Re(-)collecting cabaret. A queer haunted autoethnography of real, researched and imagined stories of cabaret past and present.

Abstract

In the 1970s & 1980s, many dancers, including myself and my peers, worked abroad, taking performing jobs as a means of acquiring the necessary requirements (at the time, forty weeks’ approved work) to join the performer’s union, Equity, for work security and a regular wage, and/or to see the world. This period of recent dance history has yet to be documented and is the focus of my creative practice thesis. The first component, an autoethnographic novel, Ghostcards, combines autoethnography, hauntology, and queer approaches of linearity and time, to recollect and re-collect my life touring Italy in a small cabaret dance company in the1980s. I further queer my 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. Ghostcards chronicles the first eighteen months of my life abroad. For the accompanying critical reflection, At ‘Le Petit Gavroche’. An Autoethnocabaret, I bring into play my knowledge of, and career in, live performance, and place my work onstage and off in a small intimate cabaret venue. Through dialogue and performed scenes and sketches, I focus on, and evolve the individual components - autoethnography, hauntology, queer(ing), magical realism and cabaret, that make up my method I call autoethnocabaret. Backstage, the conversation turns to literature, method, and the ethics of writing an autoethnographic novel.
My thesis sets out to resist, challenge, and queer the patriarchal discourse of traditional academic narratives, and identifies an original contribution to academic writing that draws on and celebrates cabaret, to create a doctoral thesis for the twenty-first century.

Date of Award	Sept 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Jessica Moriarty (Supervisor), Ailsa Grant Ferguson (Supervisor) & Kate Aughterson (Supervisor)