Innovative – Interdisciplinary
My practice moves through theatre, design, history, visual art, music, choreography, and sensory experience.
I don’t experience these as separate disciplines, but as interwoven threads of a single practice. Each informs the others, creating a field rather than a hierarchy. I work with whatever means are necessary to tell the story I feel needs to be told.
I do not approach art as an object to be viewed from a distance. I think of it as a place. A place that is entered with the body, the senses, and the imagination. My works invite participation; they are meant to be inhabited, not only observed.
A performance may extend into architecture, into taste, into scent. An installation may behave like a living stage. I am curious how perception shifts when context changes, how space, silence, scale, sound, intimacy, and proximity can reshape meaning.
I am interested in how people feel, not only what they see.
The audience is not a passive witness, but an active presence within the dramaturgy. Meaning arises through shared attention, through being together in time.
Over the past twenty-five years, my practice has gradually expanded from a performance-centred approach toward a fully interdisciplinary form of experience-making.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, my focus was theatre and choreography: directing bodies in space, working with presence, physical tension, and the exploring the boundaries between performer and audience.
Over time, the frame widened. Performance moved beyond the proscenium into sites, public spaces, museums, and unconventional architectures. Immersion became structural rather than ornamental. Sound, installation, history, visual art, sensory design, technology, and spatial composition emerged as equal dramaturgical forces.
In the last decade, the work has evolved into large-scale experiential systems that merge performance, scenography, sensory design, and collective encounter.
The focus has shifted toward creating total environments, spaces that choreograph perception itself. Collaboration across disciplines has deepened, and projects increasingly function as social architectures, forming temporary communities rather than producing passive spectacles.
What has remained constant is an attention to live transformation: how space alters behaviour, how proximity alters meaning, how shared presence generates intimacy.
What has changed is scale, complexity, and assurance, moving from directing performances to choreographing experiences.
My practice continues to unfold and transform. I remain curious, excited by learning, and open to change.
25+ years experience in arts, culture, and performance.
Extensive international expertise in delivering multi-sensory, participatory projects for theatres, festivals, museums, and cultural and commercial institutions.
Skilled in audience engagement, cultural infrastructure planning, cross-sector collaboration, and translating creative vision into actionable strategies with measurable social, cultural, and economic impact.
*
THe interval, pause, or the space between things is not empty space. It’s alive with potential.
Martin Butler 