Personal Research & Articles
Over the years, I have been able to write or participate in writing articles and essays examining what I do and where it comes from. These are some selections of those writings
The Grotowski Essay
This essay is why I didn’t have a personal website with my name for 10 years. This was originally written as a directing research paper for my undergraduate program. I revised and published the essay a few years later when I first created this artist website. In 2008 the internet was young, Google worked, and Wikipedia was new. This essay was apparently one of the first pieces of content referencing Grotowski and my website quickly became the top search result. This was great! I was famous… if you were a theatre student trying to look up Grotowski on the internet between 2008 -2010.
A few years later, I tried to switch hosting services and my website address inadvertently got dropped back into the market. Because of that ridiculously high Google search rank, a bot immediately swooped in to grab my name and tried to re-sell it for something like $2000 per month. Since I was planning on paying about $20 for a year, this seemed a tiny bit out of my budget. Hilariously, because my goofy essay had been plagiarized so much, you could still find the essay on random websites. I found my own essay a couple times in the next few years when I needed to research Grotowski again for one reason or another. Sometimes it even had my name still on it!
Fast forward 10 years and I would occasionally get bored and check to see if my name was still selling at a premium. I am not the only Jonathan Lowery in the world, so I was always curious if another person would grab it. One day, the price finally fell to what it should have been all along and I was able to reclaim my glory.
Then it took me another few years to find where I had stored this silly essay so I could toss it back out to where it belongs.
PUSH - Moments in Motion
This was a ‘response’ essay I wrote at the request of the Artistic Director of PUSH Physical Theatre Darren Stevenson. Darren had written a sort of ‘founding’ philosophical article when he started the company in 1999 and wanted a ‘where are we now’ type of article. So, nearly 10 years late, I wrote this article. You can find PUSH’s colllection of articles here, which includes Darren’s original “A Case for Physical Theatre”, my article, and other materials.
Included here is my essay, which examines the events and practices that I experienced as a company member in PUSH.
Other PUSH Research
In addition, to ‘Moments in Motion’, I was also integral to PUSH’s academic response to students. I handled emails from students and teachers across the world for many years. Eventually, I collated the most common questions and created an online resource… so I didn’t have to type as many emails. As of this typing in December 2025, my material is still available in their Frequent Asked Questions section of PUSH’s “Academic Resources” page here.
Dayne Nel Interview & Reserch
Over several years, Dayne Nel from South Africa trained and interview members of PUSH for her thesis “ORDER THROUGH IMPROVISATION: ENGAGING THE CHOREOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT”. My “Moments in Motion” essay along with Darren’t “A Case for Physical Theatre” were cited as large aspects of her thesis. You can find it hosted here: