Meet the Makers: Ira Brand

Commitment Phobe – Ira Brand

In this Meet the Makers Conversation, Ira Brand will discuss her experience in making live, inter-disciplinary performances: from solo stage shows to one-to-one pieces, from duets to participatory work. Her process is one of using personal starting points to speak to wider social, political, and formal concerns. In recent years Ira has been exploring power, and how it is felt and enacted – specifically looking at the relationships between power, language, gender and desire. Works she has made in pursuit of this curiosity include: Break Yourself (2016), a performance in male drag that layers multiple, slippery identities on top of each other; Ways To Submit (2019), a work about dominance and submission in which Ira invites the audience to have a physical fight with her; like the party has been cancelled (2022), a show about control – and the desire to lose it – that uses a live collaging practice spilling from the page into the room; and Commitment Phobe (2023), a work about doubt in which a chain reaction machine is constructed live on stage.

Ira makes performance as a way to imagine – and practice – ways of being in the world that do not otherwise feel available to her. She is motivated by multiplicity, contradiction, ambiguity, and inconsistency, in a world that tends to value the opposite. She wants to create spaces to feel strongly and think critically, spaces of equal openness and rigour, and spaces for pleasure. The relationship with the audience is a core material of all her work, and she makes use of text, video, auto/biography, found material, research and interview processes, and physical practices. She has a recurring interest in achieving particular states in the body, and in the space of the theatre – in the looseness and explicitness brought on by exhaustion or obstacle or a lack of control. In her most recent work RUNNER (2025) the performer is outside of the theatre, in the city, running towards the audience: a piece about labour, value, absence, and exhaustion.

If you wish to attend, RSVP via this link.

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Meet the Makers is a series by The Creative Humanities Academy, a platform that fosters collaboration and knowledge exchange between cultural and creative professionals and academic researchers and students. Here you will find the full Meet the Makers programme and archive.