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Living Room
Get PDFLiving Room is an inter-disciplinary research project exploring how we can turn a(ny) room into a room that can host and support a performance, facilitated by a better understanding of theatre scenography (staging/set/lighting/sound). How can we use the arts to improve the way we use the spaces we work in?
Living Room brings together a range of academics and practitioners from the humanities and science who are all interested in exploring how and where they perform: a primary teacher, a surgeon, a puppeteer, a judge. Performance is understood in its widest context, so from performing a play to performing an operation, a teaching event, or a court case. The room might be a studio theatre, a classroom, a doctor’s surgery or any other room where we perform for others.
We ask: how can we turn a room into a room that actively supports our performance
The Gaming Democracy Project: Virtual Democracy in the Age of Fascism IRL (In Real Life)
Get PDFGaming Democracy: Participatory Performance Strategies for Countering Far-Right Politics brings together a wide variety of artists, academics, and activists working in the fields of interactive theatre, criminology, political science, game design, computer science, and digital media to investigate how participatory performance, social media, and democracy interact in the present political conjuncture. The British Labour party and wider establishment left show no signs of being able to build a new political bloc that stand in opposition to fascists acting as major political actors in digital culture. We believe theatre must position itself as an interventionist force in digital spaces to halt the infiltration and normalisation of far-right ideas into the mainstream through gamification systems. Gamification refers to the far-right’s use of game attributes - playing a character in a fictional world, reward incentives, progressing through levels of complexity - in political and cultural environments to radicalise and recruit (Schlegel 2018). We are investigating the interrelatedness and distinctions between the sense of immersion generated from the online gamification weaponised by the far-right, and the gameplay systems used by performance makers both onstage and online, where immersion can be framed in terms of empathic interconnectedness and collaborative meaning-making. In direct contrast to the online gamification of hatred by the far-right (using memes, role-play on chat forums, and computer games), Gaming Democracy explores the untapped potential of gameplay as a model for alternative world-building. These worlds can enable us to imagine the future of democracy as a digital architecture that flows between and across the virtual and offline spheres. This paper will reflect on the webinar series we convened with members of the Gaming Democracy research network in 2022 to consider how egalitarian futures of modernity can be ‘imaged’ (Hall [1988] 2021, 261) through participatory and interactive performance processes. This will form the basis for our argument that the metaverse can become a vibrant laboratory for testing new democratic systems through digital aesthetics to produce globally interconnected political communities for new virtual realities
100 Stories: A CANON of technical theatre history
Get PDFThe 100 Stories describe the development of European theatre technology, design and architecture, from the Greek and Roman theatres of antiquity to the present day. Extensively illustrated, the ten time periods and ten themes allow the reader to explore different topics over time, or all aspects of technical theatre in a particular era.
Written by specialist teachers and professional experts, the 100 Stories are designed to act as entry points to the diverse history of technical theatre, each one placing its topic in a wider context, and so opening up a rich but often hidden field of study. Students of technical theatre, performance design, theatre architecture and of the performing arts more generally will find this book invaluable
The CANON Cookbook: Recipes for learning and teaching the history of technical theatre
Get PDFThe Canon Cookbook has thirty ‘recipes’, each one a method of teaching and learning about the development of European theatre technology, design and architecture, from the Greek and Roman theatres of antiquity to the present day. Extensively illustrated, the Cookbook includes ways of learning about stage design and mechanics, lighting, sound and architecture. Each recipe describes the process, the resources needed and the preparation required, as well as showing the type of student it is intended for, the kind of learning process it is, and how long it will take.
The Cookbook is written by specialist teachers and professional experts, who share their methods and offer tips and advice, based on their extensive experience teaching technical theatre history. The learning activities are based on making and doing, for maximum student engagement, and many are also suitable for solo, self-directed learning by students, professionals, researchers and members of the public. Anyone wanting to learn more about the history of technical theatre, or who teaches the subject, will find this book invaluable
Living Room - workshop notes
Get PDFDocumentation of the workshop, 15/16 November 2022, leading up to the Being Human sharing and panel discussion at Rose Bruford College, 16th November (see separate podcast recording).
Living Room is an ongoing inter-disciplinary research project exploring how we can turn a(ny) room into a room that can host and support a performance, facilitated by a better understanding of theatre scenography (staging/set/lighting/sound). How can we use the arts to improve the way we use the spaces we work in?
The workshop explored ideas around staging, collaboration, and scenography – working in a ‘neutral’ (non-theatre) space
Nick Hunt: “Light works through effect, through feeling.”
No full textIn the first episode of the CANON podcast series, we spoke to Nick Hunt, lighting designer, technician and currently the Programme Director for Lighting Design at Rose Bruford College in London. As we discussed the creative processes in lighting design, Nick touches on how the role of the audience affects his work. He also evaluates the technical history from the standpoint of its efficiency for and contributions to contemporary artistic projects.
“One thing I learned as a lighting designer, and I think is true for everybody who is making some kind of creative work intended for an audience, is trying to work out what kind of effect you’re having. Particularly because light is such an intangible medium. Light works through affect, through feeling, rather than through something that the conscious part of the brain really deals with.
Hacking the Archives: the 2012 Olympic Legacy, Fun Palaces and Game Theatre
Get PDFArchival material pertaining to Clive Barker is interrogated to assess Barker's legacy in the future tense by arguing that the concept of the Fun Palace can hack the neoliberal politics of the 2012 Olympic legacy
Internet theatre and the historical consciousness of the Covid-19 era
Get PDFThe pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality and virtuality structured by the materialism of the Internet. Internet theatre created during the pandemic functions as a metonym for the transformation of the human subject from corporeal flesh to bio-techno hybrids. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All (Forced Entertainment 2020) and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2021) are used as case studies in this article to show how today’s informational environment augments perceptions of the real in performance through the convergence of media formats, including the fleshy human. This analysis is contextualised from the historical perspective of the post-Cold War period when anxieties about cultural homogeneity and assimilation were prominent themes in theatre and performance discourse in the absence of any viable alternative teleology to Western capitalism
Teaching Writing for Performance Online: Creative Approaches to the Online Workshop
Get PDFThis paper builds on my on-going research into the playwright’s role within the collaborative devising process, which includes questioning traditional pedagogical approaches to writing for the stage. In addition, it references the practical experience of developing and teaching modules focused on the craft of playmaking for the online Theatre Studies BA at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. Although there may appear to be a disconnection between encouraging playwrights to engage with collaborative theatre making and the mainly asynchronous nature of an online degree, where students often work in isolation, the core tenet of this ‘Perspectives’ piece is that all teaching of playwriting, regardless of whether it is online or not, needs to move beyond the traditional classroom/workshop approach.
Whilst the pedagogical framework that sees students engage in text-based studies of scripts and books about writing cannot be entirely abandoned, students benefit from a more embodied approach, which reminds them that they are writing for a medium which communicates in a multi-faceted way and is negotiated in the moment, so that they gain a more holistic understanding of how a script might be interpreted in live performance. Drawing on both my practice as a playwright and dramaturg, and my work in online teaching, I argue that there is potential to treat the ‘Zoom room’ as workshop, where students can work together, improvise, and treat their screens as spaces for experimentation and performance. In addition, this more dynamic approach helps to prepare students for a rapidly evolving theatre ecology, which had embraced digital technology long before Covid-19 entered our lives
Networked audience participation: the futurity of post-Brexit democracy in One Day, Maybe and Operation Black Antler
Get PDFWhere are we in the story of British democracy? Was the 2016 EU Referendum a rehearsal for a new political system of direct democracy that ultimately benefits the far right? Or will the Internet replace the conventional machinery of government with a radical new form of network power where people discursively experiment with new political realities through aesthetic modes of social relations? This article proffers the term ‘networked participation’ to describe a conceptual model of citizenry centred on structuring meaning through the dialogic exchange of information in aesthetic environments. The political ideals of network politics inform my analysis of the complex web of connections that participants scaffold in the performances Operation Black Antler(Blast Theory and Hydrocracker 2017) and One Day, Maybe (dreamthinkspeak 2017) between identitarian ideology in Britain and competing narratives of democracy’s meaning in South Korea, respectively. This model of audience participation is proffered to develop a theory of social relations produced through a theatrical experience of digital interconnectivity