George McConnell
- Editor at Titan Contemporary Publishing
- Dec 12
- 3 min read
George McConnell is a theatre director, curator, and performer who has extensively directed national, international, local, juried, and academic performances. Recent venues which have hosted his performances include Texas A&M University, INVERSE National Performance Art Festival in Arkansas, Center for Performance Research and Panoply Performance Lab in Brooklyn as well as the International Fringe Festivals in Tampa and Denver, which granted him a Venue Tech Award and the #FringeAF Award. George has also received multiple fellowship awards from the University of Minnesota and Best of the Decade recognition from City Pages.
The devised theatre direction and performance work of George McConnell typically touches upon themes of pop culture, youth and occupational identity as well as comedy based on concepts rather than a direct narrative. As a result, his work is sometimes referred to as performance art rather than theatre. For our readers who are not familiar with devised theatre, George McConnell’s process or method entails generating the origins of a performance through improvisation and then developed through multiple rehearsals. There is no pre-ordained script and no pre-narrative. As George McConnell states about the essence of his work: “It isn’t about something. It is something”. Such a style of theatre becomes focused completely on the imagination of the actor and director rather than a playwright, author, or some other fictional or biographical work created by a writer, except for perhaps initial inspiration. Some of George’s most notable performances includes Nowhere Now and Swim Team, directed by him, Britney Spears’s Crossroads and the brilliant ensemble of Even If We Never Look Forward co-directed with Samantha Johns, Fuck Yeah co-directed with Hannah Eubanks, and his performance duo with Justin Dodd in Feel the Lightning by Dan Deacon.
Nowhere Now is perhaps George McConnell’s most dramatic and epic performance. The piece reflects youth identity around the concept of the team, specifically, a football team. A mythological identity becomes formed as football gear is turned into imagined-elaborate costumes and fist-pumping dances reminiscent of physical training played to the tune of ominous robotic-electronic music. The ‘players’ behave and dance in a trance, as if to seduce each other and the audience into hypnosis. Actors are ostracized and engaged at various times, feeling made part of the group or separate from the collective, reinforcing the cohesive identity as well as detachment and concept of youth-sports culture. Notably, Swim Team comes off more like performance art rather than theatre due to the dominant roles of dance and audio. Fuck Yeah is part witty and ironic dialogue engagement, part rock concert performed by the fictional band Sour Milf. The breaks of lucid and hilarious conversations around relationships between the bandmates becomes interrupted at times by epic ballads using minimal props like sparklers and their attire (or lack thereof) as props. This constant back and forth creates an intimate setting for the audience who fully engage. Feel the Lightning by Dan Deacon, performed by Georgie McConnell, reflects one his most minimal scenes of theatrics. The piece makes whole of the concept of ‘work hard, play hard’ and expresses the dichotomy between work and recreation between breaks of dancing while the other performs manual labor or actions associated with toiling. Britney Spears’s Crossroads, co-directed with Samantha Johns, represents a conceptual approach to interpreting pop culture. Britney Spears becomes treated as a symbol of youth-tyranny as the young actors motion and act with mannerisms of lobotomites and zombies with droning-on chants of “Briiiiiiiiiitney…”
Even if We Never Look Forward (pictured above), co-directed with Samantha Johns and containing a dynamic as well lively cast, represents a remarkable synchronization of excellent acting, good choreography, integrative set design, and clever use of props. The latter being notable for the repeated smacking of the heads of a stripped couple with motorcycle helmets and the use of food and drink to create spraying actions. From fine linen tucking to food fights and dances to rockstar ballads, the performance is a glorious collision which just…works.
A deeply experimental artist, George McConnell (along with his colleagues) represent how contemporary performance can be elevated into pure conceptual form. He can be credited for his immense contributions as to why performance remains at the helm of the avant-garde in contemporary discourse. There are no fillers with the work of George McConnell. A break from the past where theatre was a derivative of a pre-ordained and well-rehearsed stage play script. These deeply hypnotic, hysterical, and lucid performance works have us ponder upon the philosophical meaning of contemporary identity in the most absurd, ironic, and enlightening ways.
