Current Work
Temporality in performance
"Notions of time and space are complicated in performance. We deal with the heightened 'now' and 'here' with the ambiguous space between 'real time' and 'ritual time', as apposed to theatrical or fictional time..." (Gomez-Pena in Heathfield, A. 2004).
Duration in performance is something that is often thought of in the most functional of ways. 'When will the performance finish?' 'When can I book my taxi for?' Temporality in performance plays a more important in its own creation, but how?
Performance's temporality is build from pure interpretation of the environment and the commonality of the interest. As Gomez-Pena has suggested, they are ambiguously bound, the temporality of the online performance comes from an interpretation of the environment before the fundamental understanding of performance takes hold. Walter Benjamin called in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) has suggested, an "aura" that surroundsthe event. This 'aura' or presence that is documented to be in it philosophy comes from being-among-others-in-the-world; our presence in the world is the understanding of the temporality of performance.
Anticipation of form and textual analysis inform an inauthentic expectation of what will happen that is affirmed in the being 'there'. The focus of the work has been with Martin Heidegger, Peggy Phelan, as well as Philip Auslander and Walter Benjamin, drawing these practitioners together to explore the concept of time in performance. Does it happen 'now' as Phelan has suggested or is a social construct and the traditional paradoxes of time struggle to fit a liminal event such as a performance?
About the Artist
Franken Beaumont is interested in challenging the traditional and generally assumed rules of performance. He collaborated between merging forms and is immensely interested in postmodern and the post dramatic effect on art, culture and politics. Influences are drawn from works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and Jean Baurdillard, exploring the ideas of freedom from a humanist perspective. While Samuel Beckett, Richard Schechner, Philip Auslander and Peggy Phelan provide an artistic and cultural philosophy to forms of theatre, dance, art, sculpture, media and technology. 
Form is nothing to retain in expression but to explore, divide and rebuilt in a true expression of research. Collaboration of forms and philosophy is important in his work and is expressed throughout his work.
Franken is a freelance scholar and performative artist. Performance is a slippery concept to gather once the traditional ideas are challenged. What is performance? This is a question that has baffled scholars since mid-way through the 20th century, and one that is continued in a growing performance-based culture. When is the sign a sign? The semiotic is no longer confined in theatre and culture in the same way. How can we exploit this?
Working in areas of Philosophy, Performance Theory and Media/Culture Theory, Beaumont has been developed work that is not bound to the norm, but attempts to provoke thought and questions from an expression of ideas – the starting point to the work.
