Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Puppetry: The Art of Puppetry Practice: Embodiment, Enchantment, Memory, History
No full textThis chapter foregrounds puppetry as a powerful medium for expression in contexts of health, situating it as a conduit into imaginative spaces where it can assist with individual and collective narratives of health and bodymapping. The chapter highlights its potential as an embodied practice, bringing insight to disability studies, medical practice and contexts of care
Physically distanced, but socially collaborative applied theatre: setting up and supporting student-led groups working with partnerships and communities online
No full textWonder VR: creating bespoke VR360 with NHS patients to improve patient wellbeing in acute hospital settings (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textWonder VR offers new insights into the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to improve patients’ experience and wellbeing in acute hospital settings. A collaboration with Dementia Care nursing staff and a Nurse Consultant at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (ICHT), the practice received the National Dementia Care Awards 2019 award for Outstanding Arts and Creativity in Dementia Care and The Guardian University Awards 2020 Teaching Excellence Award.
The practice responds to the broader context of an increasing ageing population in the UK, resulting in long hospital stays with risks of depression, isolation and diminished wellbeing. Using 360-degree VR (VR360), enhanced by facilitated intersection with the ‘real world’, the practice creates bespoke videos that offer older patients temporary respite from the hospital ward through experiencing places that are significant for them in terms of familiarity, memory or aspiration. The immersive, affective experience of VR360 counters patients’ lack of autonomy and sense of isolation thus improving their stay in hospital and increasing their wellbeing.
The practice is delivered through a developmental, collaborative and person-centred methodology. Patients participate in the creation of their own VR360 video, which further contributes to their sense of autonomy and, therefore, their wellbeing. The project has engaged with 10 patients across Charing Cross, St Mary’s and Hammersmith hospitals, which form ICHT. This multicomponent output comprises 7 bespoke videos, 2 demonstration videos for patients, 1 annotated training film of the practice to train nurses and to share the research with other medical staff, a peer-reviewed article in Contemporary Theatre Review (2020), presentations at Being Human: Different Stages (2019), a blog published on The Culture Capital Exchange (2020) and a framework of best practice for ICHT outlining the methodology and its capacity to deliver person-centred practice that attends to the needs of the individual patient
Movement Directors in Contemporary Theatre: Conversations on Craft
No full textMovement directors work as part of a creative theatre team on the physical life of a production, developing movement languages with actors and directors . Through a series of in-depth interviews with leading theatre practitioners, Ayse Tashkiran charts the growth of the movement director in contemporary theatre. The voices of Jane Gibson, Sue Lefton, Kate Flatt, Toby Sedgwick, Siân Williams, Struan Leslie, Ellen Kane, Peter Darling, Steven Hoggett, Ann Yee, Imogen Knight and Shelley Maxwell explore processes of creativity, collaboration and innovation for the moving body in performance.
The conversations open up:
• Growth of movement direction through the 20th century
• New insights into embodied theatre practice
• Diverse movement approaches and creative preparation
• Physical trainings and influences
• Working methods with directors and actors in the rehearsal room
• Movement for actors in opera, film, television and musical theatre
• Relationships between movement direction and theatre choreography
• Potential future developments in the field
Forewords by Maria Aberg and Joan Iyiola
Not a Cock in a Frock, But a Hole Story. Drag and the Mark of the 'Bioqueens'
No full textThis chapter engages with the phenomenon known colloquially as ‘bio-queens’. Bio-queens are biological female performers who make work as if a traditional drag queen. Thus the performers: females playing males playing females, makes for a complex interplay of gender, performance and the traditions of drag. By comparing drag king performances, the chapter unpicks how drag performance traditions are present in kings and queens. It then looks to how performance with bio-queens concurs, upsets and augments those drag traditions. There is a politics at play when a cis-gendered performer presents cross-cast in drag forms (in this case a female presenting as female) and this chapter engages with the presentation of bio-queens as a form of politics in the queer community – and notes that even the term bio-queen is subject to vigorous debate. By focussing on a specific performer, Holestar, this chapter engages primarily with her work, but also with her experience of misogyny in the community and the mark this has left on her. Through her experiences, the chapter plays on this idea of ‘mark/ing’ as a moment of noticing, of marking something out of place or out of rhythm that in some way allows an audience to see unexamined assumptions about drag performance (and perhaps its position in relation to gender equality). Marking also stands as a term for grading, for ranking the relative quality of something. This turn to the quality of the performance (given that Holestar sings and lots of queens do not) brings about an interesting discussion of the relationship of the quality of the work, the traditions into which it fits and the community in which it is practiced. The chapter closes by marking the importance of bio-queens in the scene, not only to further diversify the kinds of work present, but also as a litmus test of the grassroots politics of the community in which the work mostly plays. It makes the closing argument that bio-queens are in some ways continuing the political and cultural work of drag kings and drag queens in a way that kings or queens cannot. Holestar continues to do this work on stage and in interview in a fierce way (indeed berating academics for their inability to speak in a language that most performers understand). She does this, of course, whilst maintaining impeccable and unfeasibly large hair
Puppet Theatre under Covid-19
No full textThis article explores how puppet theatre across the world responded to the Covid-19 crisis in 202
Michael Chekhov Technique in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways
No full textThe culmination of an innovative practice research project, Michael Chekhov in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways draws on historical writings and archival materials to investigate how Chekhov's technique can be used across the disciplines of contemporary performance and applied practice.
In contrast to the narrow, actor training-only analysis that dominated 20th-century explorations of the technique, authors Cass Fleming and Tom Cornford, along with contributors Caoimhe McAvinchey, Roanna Mitchell, Daron Oram and Sinéad Rushe, focus on devising, directing and collective creation, dramaturgy and collaborative playwriting, scenography, voice, movement and dance, as well as socially-engaged and therapeutic practices, all of which are at the forefront of international theatre-making.
The book collectively offers a thorough and fascinating investigation into new uses of Michael Chekhov's technique, providing practical strategies and principles alongside theoretical discussion
The Performance of Water Governance as Cultural Heritage in Peru
No full textIn this article, I apply performance theory and analysis to the examination of a performative community-based water governance system in the Peruvian Andes. I weave together performance studies and natural resource governance practice through Jacques Derrida’s concept of iterability – the inherent capacity of an iteration to be deciphered and re-iterated beyond its immediate, present context. I ask what idea and what practice of natural resource governance are enabled through the performative iterations of a rural community’s ancient ritualised relationship with water. I focus my analysis on the town of Corongo, in Northern Peru, and its water management system, whose heritage status was globally recognised through its inclusion on UNESCO’s 2017 Representative List of Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This analysis leads me to a wider consideration of some of the types of contributions that performance studies can make to environmental political theory and environmental policy making as well as to political and critical discussions about how to transition towards more environmentally sustainable societies. I argue that ritual performance is the language with which Coronguinos (people from Corongo) carry out water governance at a local level and the means by which they produce and transfer a consciousness of themselves as a water heritage community. Performance operates in Corongo by means of an ancient chain of restored behaviours, structuring Coronguinos’ lived relationship with their natural environment as well as shaping their awareness of the key role that embodied, performative water governance plays in the definition of their cultural identity and heritage
The Theatre of Rupert Goold: Radical Approaches to Adaptation and New Writing
No full textThis book provides an account of the work of the director Rupert Goold from the beginnings of his career to the present day. It both documents Goold’s productions and gives an insight into the creative processes that went into creating them. Primarily based on extensive interviews conducted with Goold and a range of his collaborators, it aims to provide an inside view and in doing so challenge a range of perceptions about Goold’s work, which are misaligned with both the impulses behind the work and people’s actual experience of working with him. It argues that while Goold has reputation for being a tricksy and flashy director, his approach to staging classic plays is informed by a deep reading of the text and aims to make these plays more accessible to a modern audience. It challenges the idea that Goold is an auteur, arguing that rather than enforcing his singular vision on a production, he works collaboratively with his cast and his creatives to create his productions, While Goold is often classified as a more ‘European’ director, it examines that ways in which his theatrical influences are actually largely drawn from work of British and North American theatre directors and argues that he is as influenced by the language of film as he is by theatre. In addition to this, it will explore the idea that much of Goold’s work is infused with ideas around both the nature of faith and a sense of the sacred. Goold’s approach to the creative process will ultimately be positioned as a dialectical process. The first section is an account of Goold’s work to date both as a director and as an artistic director. Rather than providing a comprehensive analysis of Goold’s work, this book documents both Goold’s body of work to date and the major shifts in his approach to creating it over the years
Marius Von Mayenburg and Roland Schimmelpfennig
No full textRoland Schimmelpfennig and Marius von Mayenburg represent a new generation of playwrights to emerge in the German-speaking countries in the late 1990s; other prominent protagonists include Falk Richter, Lukas Bärfuss and Kathrin Röggla, as well as Dea Loher and Sibylle Berg. In this chapter, the author clearly shares some of their approaches, as both revisit and reinvent key conventional dramatic mechanisms, yet from a postdramatic horizon. Fireface, mapped out key themes as well as the (European middle-class) universe that keeps appearing in Mayenburg’s work in a variety of permutations. In Der Hässliche, premiered at Schaubühne Berlin in January 2007, Marius von Mayenburg plays a scathing game with postmodern ideas of the ‘performativity’ of subjectivity and contingency of identity. These academic ideas, in the context of neoliberal capitalism, contribute to an all-encompassing commodification of individuality. In fact, all of Marius von Mayenburg’s plays transcend the hyper-realities of his scenarios into grotesque exposures of absurdities of middle-class life under global capitalism