Current research interests:

Simon Jones has written plays and texts for a number of companies since the 1980s and founded the performance company Bodies in Flight in 1990, which has to date produced 13 works and numerous documents of performance. Before coming to Bristol, he taught theatre studies at Lancaster University. He has been a visiting scholar at Amsterdam University (2001), a visiting artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002), and worked with Spell#7 Performance (Singapore) in a revival of his performance text Beautiful Losers (1994/2003). He has published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Entropy Magazine, Liveartmagazine, Performance Research, Shattered Anatomies (ed. Heathfield & Quick), and most recently in The Cambridge History of British Theatre.

His current research interests focus on the nature of the encounter between the body and text in contemporary performance, and are informed by the work of such companies as Forced Entertainment (UK), Goat Island (US) and the Wooster Group (US), and the writings of Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida and Foucault, and through those of David Bohm and Michel Serres by models of creativity in the sciences. His earlier research was a cultural-materialist study of how Elizabethan pedagogic exercises influenced playwrights in the Early Modern period, particularly George Chapman. This led to a fascination with rhetoric and the post-structuralist analysis of discursive fields. This underpins theoretically the long-term practice-as-research project of Bodies in Flight the encounter of flesh and text.

A related interest has been in developing and critiquing processes of documenting performance. Apart from more conventional forms of dissemination through print publication, Simon co-edited Flesh & Text - a document (2001), one of the first attempts to archive the work of a performance company in the medium of CD-ROM. More recently he worked on a radio version of a work Skinworks for ears, that was broadcast on ResonanceFM (London, UK); and with the Department's major research project Practice-as-Research in Performance he explored the use of multi-angle DVD technology in documenting performance Double Happiness (2002).