While at STIAS Jane Taylor will be launching creative/intellectual projects involving object theatre and puppetry arts. The broad collective of scholarship that she is establishing is LOKO – The Laboratory of Kinetic Objects – an initiative to link scholars and artists with related questions. Taylor has worked for several decades with the world-renowned Handspring Puppet Company and will be making new theatre works and developing the scholarly enquiry into the meaning of the Subject/Object continuum. Her play Ubu and the Truth Commission written with Handspring and artist/director William Kentridge informs much of her thinking about the object and the person onstage. The theatre work and the scholarship she will generate while at STIAS will examine the human in the age of the so-called ‘post-human’ and relations and emotional meanings that hold together complex relations between humans, between persons and things, and our relations with animals. She will be giving several public lectures while in residence. She will also be examining the ethical links between the human and the animal in a theatre work on primate being.
Taylor will also develop her ongoing interest in the Medical Humanities, positing questions about the Prosthesis, the transplant and the limits of the organic self. Here she will be drawing on her novel, The Transplant Men, on the first human heart transplant.
