Dr. Nicholas Johnson
Assistant Professor
Creative arts
Trinity College Dublin
Ireland
Biography
Nicholas E. Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Drama and a scholar-artist who convenes the college-wide Creative Arts Practice research theme. He is co-founder of the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, where the techniques of the theatre laboratory are used to produce cutting-edge research and practice in relation to Beckett in performance. A director, adaptor, and literary translator, Johnson has used techniques of performance in interdisciplinary research projects including "The David Fragments" after Bertolt Brecht, "Enemy of the Stars" after Wyndham Lewis, "The Machinewreckers" and "Masse Mensch" after Ernst Toller, "The Brothers Karamazov" after Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Howl" after Allen Ginsberg, "Three Dialogues" after George Berkeley, "K." (based on the short prose of Franz Kafka), and "The Way of the Language" (based on a large archive of non-fiction materials relating to Guantánamo Bay and post-9/11 America). His recent Beckett projects include "Cascando" with Pan Pan Theatre Company (Beckett Theatre 2016), "No's Knife" with Lisa Dwan (Lincoln Center 2015) and "Ill Seen Ill Said" (ATRL & Antwerp 2015-16). In 2012 he directed "Ethica: Four Shorts by Samuel Beckett," presenting "Play", "Come and Go", "Catastrophe", and "What Where" in Bulgaria, Dublin, the Enniskillen Festival 2013, and Áras an Uachtairáin for World Human Rights Day. He has contributed to "The Plays of Samuel Beckett" and "Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland" (both from Methuen) as well as Theatre Research International, the Journal of Art Historiography, and Forum Modernes Theater. He co-edited the Journal of Beckett Studies special issue on performance (23.1, 2014) with Jonathan Heron. He has facilitated performance workshops worldwide, including most recently the US, UK, Germany, Turkey, India, Japan, Bulgaria, Morocco, Israel and the West Bank. He is a founding co-director of the Beckett Summer School at TCD. He won the Provost's Teaching Award (early career) in 2013, and in 2016 he held a visiting research fellowship at Yale University.
Research Interest
Art, Historiography, Drama
Publications
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Nicholas Johnson, Analogue Krapp in a Digital Culture, Journal of Beckett Studies, 20, (2), 2011, p213 - 220
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Nicholas Johnson, Theatrum Philosophicum: A Platonic Turn in Theatre Scholarship, Forum Modernes Theater, 25, (2), 2011, p59 - 64
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Nicholas Johnson, Language, Multiplicity, Void: The Radical Politics of the Beckettian Subject, Theatre Research International, 37, (1), 2012, p38 - 48
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Nicholas Johnson, Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, Journal of Art Historiography, 9, (December), 2013, p1 - 12
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A Spectrum of Fidelity, an Ethic of Impossibility: Directing Beckett in, editor(s)Katherine Weiss , The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Critical Companions), London, Methuen, 2013, pp152 - 164
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Jonathan Heron and Nicholas Johnson, with Burç ÃŽdem Dinçel, Gavin Quinn, Sarah Jane Scaife, and Ãine Josephine Tyrrell, Dossier: The Samuel Beckett Laboratory 2013, Journal of Beckett Studies, 23, (1), 2014, p73 - 94
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Jonathan Heron and Nicholas Johnson, "First Both": Introduction to "the Performance Issue", Journal of Beckett Studies, 23, (1), 2014, p1 - 10
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A Theatre of the Unword: Censorship, Hegemony, and Samuel Beckett in, editor(s)Christopher Collins and Mary Collins , The Rest is History: Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp36 - 54
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Nicholas Johnson, Performing Embodiment, Review of Performing Embodiment, by Anna McMullan , Journal of Beckett Studies, 25, (2), 2016, p280-284
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Jonathan Heron and Nicholas Johnson, Critical Pedagogies and the Theatre Laboratory, RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 22, (2), 2017, p282 - 287, Notes: [A dialogue contribution to the "Points and Practices" section of RiDE.], Journal Article, PUBLISHED
