Charlotte Farrell
Charlotte Farrell is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines contemporary live performance and its relationship to bodies, affect, and social space. With a particular investment in queer and feminist performance making, Charlotte’s research is articulated through historically-situated written accounts, as well as her own embodied art practice. She is the author of the book, Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage: Affect, Post-Tragedy, Emergency (Routledge, 2021) and co-author of How to Play in Slow Time: Creativity, Pedagogy, Process (Brill, 2025). Her work has been published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Survey, Somatechnics, Peripeti, Media International Australia, RealTime Arts, and the books, Corporeality and Culture and Barrie Kosky's Transnational Theatres.
In New York City where she was based from 2013-2020, Charlotte held positions as Segal Theatre Center Visiting Scholar at CUNY, Director of Rox Contemporary Art Gallery, Executive Director of CPR - Center for Performance Research, and Adjunct Instructor in the Dramatic Literature Program at NYU. In 2023, Charlotte co-founded performance company Body of Work with multi-award winning performance artist, Betty Grumble. Currently, she lives on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal Peoples.
In New York City where she was based from 2013-2020, Charlotte held positions as Segal Theatre Center Visiting Scholar at CUNY, Director of Rox Contemporary Art Gallery, Executive Director of CPR - Center for Performance Research, and Adjunct Instructor in the Dramatic Literature Program at NYU. In 2023, Charlotte co-founded performance company Body of Work with multi-award winning performance artist, Betty Grumble. Currently, she lives on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal Peoples.
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Papers by Charlotte Farrell
the prism of Kosky’s work, post-tragedy is posited as a particular approach to adapting the classics that, paradoxically, engages both postdramatic and Aristotelian performance modes. It is precisely through this paradoxical intersection that Kosky’s Women of Troy—as an example of post-tragedy - operates as a theatrical response to and affective critique of the production of neoliberal subjectivity.
Talks by Charlotte Farrell
In 2010 the Icelandic band Sigur Ros announced to be “going on a hiatus” only a few months before the launch of their second music-film and album entitled Inni. In the film light dynamically flickers and folds, whispering on the edges of not-quite fully formed bodies. Microphone-bodies, cymbal-bodies; a hand, a foot, moving lips. The cinema wells with the heady nausea of what it feels like to be at a rock concert. The screen swells with an overflow of a synaesthesic cohabitation of light-sound and sound-light that plays at the edges of perception.
Inni was filmed at Alexandra Palace, London, over two nights by director Vincent Morisset, where Icelandic band Sigur Ros performed songs from their album by the same title. In this article we explore the composition and visual artifacts through which the traditional fetishisation of the all-male rock band - particularly the lead singer - becomes disrupted and muddled in Inni. Replacing the registering of a concert from a centralized camera perspective, the film privileges the transduction of sound into movements of light; it re-composes the experience of the concert through a never complete performative body.
Such an aesthetic move, made by Vincent Morisset, takes the micro-perceptible fields of light as what precedes contour and colour: the before of content, the before of form, the before of sound. What is generated on the screen and throughout the film’s audio standpoint is the force of relation of a concert experience. Such an aesthetic proposes to transcend the notion of a music clip that represents the origin of the music from a human-body perspective and moves it towards the event of listening, stretching the notion of the film as a documentation of the concert.
The movements of light in Inni allows for a consideration of what sort of politics of performance emerges through light’s making-with music. This more-than human field of emergence helps to think the performance-body not as pre-formed, but forming in its performing. By focusing on granular and extra contrasted images, textures of objects and extreme close-ups, the director invests in the emergence of the improvisational body that takes place and vanishes with the concert, yet leaks outside the measured time of the film itself.
This paper explores Inni’s politics of light that co-composes with music’s movement as a micro-politics of relation. It asks: how is the passage between the affection-image and the relation-image made felt in rhythms of light (Deleuze, 1986; 1989)? How can we think about a music clip in terms of light’s rhythm and its force to co-composes with the texture of sound? How do we differ, from the listener-viewer’s standpoint, the difference between rhythm and texture, and how such qualities bridge what is heard and what is seen? Is rhythm the texture of light as it makes light-time with music?
References
Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault (The Althone Press, London).
________. (1986) The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis).
________. (1989) The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis).
Book Reviews by Charlotte Farrell
Performance Reviews by Charlotte Farrell
the prism of Kosky’s work, post-tragedy is posited as a particular approach to adapting the classics that, paradoxically, engages both postdramatic and Aristotelian performance modes. It is precisely through this paradoxical intersection that Kosky’s Women of Troy—as an example of post-tragedy - operates as a theatrical response to and affective critique of the production of neoliberal subjectivity.
In 2010 the Icelandic band Sigur Ros announced to be “going on a hiatus” only a few months before the launch of their second music-film and album entitled Inni. In the film light dynamically flickers and folds, whispering on the edges of not-quite fully formed bodies. Microphone-bodies, cymbal-bodies; a hand, a foot, moving lips. The cinema wells with the heady nausea of what it feels like to be at a rock concert. The screen swells with an overflow of a synaesthesic cohabitation of light-sound and sound-light that plays at the edges of perception.
Inni was filmed at Alexandra Palace, London, over two nights by director Vincent Morisset, where Icelandic band Sigur Ros performed songs from their album by the same title. In this article we explore the composition and visual artifacts through which the traditional fetishisation of the all-male rock band - particularly the lead singer - becomes disrupted and muddled in Inni. Replacing the registering of a concert from a centralized camera perspective, the film privileges the transduction of sound into movements of light; it re-composes the experience of the concert through a never complete performative body.
Such an aesthetic move, made by Vincent Morisset, takes the micro-perceptible fields of light as what precedes contour and colour: the before of content, the before of form, the before of sound. What is generated on the screen and throughout the film’s audio standpoint is the force of relation of a concert experience. Such an aesthetic proposes to transcend the notion of a music clip that represents the origin of the music from a human-body perspective and moves it towards the event of listening, stretching the notion of the film as a documentation of the concert.
The movements of light in Inni allows for a consideration of what sort of politics of performance emerges through light’s making-with music. This more-than human field of emergence helps to think the performance-body not as pre-formed, but forming in its performing. By focusing on granular and extra contrasted images, textures of objects and extreme close-ups, the director invests in the emergence of the improvisational body that takes place and vanishes with the concert, yet leaks outside the measured time of the film itself.
This paper explores Inni’s politics of light that co-composes with music’s movement as a micro-politics of relation. It asks: how is the passage between the affection-image and the relation-image made felt in rhythms of light (Deleuze, 1986; 1989)? How can we think about a music clip in terms of light’s rhythm and its force to co-composes with the texture of sound? How do we differ, from the listener-viewer’s standpoint, the difference between rhythm and texture, and how such qualities bridge what is heard and what is seen? Is rhythm the texture of light as it makes light-time with music?
References
Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault (The Althone Press, London).
________. (1986) The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis).
________. (1989) The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis).