Abstract My practice-led PhD research combines theories of Worlding and Unworlding with my own lived experiences of working as a backstage labourer to develop new practice-led research which critically engages with the invisible labour embedded in the production of large scale theatrical worlds. This involves situating writing, filmmaking and performance practices within the liminal areas of production to question the politics of what is occluded from view. These questions form the basis of interrelated site-specific embodied practices which seek to problematise and re-map thresholds between the construction and deconstruction of dominant fictions, past and present.

In response to the provocation of 'Making seeable and sayable: artistic research in the interplay of power and language'. I propose to share elements of this ongoing research as a performance/lecture, combining readings from my experimental written field-notes with film extracts. Together, these materials approach the complications of representation through the proximal lens of backstage and working-class labour. I explore the body and voice as generative tools capable of developing haptic, perceptual and situated writing as practice which seeks to queer and destablise accepted hierarchies of knowledge production and the favourability of normative imaginaries. (My proposed presentation would be 20 minutes in duration).

Two key pieces of theory which ground my methodological approach are Kathleen Stewart's notion of Worlding and Jack Halberstam's notion of Unworlding. "Worldings are not globe-like containers but radically-situated modes of response to a present sensed out in bodies, affects, aesthetics and politics". Whilst Halberstam's notion of Unworlding asks how concepts such as the human, subject, object or animal might be tipped out of their hierarchical formations to explore the unmaking of worlds. Building from these ideas, my research asks how attunements to the usually unseen and unheard can be