Professor Jerri Daboo

I worked professionally as a performer and director for fifteen years, before taking up the position of Lecturer in Exeter in 2004. My work moves across forms of theatre, music, dance, and popular culture in a range of different contexts.

My research and teaching focus on performance and culture in diverse contexts and practices. I have been working on a number of projects researching the histories, cultures, and performance forms of the British South Asian communities, and transnational connections with the Indian subcontinent. I was a member of the AHRC-funded project investigating the history of British South Asian theatre. Subsequently, I was the PI on a project researching the histories and cultures of the communities in Southall for the AHRC-funded Southall Story project. An AHRC Follow-on grant enabled us to tour the exhibition and run a related festival in Delhi and Bangkok. I was the PI on an AHRC/REACT project with renowned tabla player, composer and producer Kuljit Bhamra and Keda Music to develop an electronic version of the tabla, along with new teaching materials and a new notation system for the instrument. Further information can be found on keda.co.uk. The project has been nominated for a Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts. More recently, I’ve been working on the AHRC-funded project led by my colleague Professor Cathy Turner on the politics of performance in South India, and am joint PI with Dr Smriti Haricharan in NIAS, Bangalore, on an AHRC Newton-Bhabha funded network grant examining cultural heritage and migration in connection with weddings and marriage among women in the Tamil and Parsi communities in India and the UK.

I conducted an extensive study of the music and dance ritual of tarantism in Southern Italy, resulting in a monograph, 'Ritual, Rapture and Remorse: a study of tarantism and pizzica in Salento' (Peter Lang, 2010) which has received two awards: a special citation for the de la Torre Bueno prize awarded by the Society of Dance History Scholars in America; and runner-up for the Katherine Briggs Award, 2010.

Another strand of my research is on performer training and the body. I trained and taught for many years in martial arts, yoga, Buddhism, Indian dance, movement, physical theatre, body awareness and improvisation, and utilise principles from these in my work with actors and dancers. My practical and theoretical research areas take an transcultural and interdisciplinary approach to examining actor and dancer training and performance, particularly through Buddhist philosophy and practice, and the work of Michael Chekhov.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Research supervision:

I am currently supervising six PhD students, including three through practice, and have previously supervised fourteen students through to completion. Subject areas include performance and culture; ritual performance; actor/performer training; traditional and contemporary dance forms.

I welcome enquiries from prospective MPhil or PhD students in the areas of:

Performer training.

Systems of actor training including Stanislavsky; Michael Chekhov; Joseph Chaikin.

Issues of the body and bodymind in performance.

Martial arts/meditiation in/as performance.

Performance and culture.

Ritual performance.

Traditional forms of dance.

Physical and dance-theatre.

British South Asian performance and culture.