A performance studies scholar in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and the Director of SFU’s Institute for Performance Studies, my research investigates the time- and place-based relationships between audience and event across a range of aesthetic practices (including dance, theatre, film, and performance art) and social formations (from same-sex marriage to civic branding to urban mega-events). I am the author, editor, or co-editor of eleven books and special journal issues, including: World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place and Politics (2010); Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice (2014); Mega-Event Cities: Art/Audiences/Aftermaths (2016); and Q2Q: Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada (2018). My most recent book is My Vancouver Dance History (forthcoming in 2020), a performance ethnography of his collaborations (as a writer, researcher, facilitator, outside eye, co-creator, and occasional mover) with several Vancouver-based dance artists and companies. My essays have appeared in Dance Research Journal, Modern Drama, Screen, TDR: The Drama Review, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Survey, CinéAction, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, as well as numerous other journals and edited collections. Also a playwright, productions of my work include The Objecthood of Chairs (SFU Woodward’s, 2010), Positive ID (Berkeley Theatre, Toronto, 2012), Long Division [Part 1 / Part 2] (Pi Theatre, 2016/17), and The Bathers (excerpt, Zee Zee Theatre, 2017). Between 2008 and 2018 Peter regularly documented Vancouver performance practice at performanceplacepolitics.blogspot.ca.
EDUCATION
- Ph.D., University of British Columbia, 1997
- M.A., University of British Columbia, 1993
- B.A. (Honours), University of Toronto, 1990