Al Meggs

In the 1970s & 1980s, many dancers, including myself and my peers, worked abroad, taking performing jobs as a means of acquiring Equity (performer's union) membership, for work security and a regular wage, and/or to see the world. This undocumented period of recent dance history is the focus of my creative practice thesis.

Chapter one, an autoethnographic novel, Ghostcards, combines autoethnography, hauntology and queer approaches of linearity and time, to recall my life in a small cabaret dance company touring Italy inthe 1980s. I queer the narrative by storying people and places from the origins of the modern cabaret in fin-de-siècle Paris, bringing the past and present together in a magically real space, where real, researched and imagined lives meet, haunt, and interact within my lived experience. The accompanying critical reflection, At "Le Petit Gavroche", brings into play my knoweldge of, and career in, live performance, placing my work onstage and off, in a small intimate cabaret venue. Through performed scenes, dialogue, and sketches, it evolves the individual elements - autoethnography, hauntology,  queer(ing), magical realism and cabaret - into an original method I call Autoethnocabaret.

My thesis sets out to resist, challenge, and queer traditional academic methods/texts, and identifies an original contribution to knowledge, where two chapters, inspired by live performance,reflect and inform one another, becoming both method(ology) and outcome. A space where the traditional and contemporary can coexist, converse, and learn from each other. 

Autoethnography. Hauntology. Queer(ing). Magical Realism. Dance. Cabaret.