David Calder

I am Senior Lecturer in Theatre & Performance Studies in the Department of Drama at Manchester. Broadly speaking, my research explores the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of performance in public space, with a particular focus on Europe. I approach performance in public space as both a professional sector—sustained by funding bodies, residencies, festivals, and networks—and as an artistic, theatrical event—an embodied encounter between performers and spectators.

Prior to joining the Drama Department in 2014, I earned my B.A. in French from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and completed my Ph.D., titled “Visible Machinery: Street Theatre and Industrial Space in Contemporary France,” at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I conducted fieldwork for my doctorate as a Fulbright Fellow in France.

I am also a writer of plays and creative nonfiction. My plays have been shortlisted for the Theatre503 International Playwriting Award, a top-10 finalist for the ATG Playwright’s Prize in association with Platform Presents, and longlisted for the RSC 37 Plays Project and the Papatango Prize. My creative nonfiction has won the QuietManDave Prize and been published in Epoch. 

In my current work, I am interested in how artists working in European public space engage their audiences, implicitly or explicitly, with debates surrounding democracy, rights, citizenship, and sovereignty, and how the terms of such debates come to be embodied and felt in performance, rather than simply represented or discussed. How do performances in public space and the infrastructures that support them contribute to the imagination and contestation of a transnational European public sphere? And how might performances in public space become performances of public space as part of the necessary infrastructure of democracy? 

This project has emerged from my earlier work on French street theatre. In my first book, Street theatre and the production of postindustrial space: Working memories (published 2019), I analysed contemporary French street theatre companies' involvement in urban and regional redevelopment projects in order to discover how street theatre makes sense of urban and economic change. My goal was to show how, 1) the processes of deindustrialisation and redevelopment operate according to the spatial and temporal logics of theatre and performance, and 2) how theatrical events and performative acts make changes in the nature of work manageable and spatial transformations navigable. Thanks to funding from the University of Manchester, this book is available Open Access here.

I welcome proposals and expressions of interest from prospective Ph.D. students in any of the following areas: performance and public space, street theatre, theatre and the public sphere, European performance and political theory, theatre and urban (re)development, theatre and labour, theatrical space, and theatrical engagements with memory and temporality.

In my classes on theatre history and theory, students explore the relationships between theatre and its social world, and between text, image, and performance. I ask students to consider what we can and cannot learn from different kinds of evidence, how to develop strong arguments based on that evidence, and how to craft their arguments as creative academic writers.

I currently teach the following units:

DRAM20051: Theatres of Modernity

DRAM20221: Performing America

DRAM30292: Performance and Public Space

DRAM30001 and DRAM30002: The Dissertation

DRAM30990: The Extended Dissertation