Dr Broderick Chow

I am a scholar, educator, and artist whose work focuses on the intersections of theatre, performance, and sport. My research on sport and physical culture practices including weightlifting, wrestling, and bodybuilding crosses numerous academic fields, such as performance studies, masculinity and gender studies, sport history, and qualitative research in sport, exercise, and coaching. In addition to this research, I also have research interests in East and Southeast Asian theatre and performance, Philippine commercial theatre and popular music, economies of theatre, and anti-racist and anti-colonial pedagogies. My current projects include “Bros”, a co-authored book with Eero Laine on homosocial performances; and a cultural history of the prison gym that looks at the intersection of physical culture, incarceration, and racial capitalism.

I grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and hold a BA in Theatre and English from the University of British Columbia. I came to London in 2005 to study at Central on the MA in Advanced Theatre Practice and in 2010, became Central’s first PhD graduate. Before returning to my alma mater, I was a lecturer at the University of East London and Brunel University London. I been a visiting scholar at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and I am a regular visiting researcher at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, University of Texas at Austin. In 2016 I was awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellows grant for a project on a cultural history of men’s fitness and its intersection with the theatre in Britain and the United States, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The outcome of this research will be published by Northwestern University Press as the monograph Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity in 2024.

I have extensive experience teaching musical theatre, acting, and performance writing, as well as research-led modules that integrate theatre and performance theory with methodologies of ethnography and Practice Research. As Central’s Director of Learning, Teaching and Inclusion, I am involved in shaping pedagogy across the College and strategy for equality, inclusion, anti-racism, and social justice at every level of the institution. I lead practice research and theoretical study on the MA Acting course and the Professional Development in Learning and Teaching programme (accredited by AdvanceHE).

As a member of the East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) artistic community in the UK, I am highly involved with developing and raising the profile of ESEA performing arts. I am course leader of the New Earth Performer’s Academy London, a partnership with New Earth Theatre company. The only programme of its kind in the UK, NEPA London provides a two-week intensive actor training course for ESEA performers and serves as a bridge between training and professional careers. I am also a Trustee of Kakilang, a multidisciplinary ESEA arts company.

I am an Editor of Contemporary Theatre Review, with responsibility for its online site, Interventions, a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. With Royona Mitra and Rachel Hann, I am Chair of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA). I also sit on the Editorial Boards of Theatre Topics and Imagined Theatres. I have served as a quality reviewer for MusiQue/Association of European Conservatoires’ institutional review of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, as a member of the Conservatoires UK Learning and Teaching Forum and EDI Forum, and the steering group for Healthy Conservatoires.

I am a competitive Olympic weightlifter and a British Weight Lifting qualified coach.

Areas of Expertise

• Sport and physical culture history and performance
• Masculinities and gender studies
• Professional wrestling and/as theatre
• East and Southeast Asian theatre and performance in the diaspora
• Philippine theatre, performance, and popular music
• Musical theatre
• Economies of theatre and performance
• Anti-racist and anti-colonial pedagogies and practices
• Solo performance and stand-up comedy

PhD Supervision

To date, I have supervised three PhD thesis to completion and externally examined 2 more in areas including political theory and performance, applied place-making performance, and humour theory. I am currently supervising projects on actor training, Eastern European identity in British theatre, Black British queer theatre and performance, and I am interested in supervising potential PhD students in any of my areas of expertise.

Key Publications

2022. ‘出る釘は打たれる: Tommy Kono’s performances of strength and the formation of Asian American subjectivity’, Iron Game History, 16:1.

2021. ‘Epistemology of the Locker Room: A Queer Glance at the Physical Culture Archive’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 31: 1-2 (2021), pp. 74-90, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1878505

2021. (co-edited by Eero Laine), Sports Plays (London: Routledge, 2021)

2021. ‘Swolecial Distancing: Gym Closures and the Quarantine Workout’, in Time Out: Global Perspectives on Sport and the Covid-19 Lockdown, edited by Jörg Krieger, April Henning, Lindsay Parks Pieper, and Paul Dimeo (Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks), pp. 119-131.

2019. (co-authored with Eero Laine) ‘Between antagonism and eros: the feud as couple form and Netflix’s GLOW’, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.

2019. ‘Sculpting Masculinities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Physical Culture: The Practiced Life of Stanley Rothwell’, TDR: The Drama Review, 63: 2, pp. 34-56. 

2019. ‘How does the trained body think?’ in Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher and Heike Roms (London: Bloomsbury).

2019. ‘Seeing as a Filipino: Here Lies Love at the National Theatre’, in Re-framing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity, edited by Sarah Whitfield (London: Red Globe Press).

2018. ‘Feeling in Counterpoint: Complicit Spectatorship and the Filipino Performing Body’, Theatre Journal, 70: 3, pp. 327-347.

2018. (co-authored with Claire Warden and Eero Laine) ‘Working Loose: A Response to “Donald Trump Shoots the Match” by Sharon Mazer’, TDR: The Drama Review, 62: 2, pp. 201-215.

2017. ‘Every Little Thing He Does: Entrepreneurship and Appropriation in the Magic Mike Series’. Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 6 (1) (2017).

2017. ‘Parterre: Olympic Wrestling, National Identities, and the Performance of Antagonism’, in Performing Antagonisms, edited by Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 61-79.

2017. ‘A Chinese Actor’s Late Style’, in Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, edited by Daniel Sack, (London: Routledge).

2016. (co-edited with Eero Laine and Claire Warden) Performance and Professional Wrestling (London: Routledge).

2016. ‘Muscle-Memory: Re-enacting the fin-de-siècle strongman in pro wrestling’, in Performance and Professional Wrestling, edited by Broderick Chow, Eero Laine, and Claire Warden (London: Routledge), pp. 143-153.

2016. (with Grant Peterson) “Democratising Singing: Teaching Musical Theatre to a Mixed-Ability Higher Education Student Cohort.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 7(1). doi:10.1080/19443927.2016.1148908. 

2015. ‘A Professional Body: Remembering, Repeating and Working Out Masculinities in fin-de-siècle physical culture’, Performance Research 20:5.

2014. ‘Here is a story for me: representation and visibility in Miss Saigon and The Orphan of Zhao’, Contemporary Theatre Review 24: 4, pp. 507-516.

2014. ‘An Actor Manages: Actor Training and Managerial Ideology’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 5: 2, pp. 131-143.

2014. (co-authored with Eero Laine) ‘Audience Affirmation and the Labour of Professional Wrestling’, Performance Research 19: 2 (2014), pp. 44-53.

2014. ‘Work and Shoot: Professional Wrestling and Embodied Politics’, TDR: The Drama Review 58: 2, pp. 72-86.

2014. (co-edited with Alex Mangold), Žižek and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

2014. ‘The Tickling Object: On Žižek and Comedy’, Žižek and Performance, edited by Broderick Chow and Alex Mangold (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

External Practice

Practice Research forms a significant part of my research work, often in tandem with (auto)ethnographic and archival methods. The form, genre, and nature of my artistic outputs depends on the subject I am exploring. From 2012 to 2014, I created and toured the dance-theatre performance Work Songs with my collaborator, actor and choreographer Tom Wells. The work drew on my ethnographic research into professional wrestling and explored how labour is made perceptible on the theatrical stage. For my AHRC Leadership Fellowship project (2016-2018) I created The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show. This performance combined sport, live art, physical theatre, musical theatre, and verbatim performance, while drawing on the aesthetics of the “physical culture” lecture-demonstration variety shows popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Collaborators included bodybuilder Peter Moore, strongman Daniel Crute, wrestler/personal trainer Philip Bedwell, and rugby player/performer Jonathan Hinton.

Register of Interest

Member, Board of Trustees, Kakilang