Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Collaborations Between Surgery and Puppetry: Rachel Warr
No full textAn interview with Rachel Warr of Dotted Line Theatre on the synergies between surgery and puppetr
Being Imperfect: Breakin’ Away from Relating Competitively in Singapore
No full textThe Applied Theatre Reader is the first book to bring together new case studies of practice by leading practitioners and academics in the field and beyond, with classic source texts from writers such as Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Mikhail Bakhtin, Augusto Boal and Chantal Mouffe.
This new edition brings the field fully up to date with the breadth of applied theatre practice in the twenty-first century, adding essays on playback theatre, digital technology, work with indigenous practitioners, inter-generational practice, school projects and contributors from South America, Australia and New Zealand. The Reader divides the field into key themes, inviting critical interrogation of issues in applied theatre whilst also acknowledging the multi-disciplinary nature of its subject, crossing fields like theatre in educational settings, prison theatre, community performance, theatre in conflict resolution, interventionist theatre and theatre for development.
A new lexicon of Applied Theatre and further reading for every part will equip readers with the ideal tools for studying this broad and varied field. This collection of critical thought and practice is essential to those studying or participating in the performing arts as a means for positive change
Applied Theatre and Sexual Health Communication: Apertures of Possibility
No full textThis book analyses the partnership between applied theatre and sexual health communication in a theatre-making project in Nyanga, a township in South Africa. By examining the bridges and schisms between the two fields as they come together in the project, an alternative way of approaching sexual health communication is advocated. This alternative considers what it is that applied theatre does, and could become, in this context. Moments of value which lie around the margins of the practice emerge as opportunities that can be overlooked. These somewhat ephemeral, intangible moments, which appear on the edges, are described as ‘apertures of possibility’ and occur when one takes a step back and realises something unnoticed in the moment. This book offers an invitation to pause and notice the seemingly insignificant moments that often occurs tangentially to the practice. The book also calls for more outcry about sexual health and sexual violence, arguing for theatre-making as a route to multitudes of voices, nuanced understandings, and diverse spaces in which discussions of sexuality and sexual health are shared, felt, and experienced
Child Agency of Working in the Arts Therapies: New Ways of Working in the Arts Therapies
No full textChild Agency and Voice in Therapy offers innovatory ways of thinking about, and working with, children in therapy.
The book:
*considers different practices such as respecting the rights of the child in therapy and recognising and listening to children as ‘active agents’ and ‘experts’;
*features approaches that: access children’s views of their therapy; engage with them as researchers or co-researchers; and that use play and arts-based methods;
*draws on arts therapies research in ways that enable insight and learning for all those engaged with children’s therapy and wellbeing;
*considers how the contexts of the therapy, such as a school or counselling centre, relate to the ways children experience themselves and their therapy in relation to rights, agency and voice.
Child Agency and Voice in Therapy will be beneficial for all child therapists and is a good resource for courses concerning childhood welfare, therapy, education, wellbeing and mental health
The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show: A Counter-Genealogy of Built Masculinities (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textThis multi-component output consists of one collaboratively devised theatre piece, which I led as director, writer, historian, and performer; one scholarly peer-reviewed essay; and two public engagement web articles. The different methodologies (practice research, history, reflective and autoethnographic writing) locate the origins of the Anglo-American physical fitness movement in the physical culture shows and performances of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vaudeville theatres and Music Halls, in order to argue for a different relationship between the muscular male body and orthodox masculinity.
Dynamic Tensions is motivated by urgent questions about men, masculinities, and fitness and health in the present day: (1) how do men negotiate their relationship to the ideal of the strong, athletic, and muscular male body? (2) how can fitness be seen as an expressive practice? and (3) how do men use fitness as a way of relating to self and others? It considers these questions in the historical archive and uses performance practice as a method to propose that the muscular, athletic male body ideal is a cultural script produced through embodied acts of everyday performance. Considering these acts as performance reveals the “dynamic tensions” (borrowing the term from Charles Atlas’s mail-order programme of muscle-building) between the institutions, industries, and social structures of physical fitness and the participant’s individual bodily experience. The research began in 2014 and was supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellows grant from 2016–18. It has been shared through performance practice, workshops, post-show discussions, publications, and performance documentation
Aida, Opera North 2019 (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textAida is a practice research project that involved the design of set, costumes and video for a new stage production of Verdi’s Aida, a key work of the European opera canon, first performed in 1871. The concert staging was commissioned by Opera North for a two-month tour in May and June 2019. My practice research as set and costume designer included directing and orchestrating the content for a videographic montage that was projected throughout the entirety of the opera as a crucial element of the overall spatial design and dramaturgy.
Verdi’s opera has come under severe attack from cultural criticism, most prominently from Edward Said, who claimed Aida represented aesthetically the warped interests and sensibilities of an imperialist Europe. This posed a major challenge to our choice of dramaturgy and resulted in a realist reading, placing Aida within a concrete contemporary context, namely the current war in Syria, whilst freeing it from any exoticizing references.
My practice research involved exploring and implementing formal design solutions that would convey our dramaturgical intentions. It set out to achieve three aims: a) to decolonize Aida by creating a mise-en-scène free of orientalist fantasy; b) to give the performance political relevance by turning Aida into an explicit anti-war piece; and c) to undermine the misogyny inherent in the original. As a result, I developed innovative scenographic methodologies that enabled a new critical space for the reception of this canonical piece. The outcome of my research addressed the interests of a more diverse twenty-first-century audience, who are increasingly engaged with issues of de-colonization and inclusion.
During its 2019 UK-wide tour, Aida was performed 12 times and seen by more than 24,000 audience members. The production won critical acclaim and has been invited for future performances by Montpellier Opera House, France and Washington National Opera, US
Recycled Coil: a cyborg to engage the politics of electronic waste (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textRecycled Coil is a performance-based artwork involving body modification and electronics. It engages critically with the cultural figure of the cyborg in the context of the problematics of technological obsolescence and electronic waste (e-waste).
This multi-component output, supported by contextual information, is the outcome of a two-part process: firstly, a research journey to Nigeria, during which e-waste originating from Europe was collected. Secondly, the conception and realization of an artwork with accompanying essay, based on one of the collected components, an electromagnetic coil from a television.
E-waste has emerged as a significant, environmentally hazardous by-product of digital culture. Yet, everyday representations of digital technology remain dominated by smooth surfaces, a sense of perpetual newness and suggestions of immateriality (for example, through concepts like ‘the cloud’). Thus, technology consumerism is often experienced as being disconnected from the materiality of waste, ecological damage and dwindling resources. This is also reflected in popular perceptions of the figure of the cyborg — a symbiosis of human and machinic body parts. Cyborgs are commonly imagined as enhanced human bodies, equipped with state-of-the-art technologies.
Recycled Coil challenges this techno-utopian vision by presenting a cyborg that foregrounds the afterlife of technological components. Thus, it constitutes what I call an ‘abject digital performance’ that raises awareness of the material implications of technological innovation. Instead of state-of-the-art, new components, e-waste was installed in my body: a body piercer sewed copper wire from a discarded television through my abdomen skin. Instead of enhancing my body’s capabilities, I added an apparently useless technological function: during a five-day exhibition period, a regularly pulsating electric current was run through the coil on my abdomen. This generated a very weak electromagnetic signal, which was merely made visible to audiences with a magnetometer and not used for any utilitarian purpose
Crossing Over: Choreographing Audiences Over Borders – Forms and Problematics
No full textThis article considers the potential of participatory artistic practice that debates borders through dance. It also asks why so many dance artists choose this form to debate borders, and what practices are typical of participatory dance investigations of borders. I discuss the range of border debates in works investigating dance and borders, and I begin to consider how privilege is dealt with by the work. I examine how dance works with participation and, alongside, look at the choreographic embodied invitation concerned. Particularly, I examine these questions through the dance work Rope Piece and consider how this dance
practice as research generates a collective and participatory process in relation to borders and privilege
Foucault's Theatres
No full textThe volume contributes to a new articulation of theatre and performance studies via Foucault's critical thought. With cutting edge studies by established and emerging writers in areas such as dramaturgy, film, music, cultural history and journalism, the volume aims to be accessible for both experienced researchers and advanced students encountering Foucault's work for the first time. The introduction sets out a thorough and informative assessment of Foucault's relevance to theatre and performance studies and to our present cultural moment - it rereads his profound engagement with questions of truth, power and politics, in light of previously unknown writings and lectures set in relation to current political and cultural concerns. Unique to this volume is the discovery of a 'theatrical' Foucault - the profound affinity of his thinking with questions of performativity. This discovery makes accessible the 'performance turn' to readers of Foucault, while opening up ways of reading Foucault's oeuvre 'theatrically'
