription, Music.
2020: Pina Bausch and Tragedy
2020:
On tragic pleasure in Harry Clayton Wrights Deep Clean
Delivered talk at Oxford’s Queer Studies Network
2019:
Mis-step in Time: Dancing Elsewhere and Elsewhen in Euripides’ Bacchae
Part of the Time, Tense, and Genre conference, King’s College London
2019:
Queer Contexts and Communal Hauntings: Re-enacting Neil Greenberg’s Not-About- AIDS-Dance’ through Euripides’ Bacchae
19th Annual Joint Postgraduate Symposium on Ancient Drama, APGRD