The Ceremony – Becoming the Lagomorph
The Ceremony is the film that grew out of the earlier performance The Phantom Rabbit at Brandon Lodge. It marks a shift in the work, from an instinctive encounter with myth and memory, to a more intentional engagement with transformation and ritual. This piece captures a ceremonial act performed by The Lagomorph, and represents an important moment in the research where costumed performance, practice-based methods, and the act of making all begin to weave together.
In the film, the entrance to the forest disappears in the background and we are taken to a moment where the focus is on the ritual happening at the shrine. An object I built after a trip to Serbia, where I came across a walled religious community, and an open shed, sitting amongst many objects I spotted a discarded religious shrine. It had been left to decay, but there was something that moved me, as it had a power about it. This idea that even the religious community, is situated within the in-between space, it does not belong to one village or another, but something to be encountered. That encounter stayed with me, and when I returned to the UK, I spent three weeks in the wood workshops at Kingston University building my own shrine, dedicated to all rabbits and hares. At that time, I didn’t know what it would be used for, but the object carried something. In time it would become the catalyst to a ritual and ceremony, that has formed part of one of my first hybrid outings, taking the new creature from the woodwork room, and out into the wild forest of Thetford.
In The Ceremony, it is The Lagomorph who performs this ritual at the shrine. The film doesn’t show the inside of the forest as it remains concealed and mysterious, but only the entrance that the hybrid appears from, keeping the attention on the constructed sacred site at the shrine, which became a symbolic and physical space to honour lost stories, myths, and the violent histories associated to rabbit bodies. The mask worn in the film carries elements drawn from medieval archives, images of “evil” anthropomorphic rabbits attacking humans and hounds, the coat I was wearing was made from many coney rabbits, sewn together for warmth and vanity. These unsettling representations fed into my exploration of what it means to embody a rabbit not just as symbol or costume, but as a research method, a hybrid figure rooted in folklore, failure, and resistance.
This was not theatre or entertainment. It was a sacred ritual. A way of working that speaks through the costumes and the past ghosts of the rabbits I was wearing. It was in this space that I began to realise the depth of what I was actually doing: a ceremony to honour the past, to stand in the present, and to become something new. As my practice evolved into this hybrid form of performance-research, animals became central, not as metaphors, but as active, thinking presences within the work. As Derrida writes:
“Animals are my concern. Whether in the form of a figure or not. They multiply, lunging more and more wildly in my face in proportion as my texts seem to become autobiographical, or so one would have me believe.”
(Derrida, 2008, p. 35)
The rabbit, especially this lagomorph, began to root itself more and more into my own research. It disrupted it. It guided it. It multiplied in form and meaning, pushing me to abandon neurotypical thinking and instead follow something more intuitive, more neurodivergent based. What started as The Phantom Rabbit, an isolated performance driven by instinct and vulnerability, grew into The Ceremony: a considered, quiet act of becoming. A ritual held by the shrine, informed by lived experience, and performed not to resolve, but to hold complexity. To give voice to what had been lost or silenced.
It was also about creating a new myth, one that layered autobiography with history, where the hybrid creature entered into the in-between space. During the filming of the performance, a couple appeared unexpectedly to take an early morning stroll into the forest at dawn and came across this hybrid silently walking towards them. I often wonder how they explained what they saw as this moment of being seen, being discovered contributed to the growing myth of the hybrid.
The Ceremony is the film that grew out of the earlier performance The Phantom Rabbit at Brandon Lodge. It marks a shift in the work, from an instinctive encounter with myth and memory, to a more intentional engagement with transformation and ritual. This piece captures a ceremonial act performed by The Lagomorph, and represents an important moment in the research where costumed performance, practice-based methods, and the act of making all begin to weave together.
In the film, the entrance to the forest disappears in the background and we are taken to a moment where the focus is on the ritual happening at the shrine. An object I built after a trip to Serbia, where I came across a walled religious community, and an open shed, sitting amongst many objects I spotted a discarded religious shrine. It had been left to decay, but there was something that moved me, as it had a power about it. This idea that even the religious community, is situated within the in-between space, it does not belong to one village or another, but something to be encountered. That encounter stayed with me, and when I returned to the UK, I spent three weeks in the wood workshops at Kingston University building my own shrine, dedicated to all rabbits and hares. At that time, I didn’t know what it would be used for, but the object carried something. In time it would become the catalyst to a ritual and ceremony, that has formed part of one of my first hybrid outings, taking the new creature from the woodwork room, and out into the wild forest of Thetford.
In The Ceremony, it is The Lagomorph who performs this ritual at the shrine. The film doesn’t show the inside of the forest as it remains concealed and mysterious, but only the entrance that the hybrid appears from, keeping the attention on the constructed sacred site at the shrine, which became a symbolic and physical space to honour lost stories, myths, and the violent histories associated to rabbit bodies. The mask worn in the film carries elements drawn from medieval archives, images of “evil” anthropomorphic rabbits attacking humans and hounds, the coat I was wearing was made from many coney rabbits, sewn together for warmth and vanity. These unsettling representations fed into my exploration of what it means to embody a rabbit not just as symbol or costume, but as a research method, a hybrid figure rooted in folklore, failure, and resistance.
This was not theatre or entertainment. It was a sacred ritual. A way of working that speaks through the costumes and the past ghosts of the rabbits I was wearing. It was in this space that I began to realise the depth of what I was actually doing: a ceremony to honour the past, to stand in the present, and to become something new. As my practice evolved into this hybrid form of performance-research, animals became central, not as metaphors, but as active, thinking presences within the work. As Derrida writes:
“Animals are my concern. Whether in the form of a figure or not. They multiply, lunging more and more wildly in my face in proportion as my texts seem to become autobiographical, or so one would have me believe.”
(Derrida, 2008, p. 35)
The rabbit, especially this lagomorph, began to root itself more and more into my own research. It disrupted it. It guided it. It multiplied in form and meaning, pushing me to abandon neurotypical thinking and instead follow something more intuitive, more neurodivergent based. What started as The Phantom Rabbit, an isolated performance driven by instinct and vulnerability, grew into The Ceremony: a considered, quiet act of becoming. A ritual held by the shrine, informed by lived experience, and performed not to resolve, but to hold complexity. To give voice to what had been lost or silenced.
It was also about creating a new myth, one that layered autobiography with history, where the hybrid creature entered into the in-between space. During the filming of the performance, a couple appeared unexpectedly to take an early morning stroll into the forest at dawn and came across this hybrid silently walking towards them. I often wonder how they explained what they saw as this moment of being seen, being discovered contributed to the growing myth of the hybrid.
The ceremony Thetford Forest at the Medieval Warrens Lodge 2021
Hybrid Nation: The Sound of Otherness
This film documents a performative experiment in collective voice, where I extend my exploration of the hybrid beyond the individual body. The piece responds directly to a moment from an earlier work, Hybrid in Madrid, where, after the performance, I overheard people imitating the high-pitched tones of the hybrid in the narrow city streets. It stayed with me: what does a hybrid sound like? And what happens when that sound moves through others?
In this next performance, filmed in Serbia during co hosting the international multimedia art festival (IMAF) with Nenad Bogdanovic, I wanted to test the sound of hybridity not as a solitary gesture, but as a shared act. Surrounded by people from different countries, I wondered: what if I invited them to melt their voices into one? What if we made a soundscape that erased the idea of fixed identity, not by silencing individuality, but by amplifying difference into something unified?
The performance became a collaborative live experiment: an invitation into what I now call the Hybrid Nation, not a nation of borders or flags, but a sonic and embodied union of otherness. Each collaborator was given a translucent rabbit mask, held just inches from their face. These masks didn’t disguise or conceal, but functioned as an in-between object, filters, amplifiers, distorters of vocal sound. They became temporary extensions of the body: melted shaped plastic that caught breath and tone, shaping the voice as it left the body and entered the room. These collaborators were not all fellow performers some were visiting individuals who had agreed to take part in a collective ritual, a live collaborative experiment in a shared creative space of the Suluv Gallery in Novi Sad.
I began with a series of vocal warm-ups, guiding the group into sound through breath, resonance, and listening. I divided the group into tonal clusters, each group encouraged to find a shared frequency. From these subtle hums and murmurs emerged a series of harmonised tones, fluid, layered, vibrating between human and not-quite-human. The masks, the sound, the proximity of bodies in motion began to blur the lines between individual and collective.
Here, hybridity was not visual, but sonic. Not about the body alone, but what emerges between these human hybrids, through breath, vibration, intention, and resonance. The film captures this moment, not as spectacle, but as documentation of a fleeting, shared act: ephemeral, embodied, and rooted in difference.
This performance doesn’t provide a clear answer to what the hybrid sounds like, but offers a space in which that question can be collaboratlively tested live, with others. The Hybrid Nation becomes not a fixed place, but a collective state, one formed through collaboration, not control. A nation not of sameness, but of co-existing difference, held together by shared frequency. (you can read more about this in the thesis, page 67)
Hybrid Nation: The Sound of Otherness
This film documents a performative experiment in collective voice, where I extend my exploration of the hybrid beyond the individual body. The piece responds directly to a moment from an earlier work, Hybrid in Madrid, where, after the performance, I overheard people imitating the high-pitched tones of the hybrid in the narrow city streets. It stayed with me: what does a hybrid sound like? And what happens when that sound moves through others?
In this next performance, filmed in Serbia during co hosting the international multimedia art festival (IMAF) with Nenad Bogdanovic, I wanted to test the sound of hybridity not as a solitary gesture, but as a shared act. Surrounded by people from different countries, I wondered: what if I invited them to melt their voices into one? What if we made a soundscape that erased the idea of fixed identity, not by silencing individuality, but by amplifying difference into something unified?
The performance became a collaborative live experiment: an invitation into what I now call the Hybrid Nation, not a nation of borders or flags, but a sonic and embodied union of otherness. Each collaborator was given a translucent rabbit mask, held just inches from their face. These masks didn’t disguise or conceal, but functioned as an in-between object, filters, amplifiers, distorters of vocal sound. They became temporary extensions of the body: melted shaped plastic that caught breath and tone, shaping the voice as it left the body and entered the room. These collaborators were not all fellow performers some were visiting individuals who had agreed to take part in a collective ritual, a live collaborative experiment in a shared creative space of the Suluv Gallery in Novi Sad.
I began with a series of vocal warm-ups, guiding the group into sound through breath, resonance, and listening. I divided the group into tonal clusters, each group encouraged to find a shared frequency. From these subtle hums and murmurs emerged a series of harmonised tones, fluid, layered, vibrating between human and not-quite-human. The masks, the sound, the proximity of bodies in motion began to blur the lines between individual and collective.
Here, hybridity was not visual, but sonic. Not about the body alone, but what emerges between these human hybrids, through breath, vibration, intention, and resonance. The film captures this moment, not as spectacle, but as documentation of a fleeting, shared act: ephemeral, embodied, and rooted in difference.
This performance doesn’t provide a clear answer to what the hybrid sounds like, but offers a space in which that question can be collaboratlively tested live, with others. The Hybrid Nation becomes not a fixed place, but a collective state, one formed through collaboration, not control. A nation not of sameness, but of co-existing difference, held together by shared frequency. (you can read more about this in the thesis, page 67)
Conducting A Hybrid Nation a performative workshop (IMAF) International Multi Media Art Festival Serbia 2024
Blessing of the Beasts: The Lagomorph at Whitstable Beach
As my ceremonial work with the Lagomorph developed, I felt drawn to take this hybrid creature beyond the forest and the private rituals of the shrine. I wanted to test what might happen when the Lagomorph entered a communal space, still ceremonial, but this time shared, public, and by the sea. This led me to Blessings of the Beasts, a magical, participatory event unique to Whitstable, created by artist Sadie Hennessy, who invited me to contribute.
The performance took place on the beach at sunset, where I conducted a smudging ceremony, using sage to cleanse the negative energy of the day, both from the hybrid self and the space around us. It was quiet, evocative, and spiritual, yet the image of the Lagomorph performing a ritual among other animal-bodied participants brought something unexpected: a playful reverence. Among the sea urchins, goldfish, Dalmatians, and hybrid companions created by visitors and local residents, I was not an anomaly, I was part of a broader congregation of those embodying the more-than-human.
This piece was not staged in a traditional gallery, or in the isolation of the woods. It unfolded in nature, in real time, with a setting sun glimmering across the sea, offering a space between land and water, light and dark, self and other. The Lagomorph became part of something larger, both in community and in ecological presence.
Being part of Blessing of the Beasts marked an important moment in the evolution of this research. It brought the hybrid out of the controlled environment of solo work and into a space of social participation. It aligned with my ongoing interest in honouring animals, not only by referencing them, but by becoming one, in public, and among others doing the same.
This event also reinforces one of the core aims of my research: to move beyond institutional settings and rigid academic formats, creating accessible, participatory experiences that engage with ritual, embodiment, and transformation. The invitation to contribute to this event confirmed that the hybrid research has resonance beyond the academy. It is, at its heart, about connection, to animals, to place, and to one another. I was honoured to take part, and I hope to return, as this continues to grow into an annual event of community, memory, and ceremony, where the animal is not simply honoured, but lived.
Blessing of the Beasts: The Lagomorph at Whitstable Beach
As my ceremonial work with the Lagomorph developed, I felt drawn to take this hybrid creature beyond the forest and the private rituals of the shrine. I wanted to test what might happen when the Lagomorph entered a communal space, still ceremonial, but this time shared, public, and by the sea. This led me to Blessings of the Beasts, a magical, participatory event unique to Whitstable, created by artist Sadie Hennessy, who invited me to contribute.
The performance took place on the beach at sunset, where I conducted a smudging ceremony, using sage to cleanse the negative energy of the day, both from the hybrid self and the space around us. It was quiet, evocative, and spiritual, yet the image of the Lagomorph performing a ritual among other animal-bodied participants brought something unexpected: a playful reverence. Among the sea urchins, goldfish, Dalmatians, and hybrid companions created by visitors and local residents, I was not an anomaly, I was part of a broader congregation of those embodying the more-than-human.
This piece was not staged in a traditional gallery, or in the isolation of the woods. It unfolded in nature, in real time, with a setting sun glimmering across the sea, offering a space between land and water, light and dark, self and other. The Lagomorph became part of something larger, both in community and in ecological presence.
Being part of Blessing of the Beasts marked an important moment in the evolution of this research. It brought the hybrid out of the controlled environment of solo work and into a space of social participation. It aligned with my ongoing interest in honouring animals, not only by referencing them, but by becoming one, in public, and among others doing the same.
This event also reinforces one of the core aims of my research: to move beyond institutional settings and rigid academic formats, creating accessible, participatory experiences that engage with ritual, embodiment, and transformation. The invitation to contribute to this event confirmed that the hybrid research has resonance beyond the academy. It is, at its heart, about connection, to animals, to place, and to one another. I was honoured to take part, and I hope to return, as this continues to grow into an annual event of community, memory, and ceremony, where the animal is not simply honoured, but lived.
The Blessings of the Beasts Whitstable Beach 2024
The Phantom Rabbit – Brandon Lodge, Thetford Forest (2021)
The Phantom Rabbit was the first performance I created in Thetford Forest, before I began referring to the creature as The Lagomorph. It marked the early stages of exploring the importance of ceremony and ritual in relation to land, myth, and memory. I chose the site of Brandon Lodge, a medieval warreners’ lodge once licensed by the king to the local abbey, because of its deep and violent history with rabbits. This was a place where rabbits were farmed for their meat and fur, both valuable commodities at the time. The lodge keeper was tasked with defending the rabbits against starving poachers, often locals, who risked stealing them to feed their families. In many ways, it was a war between survival and authority: between ordinary people and the Church, between hunger and power.
An ominous tale still clings to the lodge’s warrening history: it is said that a large, huge, even, ghostly white rabbit with flaming red eyes guards the doorway to the lodge and is an omen of death to anyone who lays eyes on it. Whether this was invented to frighten off would-be poachers, or derived from a now-demolished psychiatric hospital nearby, the myth remains, lingering in local memory. Performing as The Phantom Rabbit brought me face-to-face with this violent and forgotten past.
This was a solitary act. I was alone, physically vulnerable, carrying expensive equipment into a remote area of the forest. I had no support, and no plan beyond embodying the hybrid. It was in the early hours of the morning. I arrived, set up, and thought I had turned the camera on, but hadn’t. Even so, I performed. I stayed with the ceremony. I repeated it again, as the light changed. I gave myself to the process, not for an audience, but for the land, the myth, and the act of becoming.
This performance didn’t come out of a script or rehearsal. It emerged out of the forest, out of the practice, a kind of intuitive making that sits at the core of my research. The Phantom Rabbit was not about re-enactment or illustration; it was about listening to what the site held, and responding through embodiment. It was a way of making space for stories that have been erased or twisted, giving voice to the violence and survival that often go untold in official histories. By becoming the hybrid creature, I entered into a conversation with that landscape, offering something back, and creating something new.
The Phantom Rabbit was an early yet important step in my journey. It set the foundations for what would become The Lagomorph, not just another hybrid or costume, but a methodology. This was where I first began to understand how ritual and ceremony can operate as research practices. The performance offered a way to work with history that doesn’t depend on academic certainty, but instead on presence, care, intuition, and risk. This early work taught me that even failed recordings, missed cues, and tired bodies are part of the knowledge-making process. From this point on, the hybrid became not just a figure I wear, but a way of working.
The Phantom Rabbit Thetford 2021 (Brandon Lodge)
Madrid Prelude: Finding the Voice of the Hybrid
This performance, captured in Madrid, became a prelude to the later development of the Hybrid Cruiser character. Performed in an old factory space with tiled marble floors and echoing concrete walls, the work explored the sonic identity of the hybrid, asking, what does a hybrid sound like? The answer emerged as a high-pitched, rhythmic tone, layered and dissonant, bouncing off the industrial surfaces and into the bodies of the audience.
The hybrid figure was layered in discarded clothing, part human, part animal, wearing a coat made by fashion students from recycled materials, topped with stacked latex animal masks that were slowly peeled away over the course of the performance. The result was a gradual unmasking, not towards clarity but toward distortion: a hybrid face both revealed and confused. Colourful high heels clashed with the rawness of the environment as the hybrid precariously climbed ladders, physically ascending while the eerie hybrid tone echoed above the heads of the audience.
In one sequence, the hybrid poured water from one bucket to another. But rather than diminishing, the water multiplied, the foam swelling and bubbling over the rim, spreading across the floor. Like the performance itself, the act defied logic. The more the hybrid tried to contain, the more it spilled over, playfully, uncontrollably. This moment of overflow mirrored the affective charge of the performance: a strange mix of humour, tension, fear, and curiosity.
This early work became an important step in the research. It introduced questions that continued to shape A Hybrid Nation: how does hybridity sound, feel, and move through public and private space? What is the potential of costume to confuse boundaries of species, gender, culture, and voice? And how do these performances echo after the event?
As the audience filtered out of the factory into the narrow streets of Madrid, many were overheard mimicking the hybrid’s vocalisation, attempting to reproduce the sounds that their bodies absorbed and that they had just witnessed. This echo becomes a kind of transmission. It shows how the hybrid doesn’t end at the moment of performance but lingers, reverberates, inhabits others. This moment of relational intersection, when the hybrid’s voice becomes someone else’s voice, forms part of the thread of the research. It points to hybridity as an affective process, not just of transformation, but of exchange.
Madrid Prelude: Finding the Voice of the Hybrid
This performance, captured in Madrid, became a prelude to the later development of the Hybrid Cruiser character. Performed in an old factory space with tiled marble floors and echoing concrete walls, the work explored the sonic identity of the hybrid, asking, what does a hybrid sound like? The answer emerged as a high-pitched, rhythmic tone, layered and dissonant, bouncing off the industrial surfaces and into the bodies of the audience.
The hybrid figure was layered in discarded clothing, part human, part animal, wearing a coat made by fashion students from recycled materials, topped with stacked latex animal masks that were slowly peeled away over the course of the performance. The result was a gradual unmasking, not towards clarity but toward distortion: a hybrid face both revealed and confused. Colourful high heels clashed with the rawness of the environment as the hybrid precariously climbed ladders, physically ascending while the eerie hybrid tone echoed above the heads of the audience.
In one sequence, the hybrid poured water from one bucket to another. But rather than diminishing, the water multiplied, the foam swelling and bubbling over the rim, spreading across the floor. Like the performance itself, the act defied logic. The more the hybrid tried to contain, the more it spilled over, playfully, uncontrollably. This moment of overflow mirrored the affective charge of the performance: a strange mix of humour, tension, fear, and curiosity.
This early work became an important step in the research. It introduced questions that continued to shape A Hybrid Nation: how does hybridity sound, feel, and move through public and private space? What is the potential of costume to confuse boundaries of species, gender, culture, and voice? And how do these performances echo after the event?
As the audience filtered out of the factory into the narrow streets of Madrid, many were overheard mimicking the hybrid’s vocalisation, attempting to reproduce the sounds that their bodies absorbed and that they had just witnessed. This echo becomes a kind of transmission. It shows how the hybrid doesn’t end at the moment of performance but lingers, reverberates, inhabits others. This moment of relational intersection, when the hybrid’s voice becomes someone else’s voice, forms part of the thread of the research. It points to hybridity as an affective process, not just of transformation, but of exchange.
A hybrid in Madrid 2023
The Hybrid Dictator: Reclaiming Space Through Neurodivergent Resistance
The Hybrid Dictator was performed at the International Multimedia Art Festival (IMAF) as a direct response to the exclusionary structures that neurodivergent people often encounter within institutions, particularly within academic environments. Drawing from lived experience, this work embodied the emotional and structural challenges of navigating systems built for neurotypical ways of thinking, communicating, and existing. The figure of the dictator became a metaphor for these gatekeeping forces, those that regulate who belongs, how they must behave, and what knowledge is considered legitimate.
In this performance at the Suluv Gallery, a supposed creative space is abruptly transformed into a hostile environment. The audience is thrown out from the building into the street, forced to stand in the rain. Meanwhile, the dictator remains inside, sealing the space inside the gallery with yellow warning tape and auth authoritative official-looking signs that declare the space as restricted, unsafe, or inaccessible. This visual language of exclusion evokes both authoritarian control and the subtler, everyday policing of bodies and behaviours that neurodivergent people regularly encounter in educational and cultural systems.
Unintentionally, a stray dog slips into the performance space and quietly joins the seated audience. When the dictator forces everyone out, the dog, non-verbal, instinctual, a creature that doesn't belong in either human institutional or artistic frameworks, follows the crowd. This moment became unexpectedly poignant. The dog’s quiet exit mirrored the cost of rigid control: even the outsider, the marginal figure, no longer chooses to stay. The dictator, despite all the effort to claim power, ends up alone.
The audience, however, doesn’t remain passive. They return. In a powerful act of rebellion, they re-enter the space, tear down the tape, rip up the restriction notices, and reclaim their place within the room. In this reversal, the dictator fails, not only politically but symbolically, and exits. The crowd stays. They inhabit the space once again, this time on their own terms, warmed, dry, and together.
This performance embeds itself with the dialogue of A Hybrid Nation, highlighting how live art can create temporary yet powerful acts of resistance and reconfiguration. It exemplifies how the hybrid costume and performance event become tools for confronting exclusion, not only representing but enacting transformation. The dictator is a hybrid too, a fusion of absurdity and authoritarianism, a mask of control, but unlike the other hybrids in the research, this one cannot adapt, collaborate, or evolve.
Here, ceremony, costume, and the live event merge as a practice-based methodology that centres emotional reality, uncertainty, and participation. The piece doesn't offer a neat solution, but rather stages a confrontation: between neurotypical structures and neurodivergent experience; between institutional power and collective reclamation. Through this embodied practice, I challenge traditional academic formats by foregrounding process, disruption, and the necessity of alternative ways of doing research.
The Hybrid Dictator: Reclaiming Space Through Neurodivergent Resistance
The Hybrid Dictator was performed at the International Multimedia Art Festival (IMAF) as a direct response to the exclusionary structures that neurodivergent people often encounter within institutions, particularly within academic environments. Drawing from lived experience, this work embodied the emotional and structural challenges of navigating systems built for neurotypical ways of thinking, communicating, and existing. The figure of the dictator became a metaphor for these gatekeeping forces, those that regulate who belongs, how they must behave, and what knowledge is considered legitimate.
In this performance at the Suluv Gallery, a supposed creative space is abruptly transformed into a hostile environment. The audience is thrown out from the building into the street, forced to stand in the rain. Meanwhile, the dictator remains inside, sealing the space inside the gallery with yellow warning tape and auth authoritative official-looking signs that declare the space as restricted, unsafe, or inaccessible. This visual language of exclusion evokes both authoritarian control and the subtler, everyday policing of bodies and behaviours that neurodivergent people regularly encounter in educational and cultural systems.
Unintentionally, a stray dog slips into the performance space and quietly joins the seated audience. When the dictator forces everyone out, the dog, non-verbal, instinctual, a creature that doesn't belong in either human institutional or artistic frameworks, follows the crowd. This moment became unexpectedly poignant. The dog’s quiet exit mirrored the cost of rigid control: even the outsider, the marginal figure, no longer chooses to stay. The dictator, despite all the effort to claim power, ends up alone.
The audience, however, doesn’t remain passive. They return. In a powerful act of rebellion, they re-enter the space, tear down the tape, rip up the restriction notices, and reclaim their place within the room. In this reversal, the dictator fails, not only politically but symbolically, and exits. The crowd stays. They inhabit the space once again, this time on their own terms, warmed, dry, and together.
This performance embeds itself with the dialogue of A Hybrid Nation, highlighting how live art can create temporary yet powerful acts of resistance and reconfiguration. It exemplifies how the hybrid costume and performance event become tools for confronting exclusion, not only representing but enacting transformation. The dictator is a hybrid too, a fusion of absurdity and authoritarianism, a mask of control, but unlike the other hybrids in the research, this one cannot adapt, collaborate, or evolve.
Here, ceremony, costume, and the live event merge as a practice-based methodology that centres emotional reality, uncertainty, and participation. The piece doesn't offer a neat solution, but rather stages a confrontation: between neurotypical structures and neurodivergent experience; between institutional power and collective reclamation. Through this embodied practice, I challenge traditional academic formats by foregrounding process, disruption, and the necessity of alternative ways of doing research.
The Hybrid Dictator who threw all the humans out of the gallery. The humans returned to rebel. (IMAF) International multimedia art festival 2022
The Hybrid Alchemist: Performing Uncertainty
The Alchemist was performed at the 2022 International Multimedia Art Festival (IMAF) in Odžaci, Serbia, in an abandoned motel on the outskirts of town. Once a space of political secrecy, power, and illicit deals, the building is now stripped of its former decadence, its faded rooms visited only by local youths, who use it as a site for graffiti and experimentation. Into this fractured space entered a different kind of experiment: a rabbit in a white doctor’s coat, covered in the molecular formula for the COVID-19 vaccine.
This hybrid, part healer, part trickster, part exile, was not aiming for scientific precision. In the performance, the Alchemist conducts a messy, improvised experiment that fails, then succeeds, but not in a conventional or controlled way. The resulting disruption causes the audience and television crew to scatter. The moment becomes charged with tension and uncertainty. And yet, this disarray is part of the practice. It’s where the knowledge lies.
The costume itself, made from local materials, with a mass-produced mask imported from China, embodies cultural entanglement and displacement. It speaks to how hybrids are born from exile, from not-quite-belonging. Performing the Alchemist meant inhabiting contradiction: the freedom offered by costume, and the challenge of expressing fluidity, complexity, and disruption within public space.
Like many of the works in A Hybrid Nation, this performance resists easy interpretation. It does not seek closure. Instead, the Alchemist lives within the friction of becoming, where knowledge is unstable, and meaning must be felt as much as understood. These tensions and failures are not obstacles to the research, but essential components of the methodology. The performance asks: what can be learned by staying inside the experiment, even when it breaks apart? (you can read more about the alchemist in the thesis page 81)
The Hybrid Alchemist: Performing Uncertainty
The Alchemist was performed at the 2022 International Multimedia Art Festival (IMAF) in Odžaci, Serbia, in an abandoned motel on the outskirts of town. Once a space of political secrecy, power, and illicit deals, the building is now stripped of its former decadence, its faded rooms visited only by local youths, who use it as a site for graffiti and experimentation. Into this fractured space entered a different kind of experiment: a rabbit in a white doctor’s coat, covered in the molecular formula for the COVID-19 vaccine.
This hybrid, part healer, part trickster, part exile, was not aiming for scientific precision. In the performance, the Alchemist conducts a messy, improvised experiment that fails, then succeeds, but not in a conventional or controlled way. The resulting disruption causes the audience and television crew to scatter. The moment becomes charged with tension and uncertainty. And yet, this disarray is part of the practice. It’s where the knowledge lies.
The costume itself, made from local materials, with a mass-produced mask imported from China, embodies cultural entanglement and displacement. It speaks to how hybrids are born from exile, from not-quite-belonging. Performing the Alchemist meant inhabiting contradiction: the freedom offered by costume, and the challenge of expressing fluidity, complexity, and disruption within public space.
Like many of the works in A Hybrid Nation, this performance resists easy interpretation. It does not seek closure. Instead, the Alchemist lives within the friction of becoming, where knowledge is unstable, and meaning must be felt as much as understood. These tensions and failures are not obstacles to the research, but essential components of the methodology. The performance asks: what can be learned by staying inside the experiment, even when it breaks apart? (you can read more about the alchemist in the thesis page 81)
The Hybrid Alchemist: It takes of lot of experimentation before something becomes aligned. (IMAF) International Multi Media Art Festival Serbia 2022
Video Diary: Entering the Forest Alone
This video diary captures a behind-the-scenes account of what it took to create the Lagomorph performance in Thetford Forest. I filmed myself in the early hours before sunrise, driving alone to the site, setting up my camera and equipment in complete darkness. There was no support crew, just me, the hybrid costume, and the quiet of the forest.
I pressed record and walked into the trees to begin the performance, trusting the camera was running. What I didn’t realise until I returned, exhausted and breathless, removing the mask, was that I hadn’t switched the camera on. As daylight began to flicker through the canopy, I had no choice but to put the mask back on and re-enter the space.
This wasn’t just a technical mistake. It became part of the research. The act of going back, despite exhaustion, frustration, and isolation, revealed something important: to enter the hybrid ceremonial space, I had to give myself fully to it. There was no shortcut, no rehearsal, no guarantee of success. The process had to be lived and experienced in real time. These kind of live experiences are not accessible in book based knowledge, they are limited to words on a page, and confined by institutional framework, here is place of risk taken, the possibility of failure and the encounter of the un-expected.
This aligns with my practice-based research methodology, where the doing, the mess, the unpredictability, the embodied labour, is central to the knowledge produced. The diary is more than a record of the making-of; it’s a testament to how solo practice in unfamiliar spaces becomes a form of dedication and surrender to the research. The performance wasn’t just for the camera, it was for the space, for the Lagomorph, and for the commitment to A Hybrid Nation.
Video Diary: Entering the Forest Alone
This video diary captures a behind-the-scenes account of what it took to create the Lagomorph performance in Thetford Forest. I filmed myself in the early hours before sunrise, driving alone to the site, setting up my camera and equipment in complete darkness. There was no support crew, just me, the hybrid costume, and the quiet of the forest.
I pressed record and walked into the trees to begin the performance, trusting the camera was running. What I didn’t realise until I returned, exhausted and breathless, removing the mask, was that I hadn’t switched the camera on. As daylight began to flicker through the canopy, I had no choice but to put the mask back on and re-enter the space.
This wasn’t just a technical mistake. It became part of the research. The act of going back, despite exhaustion, frustration, and isolation, revealed something important: to enter the hybrid ceremonial space, I had to give myself fully to it. There was no shortcut, no rehearsal, no guarantee of success. The process had to be lived and experienced in real time. These kind of live experiences are not accessible in book based knowledge, they are limited to words on a page, and confined by institutional framework, here is place of risk taken, the possibility of failure and the encounter of the un-expected.
This aligns with my practice-based research methodology, where the doing, the mess, the unpredictability, the embodied labour, is central to the knowledge produced. The diary is more than a record of the making-of; it’s a testament to how solo practice in unfamiliar spaces becomes a form of dedication and surrender to the research. The performance wasn’t just for the camera, it was for the space, for the Lagomorph, and for the commitment to A Hybrid Nation.
Above research video diary in Thetford Forest 2021 (Brandon Lodge)
Reflection on Performing Raqs 'Abr Al-Zam (2024)
Landmark Performances, United Kingdom
This performance was part of a two-day opportunity during an art exhibition at the Landmark Arts Centre, a space that carries personal meaning, as it was the same venue where my husband and I held our civil partnership ceremony in 2005. Returning to this site, now as a performer-researcher, I explored how hybrid creatures inhabit spaces marked by memory, ritual, and public presentation.
The performance investigated how my hybrid characters respond to more formal UK-based environments, not just international or culturally specific contexts. Each day I altered the setting, experimenting with spatial relationships and audience proximity. It wasn’t without challenge, there were complaints about the volume of the music, but that tension also fed into the research: how are these creatures received in a space coded by social convention?
A key moment was inviting my cousin Sarah, who has no formal performance training, to wear one of the masks. It was the first time I had witnessed one of my hybrids animated by another body, who is someone from my own family. Her visible discomfort, the slipping latex, and the struggle to breathe under hot lights became part of the live research. It revealed how the mask resists being a neutral prop, it demands a physical and emotional negotiation. These kinds of frictions are central to my neurodivergent practice, where control and surrender constantly shift.
Raqs 'Abr Al-Zam was also a collaboration with Pakistani artist and Kingston University MA graduate Fahiem Abdulah. Having previously performed in Islamabad at the 2019 Art Festival, I was keen to revisit the question: how might a hybrid costume made in the UK enter a cultural dialogue elsewhere? For this, I commissioned a new mask--Usagi (meaning "rabbit" in Japanese), crafted by Scottish fashion designer Nancy Nelson. This ongoing collaboration is a slow process of cultural blending, where hybrid identities are formed not only through performance but through transnational exchange, texture, and design.
White Rabbit at the Shrine
In this film below, I appear as a white rabbit hybrid, seated quietly before a Buddhist shrine in Japan, gently ringing a bell in time with the rhythmic chants echoing through the space. Though I am not from Japan, this performance was not an act of impersonation, but of listening, noticing, and being present. The white rabbit costume became a soft threshold between cultures, a way of experiencing Japan without claiming to belong to it.
This performance took place before I formally began this research, yet it has become a significant point of reference. It revealed how the hybrid costume could not only adapt to but also harmonise with a cultural setting far from my own. The rabbit’s neutrality allowed me, as someone who is neurodivergent, to enter this space without confrontation. The costume offered protection and permission, opening up a quiet mode of participation. It enabled me to be both present and hidden, visible yet undefined.
The rabbit did not seek to replicate local custom, it simply sat, moved gently, listened, and responded. In doing so, it became part of the space. This moment has continued to inform my current practice, offering insight into how hybrid identities can travel, adapt, and resonate across borders. It demonstrates how costume allows the body to inhabit different contexts while holding onto its own authenticity.
This early performance echoes questions of A Hybrid Nation: How do hybrid figures shape-shift between cultures? How does neurodivergent experience find expression in the quiet gestures of nonverbal performance? And how might these practices become ways of connecting across difference without erasing it?
(more can be read about the white rabbit in the thesis on page 9)
Translating Bhabha
This film responds to the physical presence of Homi K. Bhabha through his lectures, whose thinking around cultural hybridity has influenced my research. I didn’t want to just write about him or quote theory, I wanted to explore how knowledge moves through the body. When Bhabha lectures, I am not lost in his words, I was captivated by his body, and how it moved.
I was witnessing something happening, the flicker of his hands, the shifting weight in his body, the small gestures like touching the lectern or adjusting the mic, the intensity in some of his movements, speak in volumes. What I am seeing is a conversation with his body, its a language that I can understand, something that is beyond words, beyond text, beyond the neurotypical landscape. For me, this feels like liquid knowledge that I refer to in the written thesis, it is not fixed, or contained, it is something that is moving, unlike text in books, but flowing, and alive with passion. It is moments like these when I see and encounter the experience of the body, it enables me to connect to Bhabha's hybrid theories and bring it into my practice.
I made this film as part of my research trying to find a way to voice what I was seeing, and emotionally experiencing, into something that becomes visible, so that others could also relate to what I was unable to explain in writing. This film is about that. It’s about noticing the performance of thinking, and how ideas can be shared in other ways , not just through writing, but through being present, through gestures, through the energy that comes from giving and in this case Bhabha performing his lectures.
(I write about this in more depth in the thesis on page 23)
Filmed and edited by Spike Mclarrity 2024
Below is a video showing the layout of the exhibition 'A Hybrid Nation' at the Penny School Gallery Kingston Upon Thames 2025. Filmed by Spike Mclarrity
A visit from White Rabbit
Filmed by Liv England 2025