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Lecturer in Physical Performance
Dr Alan Parker is an established performance maker, dramaturg, researcher and senior lecturer, teaching and supervising research in the fields of Physical Performance and Interdisciplinary Performance Praxis. He holds a MA in Drama from Rhodes University, and a PhD in Theatre and Performance, specialising in Live Art, Interdisciplinary and Public Art from the University of Cape Town.
As a performance maker, Alan has presented a wide range of work at various South African festivals and platforms, such as the National Arts Festival, the Dance Umbrella, the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, the Cape Town Fringe and the Live Art Festival. His creative practice has garnered several awards and recognitions, including three Standard Bank Ovation awards and a Fringe Fresh Award. Over the last fifteen years, he has also collaborated as a dramaturg and/or performer on several projects that have been presented internationally in Canada, Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United States of America and Brazil.
Alan has been both a Live Art Fellow and a Writing Fellow at the University of Cape Town’s prestigious Institute for the Creative Arts and, since 2019, has been the resident dramaturg for the Live Art Arcade, a non-profit company focused on the mentorship of early and mid-career artists working in the field of live art and performance art. Since 2018, Alan has also been the Director of First Physical Theatre, an associated research project of Rhodes University Drama Department, through which he also runs the Network for Embodied Research in Africa (NERA), a body-based research and community-building initiative, which he established in 2022.
Recent creative works include performances such as Sometimes I have to lean in… (2018), Excess Baggage (2023), and Fallen (and I can’t get up) (2024), as well as several performance-for-video/screendance works, such as Swell (2021); Burrow (2022) and To the moon with a piece of paper (2023). His recent publications include: Twelve (Queer) Labours: The mundane as catalyst for the archiving of queer transgressive joy (Performance Research 28.4); “Thinking through micropractice: an embodied interrogation of the archive”, in Making/Doing/Thinking: Methods for performance research, edited by Mark Fleishman and Alex Halligey, and the edited collection, Portals into Praxis: Artists’ reflections on the Live Art Arcade 2018-2022, which he co-edited with Gavin Krastin.
Last Modified: Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:58:13 SAST