Susan Melrose, M ès L, DEA, Doctorat (Sorbonne Nlle) is Professor of Performance Arts and Research Convenor, Performing Arts, in the School of Arts, Middlesex University. After completing doctoral research in performance analysis at the Sorbonne (Nlle) in the early 1980s she established and ran postgraduate profession/vocation-linked theatre and performance studies courses at Central School of Speech and Drama and Rose Bruford College London. She has taught at universities in Turkey, France, Tunisia and Australia.
Her support for the wider acknowledgement of the complex-knowledge-status and aesthetic ownership of professional artists and their work has driven much of her teaching and research practice over the past ten years. In a number of different publications, including R Butcher and S Melrose (eds), Rosemary Butcher: Choreography, Collisions and Collaborations, Middlesex University Press, 2005, she questions the appropriateness of certain discourse-apparatus-driven approaches to the analysis of performance, performance-making practices and expert practitioners.
In A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (Macmillan 1994) she sought to critique literature-based approaches to theatre practices, proposing a practice-centred alternative. Her writing has contested the late-20C spread of what she calls the “new critical orthodoxies” in University-based performance studies programmes, and questions the nature of the university’s ethical relationship with performance-creative professionals and arts practices.
She is widely published in the fields of performance analysis, performance writing and critical semiotics. A number of presentations and keynote papers are published at http://www.sfmelrose.u-net.com.
Susan Melrose currently supervises or co-supervises higher and research degree candidates in areas including performance analysis, mask in performance training, professional music performance, choreographic signature, visual theatre and questions of discourse, performance documentation and “new technologies”. She is particularly interested in questions of the performance disciplines, “interfaces”and interdisciplinarity; meta-practice and performance meta-languages; writing and performance.