Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Dramaturgies of traumatic loss: the breakage of a framework through playwriting practice - Practice Portfolio
No full textChange
No full text'This chapter begins by engaging with definitions of change and its relationship to impact to explore the complexities of this pairing and draw out key challenges and implications for examining change within practice working specifically with young people living in towns and cities.
A screen archive of Asian bros: casting masculinity and performing stereotypes
No full textThis article examines theatrical and screen casting practices through the figure of the Asian bro. Whether or not the Asian bro is a resistant figure – one which challenges stereotypical depictions of Asian (primarily American) masculinity – or a reactionary one, has been the subject of popular debate in recent years, connected to ideas of Asian masculinity that have been rehearsed since the beginnings of the Asian American movement in the 1960s. This article contributes to these discussions by building on (and departing from) discourses of Asian male emasculation. We explore what the Asian bro tells us about the study of men and masculinities, specifically how masculinity studies might move beyond the compulsion to identify men and masculinities according to types (e.g. toxic, tender, marginal, etc.). We do this by extending the theatrical practice of casting to social relations and the ways they manifest across media and through Asian male actors who have troubled simple types often demanded by casting notices. The article concludes with an example of social casting that involves self-casting, even as it plays on and with stereotypes
British Theatre in Crisis Mode: Recording Covid, Resilience and Rebirth
No full textThe Covid-19 pandemic affected all levels of the UK theatre industry, creating a series of wide-ranging impacts on the theatre workforce, affecting livelihoods, work and employment structures, aesthetic trends, and funding and income generation. More than four years after the start of the first national lockdown in the UK, it remains clear that substantive long-term shifts in both theatre practice and the institutional fabric of the performing arts have occurred in fundamental ways that are still being understood. In addition, audience behaviour has continued to fluctuate in response to unpredictable external influences, and theatre organisations are faced with crucial choices relating to their creative and community practices. This article builds on the results of the UK strand of Theatre after Covid, a collaborative, transnational research project between The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. By combining a mixed methods approach that blends online surveys, structured interviews, and discourse analysis, I examine the long-term institutional effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on UK theatre and explore how the industry has adapted and transformed in response to the crisis. In doing so, I suggest that despite the ways in which the uncertainty of the pandemic has destabilised the theatre ecology, Covid-19 has brought opportunities to reimagine the potential of what theatre practice is, who it engages with, and how it is understood
Adapting Stig Dagerman’s German Autumn: An Interview with Anna Takanen and Stig Hansén
No full textIn the Lilla scenen of Uppsala Stadsteater (City Theatre), a haunting echo of the past emerged, meticulously stitched from the pages of Stig Dagerman’s raw recounting of post-war Germany, German Autumn, a series of articles for the newspaper Expressen collected as a book published in 1947 that has never been out of print. Dagerman was considered a wunderkind of the Swedish literary scene that included writers Erik Lindegren and Karl Vennberg. While many of Dagerman’s literary works and plays have been staged, this is the first theatrical adaptation of German Autumn. The adaptation is less a homage to Dagerman than a critical engagement with his reflections on the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Germany – referred to by Harald Jähner as the ‘Time of Wolves’ – often pushed aside in hushed tones and shameful silences. Director, Anna Takanen, and dramatist and journalist, Stig Hansén, have taken up the demanding task of adapting a work without the usual fictional scaffolding, crafting a cohesive narrative tapestry out of Dagerman’s travel essays. In this interview, Bryce Lease discusses the adaptation with Takanen and Hansén about their exploration of loss, redemption, guilt, shame, and humour in a landscape laid waste by war
No One Escapes: thoughts on coloniality, peace and martyrdom after watching Khalid Abdalla’s 'Nowhere'
No full textThis short essay draws on Stuart Hall's account of globalization and diaspora to argue that Khalid Abdalla’s autobiographical performance 'Nowhere' constitutes a deeply eloquent and ambivalent staging of the experience of identity in the contemporary world. By contrast, however, the piece argues that Abdalla's final turn to Palestine, and the image of a dove of peace, constitutes a derogation to the logic and commitments of colonial modernity, and thus to Zionist normalization. The essay proposes, instead, that the framework of martyrdom, which ghosts Abdalla's performance, may constitute the ultimate fulfilment of our constitution as political subjects in a genocidal world
Performing Architectures A Performative Approach to Space and Design
No full textPerforming Architectures-Andreas Skourtis is a London-based studio blending architecture and performance design, led by a practitionerand academic (pracademic)whose work extends across urban and rural landscapes, from London’s public spaces to an olive grove in Corinthia. Rooted in the practice of active scenography,this approach engages architecture as a live, performative medium, producing both structured and organic narratives. This paper presents select segments from theconference performance lecture, emphasizing its original fragmented, non-linear structure while adapting it to awrittenformat. Through these fragments, the paper examines key projects that employ architectural space and scenographic elements to evoke embodied experiences and foster participation, culminating in a vision for the future of performance design that honoursthe body as a performative space
Contrary Dancing Bodymind: Impairment Elision and the Binaries of IDD Dance
No full textOver the last fifty years, disability dance has offered a challenge to the aesthetics of normative Western concert dance. While the work of dancers with physical impairment is well documented by researchers and dance industry writers, dancers with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have received markedly little attention, and their contributions to the field in the United States are unacknowledged. We suggest this gap is a result of impairment elision, where, through a hierarchy of disability, privileged impairments come to stand for all disability experiences. In the case of disability dance, this impairment elision is rooted in the assumption that artistry requires intention and that dancers with IDD lack intention
Programming under Covid-19: London Film Festival 2020
No full textThis chapter reflects on a number of programming decisions made during the 2020 London Film Festival. Drawing on data from the BFI, team programming meetings and discussions, and input from the Festival Director as well as four of the festival’s programme advisors, the chapter maps the process of what programming for the London Film Festival entailed through a pandemic that shook the world
