Megan Brailey

Megan Brailey is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary performance and conceptual artist, movement practitioner, researcher, and writer. Brailey’s work spans butoh theatre-dance, performance and installation art, and immersive theatre, to spoken word poetry and photography. 

 

Having studied Literature and Art History at Durham University, they investigate the embodiment of cultural histories, gender and class politics, philosophy, and psycho-somatics. Their work is grounded in political and philosophical understandings of the world, and usually tethered to a strong art historical dialogue. Brailey works as a freelance researcher, archivist and curator. 

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Fundamental in their work is a deconstructive impulse, germinating from an interest in the incongruent and absurd normalities of our constructed world; an interest in the unconscious; the plasticity of memory, space, and time; and alternative and embodied histories. Through their research came a fascination with object-ontology, especially in the context of stagecraft, which in turned stimulated the use of symbolic objects, casts and prosthetics in performance, as well as staged self-portraits. 

 

Their movement practice is strongly tethered to their experimental, poetic, and theatrical writing, which fundamentally underlines the inadequately of language to convey embodied experience, and attempts to abstract language to promulgate pluralism, heterogeneity, and difference as a basis for connection. It also deeply investigates dreams and the unconscious as a way to access alternative and ‘felt histories’, which can be understood as both historical forces felt bodily; embodied language or the symbols of the body; and the divergent memory systems of the body. 

 

Feminism and queer theory are constant undercurrents to their work: from the representation of the body onstage, self-expressions, and the deconstruction of binarisms, to performance radicalism. Underlying all of their work is a desire to critically reflect on and renounce power structures as well as to technically challenge the overarching and instantiated structures of their practices.