Mika Hockman
Multidisciplinary performer and socially engaged artist, focusing on expressionistic post-traumatic theatre. Currently integrating and interrogating the power dynamics and the performative aspects of the legal system that silences the community through site-specific, thought-provoking, immersive installations for the audience. My work is a quest for social, artistic, and poetic justice.
About ME
My name is Mika Hockman, a professional actor with a background in journalism, theatre practice, and award-winning filmmaking. Currently, I am studying for an MA degree in Applied Theatre, Politics, and Social Justice at UEL.
Recently, I have begun to develop my domain as a socially engaged solo artist, working with the community and exploring spectral rhetoric, which is the 'World between the worlds'. I use theatre through puppetry, video art, and audience interaction to address injustice in our society. My work is influenced by postmodernism, feminism, the Theatre of Cruelty, and other experimental, devised, unconventional, and semi-improvised practices. It combines the provocative, the unconscious, the absurd, the surreal, and sometimes the humorous to create cross-disciplinary live art installations inspired by contemporary issues. My work deals with the philosophical and psychological elements of live art.
My performance art often involves puppetry to explore issues that no one wants to talk about, such as the performative aspects of the legal system and the people that society has silenced. I combine the perspectives of a journalist and a performance artist, bringing fragments of buried realities to life as a controversial and political dance of the ‘Unknown’. My content can be triggering, but I aim to inspire change. This is my meaningful endeavor, combining both artistic expression and social justice advocacy.
Socially Engaged Practice Through Site specific Installation
A socially engaged artist addresses social justice and political issues through their practice to raise awareness and create change, or facilitates creative work with the community to promote healing, shift understanding, raise awareness, provoke authorities, address social injustice, and use the creative process as an incentive. Shannon Jackson describes socially engaged work as a triangle, where practices expand from performing or visual arts towards socially engaged work. This can serve as a vehicle for future speculation, imagining life cycles of systems, and participating in an assembly that can sustains us. One way to explore this position is by combining installation art that allows multi-sensory engagement through visuals, sound, and stimuli. This approach guides a process where issues like trauma might be present, and words could be hard to find. As a neurodiverse artist, I understand the performative world through immersive mixed media more than text. I see non-textual communication as a realm to express and explore experiences, thoughts, and feelings. This is why I aim to create an installation as a socially engaged performance, by creating a supportive site-specific space that addresses a social justice issue. The community and the viewers will become part of the scene in their chosen way. The site-specific engagement will challenge the boundaries of performance and the legal system, merging multiple disciplines to foster a deeper understanding between the audience and the community. A socially engaged installation can offer an open-ended creative process, allowing the community the freedom to explore narratives that are sometimes painful. As a non-linear or verbal textual form, it can communicate directly while remaining hidden at the same time. Just as words become meaningless when you fall in love and sensation takes over, the same applies here. When the mixed media is stimulating for both the community and the audience, the created world has different boundaries, language becomes blurred, and a much deeper connection is formed.
Hauntology Through Puppetry as a Pathway for Liberation: Using 'Absence' as 'Positive Presence'
Hauntology, a philosophical concept developed by Jacques Derrida, deals with the rhetorical spectral. This is the world between worlds, where experiences are considered as ghosts from the past manifesting in the present. Just like a ghost, trauma is not yet dead and not yet alive. This can haunt the vulnerable and prevent them from speaking up and seeking justice. Puppets, like ghosts, lie between two worlds: the practical realm and the subconscious unknown. Trauma residue can be a major contributor to worsening one’s quality of life. The expression of fears and stories that have been silenced can be explored via proxy—puppetry—and can help the community feel liberated. Channeling an oppressive voice from the past as an artistic choice allows the community to tell a story safely while protecting and anonymizing their identity.
Puppets can be used as representatives in installations, accompanied by pre-recorded stories. When we stop running away from our fears, they become something we learn to master and manage in our daily routines. By bringing our ghosts into our artistic practice, we can learn to shape and understand them. The community might feel like ghosts—not yet dead, not yet alive. Through this context, they can learn from the process and gain a better understanding of their feelings, promoting confidence for the future. Involving hauntology as an art form adds deeper meaning to a concept, where performance transcends mere entertainment and offers a way to tell stories that immerse the audience. The community is invited to consciously create composite characters and fictional scenes through puppetry, learning to create positive experiences out of their ghosts. This is how hauntology can be used in the context of family court trauma to address injustice.
Empowerment Through Community Building, Storytelling, and Creativity
The community will play a crucial role in the creative installation. A group will be formed through a charity's callout and facilitated through workshops where we will explore visuals and personal objects for character development. Nonverbal communication will be encouraged to uncover the authentic meanings of individual puppets, bringing these silenced voices to life in a non-restrictive space.
Most trauma-based experiences are often doubted by those who experience them, making it unclear what happened or what was real. Screening for participants who have worked through their trauma and obtaining detailed consent for the project will be major considerations to protect both the community and myself.
The workshops will primarily involve mothers who have been through family court. These sessions will explore stories while making life-sized puppets, each representing a mother in the performance. Each puppet will have a pre-recording of the respective mother attached to it. I will act as the barrister/mediator between the puppets and the audience. The participating mothers can choose to remain anonymous in the audience, ensuring their legal and mental protection. This approach addresses my research question of creating a performance despite legal restrictions. The target audience will be judges and family court social workers to inspire change.
My values include commitment, empathy, reliability, integrity, equality, inclusivity, and social justice. Through a series of workshops, I aim to work with the community using games, objects, and visuals to foster positive reflections and build solidarity as a pathway to empowerment. In the next year of my MA, I intend to develop methods to facilitate these creative puppet workshops.
I plan to work with composite fictional characters that represent the group and their silenced stories. Through a rehearsal journey, we will explore safe ways to tell these stories, creating a new democratic realm out of visuals and imagination. This will encourage liberation and change, helping find the lost voices of the most vulnerable in our society to address injustice. The audience will be invited to engage with the performance or remain bystanders, enhancing the theatrical experience and raising societal issues that need to be addressed. This work is not therapy but will be suitable for people who have been through therapy; it is an artistic expression of the court experience as a performance.
Current Project
Court of Contempt/Muted
The aim of this site-specific performance installation is to make visible the common experiences of women who suffer domestic abuse and navigate the family court. The family court operates privately, so the treatment of women is rarely scrutinized. This installation will take place at the family court as both a political statement and a metaphor, revisiting trauma, conquering the past, and regaining power for a better future.
The community involved will consist of mothers who have experienced the family court, portrayed as anonymous voices. The audience will witness the performative aspect of being muted by wearing masks symbolizing oppression throughout the performance. The puppets will symbolize mothers silenced by abuse, embedded with archival objects of their trauma. The performance space will explore how the community has survived the legal system, living in the past and future simultaneously.
Audience engagement as listeners can elevate the impact of the trauma being portrayed, addressing issues such as being silenced, trapped, losing one's voice by authorities, losing contact with one's child, and having the maternal instinct publicly criticized and dissected without recourse.
This performance portrays a world where “Mother” and “Home” are frowned upon, canceled, and criminalized. As a mother who has experienced family court treatment, I position this project as a co-production with a community of mothers with shared experiences, acting as a form of resistance and solidarity.
Change
For the Community: Opportunities to build solidarity, gain confidence through creativity, find unique ways to express their own stories, and inspire changes in legal practices.
For Society: Opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of social injustice, provoke thought, and raise awareness through audience engagement.
Some of my previous work includes
'IT-' Mika Hockman /Delicatessen Theatre 2014
'Superimpose'- Dalston Ballet Company 2015
'Rita' - Mika Hockman/House of Odwyer 2018
'Liminals '-2019
Awards winning 'Three Black Ribbons' =2021
'The Dory Preverts' - 2022
'Film and Beyond'- Mika Hockman/House of Odweyer 2022
'Court of Contempt/Muted' -Mika Hickman/UEL 2023/4
Links to cv
Imdb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1800021/
Filmfreeway : https://filmfreeway.com/MikaHockman
Spotlight: https://app.spotlight.com/6772-6754-7493
https://www.mandy.com/u/mikahockman/
Agency: Red Door Vision
https://www.reddoorvision.co.uk/
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