Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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The Verbatim Formula (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textThe Verbatim Formula (TVF) is a multi-component practice research project comprising a book chapter, journal article, website and video animation, with accompanying contextual documentation. The project is led collaboratively by myself, Dr Sylvan Baker, a lecturer at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Associate Director at People’s Palace Projects, alongside Dr Maggie Inchley and Dr Sadhvi Dar at Queen Mary University of London and freelance artist Mita Pujara. TVF uses verbatim theatre techniques to better understand the experiences of care-experienced young people in terms of exclusion and marginalisation in Higher Education and their lived experience of the care system. TVF’s aim is to encourage care and Higher Education professionals and other key stakeholders to listen to care-experienced young people, and to reconsider and realign their services in relation to the needs of their care-experienced users.
Within applied theatre practice, TVF innovates verbatim theatre techniques combined with headphone performance to elicit affective responses in audiences and to facilitate listening and dialogue. The care-experienced young people are co-researchers in the practice, and performances based on their verbatim testimony are used in service-provider and stakeholder settings to initiate dialogue and provide training. TVF has developed the ‘Portable Testimony Service’, where pop-up performances, drawn from a ‘living archive’ of over 150 testimonies of care-experienced young people and adult professionals, are delivered in relevant stakeholder contexts. To ensure the practice remains responsive to the young people and to key stakeholders, evaluation is embedded. TVF has been disseminated in a journal article; a book chapter; and workshops, seminars, presentations and conferences. Through performances (total audiences 750) and training events (total attending 160), the project website, a video animation explaining the methodology and artistic outputs, such as zines, an exhibition and accompanying brochure, the research has been shared widely with publics and key stakeholders
Presidential Address to the 2019 ATHE Conference
No full textThis is Joshua Abrams's speech on accepting the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Presidency. Delivered at the 2019 ATHE Conference in Orlando, Florida
Puppets, Women and Health in Togo: An Interview with Vicky Tsikplonou
No full textAn interview with Togolese puppeteer Vicky Tsikplono
Men & Girls Dance (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textDeveloped and presented through multiple platforms over 7 years (2013–20), Men & Girls Dance responds to dominant social and media discourses which construct men’s relationships with children as overwhelmingly negative. The research centres on a semi-choreographed, semi-improvised performance, developed and presented through an innovative partnership and touring model. Contextual materials and further mechanisms for engagement bring people together to discuss and debate the project’s themes.
The research aimed to propose positive, embodied narratives of care, playfulness and trust in relationships between men and children, whilst also developing new approaches to performance touring in the UK to engage diverse publics with these narratives. This was achieved through a complex, interwoven methodology, which aligned, for the first time, focuses on choreographic research, new strategies for participation and inclusion, and a new approach to performance touring. The project arises from multiple contexts: historical lineages of dance practice that explore, interrogate and remodel ways to think about gender; contemporary performance practices in which children act as co-creators and established systems of performance touring, participation and public engagement, which the research seeks to reimagine, remodel and advance.
The research has proven that contemporary, experimental dance practice can create and disseminate effective new narratives of intergenerational relationships, thereby opening up discussion and debate, and that dance, as an embodied practice, is the effective artform for this. The research has also found that contextual materials and bespoke formats for dialogue and debate significantly contribute to the potential for contemporary performance to contribute to socio-political debate, and it has created effective new approaches to touring, enabling impactful social engagement.
In 2017, Men & Girls Dance was runner up for The Guardian University Award for Social and Community Impact and a shortlisted finalist for Times Higher Education’s Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of the Year
A Short Disquisition on Anatopia: Rethinking Place and its Performance
No full textUsing examples from three research projects in performing place, 2016-19, and reflecting on previous work, this document reconsiders place and its performance. Anatopia is offered and repositioned as a capacious, malleable, and hopeful term for contemporary places that can be forged within precarious, mobile lives. A case is made, also, for performing place to be more appropriately nuanced as anatopic performance practice and one that takes account of ‘time’ in addition to place. Anatopic performance practice is offered as practice facilitated with residents through subverting and repositioning local environments
Radio/Body: Phenomenology and Dramurgies of Radio
No full textThis study provides an in-depth exploration of the dramaturgical practices of radio drama and their underlying philosophical assumptions. By presenting an analytical model drawn from phenomenology, it challenges the current understanding of the medium, instead focusing on the bodily and aural aspects of radio drama, while offering a critique of the conventions of dramaturgical practice for neglecting these affective sonic aspects. Tracing these conventions through the history of the development of radio drama, it proposes that a more bodily, resonant mode of radio dramaturgy is best placed to meet the demands of the current era of digital production and distribution. The book also examines a number of approaches to creating a more embodied experience for the listener
UnfamiliarEyes: Interrogating Performing Place, 2015–2020 (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textThis multi-component output supported by contextual information comprises three externally funded pieces of practice research in urban communities (Oldham, Camden, Bexley), three single-authored, peer-reviewed academic writings and a range of talks, papers and symposia. These components overlap and intersect, developing the sustained research enquiry, which argues that, first, performance place practices can facilitate participants’ reconsideration of place within contemporary conditions of movement, migration and the breaking up of fixed community. The multimodal research methodologies (applied theatre practice research, philosophical enquiry, theoretical analysis) led to new findings where place was ‘unfamiliarised’ and re-envisioned by and for participants. Second, this practice research has supported a theoretical reconceptualisation of place and, third, enabled an interrogation of applied theatre practice research as a polyphonic conversation with researcher, stakeholder and participant voices merging.
Within the practice, contemporary tropes of mobility and the liquid — reifications of late postmodern discourse — are challenged. Rather than binarising place and mobility (or liquidity), what has become evident through the research is a conflation, a meshing or something like an acquiescence where ‘mobility’ and ‘place’ yield to each other fluently and constantly. In using performance practices that subvert and explore locality to improve dwelling with the vulnerable (such as adults with mental illness or migrants) alongside more settled communities, it has become clear that place, locality and ‘home’ are critical and can be re-formed swiftly, even within complex lives of movement, transition and stasis. The UnfamiliarEyes research in Oldham, Camden and Bexley has led to reconceiving contemporary place as ‘anatopic’ for new and settled communities: that is, always already a disrupted place, insecure and immanently changing.
UnfamiliarEyes has included partnerships with arts organisation and local authorities, and further collaborations with many practitioners and community groups. Findings have been disseminated to academic and non-academic audiences through a range of media
Home-Makers (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textThis multi-component output consists of documentation and materials related to Home-Makers, an online collection of audio works produced in collaboration with (majority Filipina) migrant domestic and care workers in the UK and Lebanon.
Employed (and frequently living) in the homes of others, migrant domestic and care workers often live with precarious residential status and inadequate domestic space of their own. Yet they must become experts at feeling “at home” in unfamiliar cities. This project develops a distinctive collaborative practice research method to prioritise migrant women’s self-representation in the production of new insights into home-making in the context of transnational labour migration. It challenges the social science norms of observation, interview and transcription through making co-edited “soundwalks” recorded in places chosen by participants, which are designed to be downloaded by general publics and listened to on location. The research focusses on two destination countries with similar, controversial “tied visa” systems that shape migrants’ home-making practices.
The research initiates dialogues between performance praxis and studies of migrant domestic work, applying a performance method to research on migration. This methodological innovation affords collaborative, creative scope with the potential to influence work at the intersection of these fields. While social science research on migration and mobility has struggled to capture migrants’ subjective lived experience, the co-created soundwalks “show” rather than “tell” the ways in which they perform intimate home-making in their everyday lives.
This transnational project contributes to migrant women’s self-representation in the face of acute exploitation and invisibility. In doing so, it reveals the expertise of “home-makers” whose experiences are prismatic of globalised labour markets
Black Rock: From Climbing to Performance (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textBlack Rock was a practice-led project that posed the question: how do you translate the experience of rock-climbing to an audience on the ground? The project was commissioned by Kendal Mountain Festival and The University of Leeds to celebrate the 30th anniversary of first ascent of ‘Indian Face’ with the technical grade ‘E9 6c’, one of the most significant feats of international rock-climbing history by elite climber Johnny Dawes.
It explored and revealed the historical and cultural context of climbing in Wales and the UK, seeking to bridge two distinct audiences of climbing professionals and outdoor enthusiasts with non-climber and non-specialist individuals within an immersive theatrical context. It sought to translate, capture and represent the complex embodied pursuit of climbing. The piece addressed the limited context of live performance to tell mountain narratives. Black Rock explored notions of embodied translation through its immersive presentation and thematically challenged conventional masculine narratives of mountain experience documented in historical literature through the use of a lead female writer and two female lead dancers/partners.
The project was developed through mixed research methods, including detailed site surveys of Snowdon via research visits with specialist mountaineers, performance scholars and site-specific artists. It drew on one-on-one interviews with over 20 climbers, movement workshops with dancers and climbers, and historical and geological research edited into a newly commissioned script (Claire Carter), an 18-channel sound composition (James Bulley), choreography (Carlos Pons Guerra) and dramaturgy (Jonathan Pitches). As lead artist-researcher I directed, designed and coordinated the project and its dissemination.
Black Rock culminated in a new 50-minute performance event at stage@leeds (2017), that combined custom immersive design technologies (including new responsive lighting and sound array), ecological materials, multimedia design, choreographic practice and new writing
A Feeling of Form: Directing Concert from the Michael Chekhov Perspective: A Conversation Between Sinéad Rushe and Tom Cornford.
No full textThis is a discussion of Sinéad Rushe's direction of Concert, a dance theatre production starring Colin Dunne, with sound design by Mel Mercier. Rushe discusses her influence of Michael Chekhov's ideas on form, aesthetics and scenography in her devising approach