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Dr Alexander Kelly

Reader

Alex is Reader in Theatre & Performance and has been with Performing Arts at Leeds Beckett since the start of its first course in 2006. He is theatre maker, performer, storyteller, game maker, writer and mentor, and tours throughout the UK and internationally. He is artistic associate of Lisbon-based international collective Má-Criação. From 1995-2023 he was Co-Artistic Director of the Sheffield-based theatre company Third Angel, with whom he created performances that connected the fields of theatre, live art, film & video, durational performance, conversation and digital media. Recent projects with Third Angel include The Desire Paths, 600 People, The Department of Distractions and The Distraction Agents.

Alex has taught at numerous Universities across the UK, and has also taught at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. He regularly mentors other artists and companies, supporting the devising and creation of their own projects, notably in the territories of documentary and reportage theatre and autobiographical performance. This has included working with gobscure, Irna Qureshi, Vandal Factory, Yolanda Mercy, Michael Pinchbeck, Holly Gallagher, Natalie Wong, Jack Dean, John Wilkinson, Lapelle’s Factory, RashDash, Daniel Bye, Ellie Harrison and Action Hero. He made three projects with Hannah Nicklin, including Equations for a Moving Body and A Conversation With My Father, and mentored Raquel Castro’s award winning Turma de '95 (based on Third Angel’s Class of ’76).

Alex has recently published writing and drawing about Third Angel's work in The Department of Distractions (Oberon, 2020), There’s A Room: Three Performance Texts by Third Angel (Oberon, 2019), The Twenty First Century Performance Reader (Teresa Brayshaw, Anna Fenemore & Noel Witts, Eds., Routledge, 2019), Michael Pinchbeck & Andrew Westerside’s Staging Loss (Palgrave MacMillan 2018), the Contemporary Theatre Review, and Performance Research journal volumes Undercover (2022), Staging The Wreckage (2019), On Value (2013) and On Foot (2012), as well as co-creating the artists' book The Dust Archive with Annie Lloyd.

Current Teaching

BA Performing Arts:

Lift Off
Making Work in Festival Contexts
Project Lab
Writing & Directing
Performance Texts

BA Theatre & Performance:

Lift Off
Project Lab
Theatre Practices

MA Performance:

Artist's Project Major
Artist Mentor

Research Interests

Alex's PhD is in autobiographical theatre, and the ethics and implications of telling other people's stories. Much of his own performance work and mentoring explores this territory, and he has supported the creation of numerous autobiographical performances by other artists.

Alex is particularly interested in the territory between theatre, games and participatory performance, and the mechanisms through which we invite audiences to take part, and contribute with creativity and agency. His story-gathering & map-drawing performance The Desire Paths was presented in Sheffield, Newcastle/Gateshead, Slough, Plymouth, Bedford and York between 2006-2022.

Alex has extensive experience of interdisciplinary performance, having made performances in collaboration with astrophysicists, cartographers, psychologists, amongst others.