Ben Spatz

Ben Spatz is a nonbinary researcher and theorist of embodied practice. They are Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Huddersfield, UK; author of What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (Routledge 2015); and AHRC Leadership Fellow with the project “Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” (2016-2018). Ben is also editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research from Open Library of Humanities and the Advanced Methods imprint from Punctum Books; co-convener of the Embodied Research Working Group within the International Federation for Theatre Research; and co-investigator on the ESRC project “Research with a Twist: A Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers” (2018-2019).

Ben has recently been invited to speak at conferences on theatre, dance, music, martial arts, and intangible cultural heritage at the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, Kent, Aberdeen, Bedfordshire, Cardiff, Maynooth, Ghent, and Zagreb, as well as New York University, City University of New York, Northwestern University, and University of the Arts Helsinki. Ben has more than two decades of experience as a performer and director of contemporary performance, working mainly in New York City from 2001 to 2013, and is currently researching the emergence of sexual and racial identities in experimental practice and audiovisual research.

For more information, please visit: <www.urbanresearchtheater.com>.

• Performer training and performance technique

• Theatres of musicality and song

• Epistemologies of embodiment and practice

• Intersections of performing, martial, healing, and ritual arts

• Ethics and politics of embodied training and discipline

• Cultural and sexual identities as areas of embodied knowledge