Kate Morton

Profile

I am a full-time practice-based PhD researcher at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. My research aims to develop a scenographic framework for understanding and enhancing audience receptivity in mobile site-specific performance.

This study springs from an extensive career in theatre design, where I evolved an interdisciplinary practice responding to the properties and possibilities of materials. This led to an interest in the materiality of the environment and how participants in site-specific work encounter their surroundings. My MA research used field work to explore the affective experience of wheelchair users in the countryside and employed scenographic methods to analyse the findings. 

My current research builds on this work using canal towpaths as the experimental site in order to focus the question of human/environment interactions in a way that can illuminate issues around the regeneration and multiple use of spaces. It explores how atmospheres activate memories and associations to produce a sense of our environment in terms of both meaning-making in theatrical performance and our everyday response to place. 
 

Research interests

My research is concerned with people’s mobile experience of place and includes an interest in:

• Site-specific performance
• Affective Atmospheres
• Mobilities
• Scenography
   

Qualifications

• MA Performance Design, University of Leeds
• BA (Hons) Theatre Design, Nottingham Trent University