Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Struggles of Singularised Communities in German Theatre: The Culture War Around the Berlin Volksbuhne
No full textThis chapter proposes that the battle around the Volksbuhne may offer important insights into an underlying crisis of the systemic structure of the German city theatre institution, once founded as a ‘national’ institution of and for the emerging bourgeoisie, and eventually paradigmatic for the liberal European culture of Bildung. It points out some of the key ideological and cultural antagonisms within the German public theatre system today, concerning its modes of production and aesthetic formats; its crucial symbolic function; and its relational but also exclusional mechanisms. The sociological perspective offers a compelling framework to explain the malignant force of the culture battle around the Volksbuhne. The buzz of the Volksbuhne itself eventually turned the quarter into one of the prime spots of Berlin gentrification and one of the city’s most desirable and most expensive districts. Politically doomed to fail even before its start, Chris Dercon’s brief Volksbuhne interlude of 2017–18 highlighted some decisive issues for this ongoing systemic (re)calibration
On Sheep Pig Goat: An Interview With Fevered Sleep
No full textThis is a conversation between the co-artistic directors of the UK-based performance company, Fevered Sleep - Sam Butler and David Harradine - and the writer, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca. The discussion is focussed on their recent project "Sheep Pig Goat" (2017): a performance project involving improvised encounters between human dancers and musicians and an audience of sheep, pigs and goats
I'll Take You to Mrs Cole (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textI’ll Take You to Mrs Cole is a multi-component practice research output including the creation and performances of children’s theatre show I’ll Take You to Mrs Cole, commissioned by Complicité and co-produced by Polka Theatre.
The research intervenes in making and research practices in children’s theatre and articulates a new methodology and dramaturgy informed by Two Tone music (established in the 1970s and 1980s in Coventry). The Two Tone dramaturgy developed in the practice influences not only the aesthetic and sonic elements of the work, but also the wider dramaturgical and creative process, and it underscores the importance of inclusive and non-hierarchical devising processes. Dealing with narratives of race, class and community, I’ll Take You to Mrs Cole aims to stimulate inter-generational conversations amongst audiences around these issues.
The Two Tone dramaturgy enables the practice to foreground the relevance of the socio-economic and political context of Two Tone music under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the late 1970s and 1980s to contemporary culture under a Conservative government in the late 2010s. And, in a context where children’s theatre is often under-valued within the wider theatre ecology, contemporary dramaturgical practices of children’s theatre are extended to present an innovative and challenging children’s theatre production
Collaborative Critique: Expanded practices of contemporary performance criticism (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textThis practice research is a multi-component output consisting of a series of inter-related criticism projects which I developed as a critic and writer, as well as a series of accompanying written findings. The research expands the political and creative scope of cultural criticism at a time of fundamental changes to the role of critical communication for democratic politics. The project emerged from my sustained inquiry into cooperative and collective structures for criticism, and professional and lived experience as a mixed ethnicity migrant critic and researcher operating across different political and cultural ecologies in Europe.
The research brings new insights into performance criticism as a distinct performative critical practice, rather than an instrument for performance dissemination. It examines the inter-relation of political structures within criticism (such as form, authorship and production) with its institutional regulation, by mainstream media, the blogosphere or cultural infrastructures on the one hand, and gendered, colonial conceptions of political rationality on the other. The project investigates the role of affective entanglements, cooperative strategies and techniques, such as the live, speculative or fictional, to act as political participation and change.
The project drew on methodologies from performance studies, creative writing and political theory, and unfolded through a series of collaborations with artists, researchers and writers; fieldwork engaging with communities from across Europe, academic, non-academic and professional; training programmes in partnership with organisations at the forefront of experimental performance practice; editorial collaborations that developed modes of collective critical writing; and residencies with independent cultural organisations.
The research has been shared internationally (UK, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Serbia) through presentations, conferences, publications in peer-reviewed journals, articles in open access platforms and websites, and creative and digital publications
Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance
No full textThis edited collection brings together essays presenting an interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and performance and the fields of care ethics, care studies, health and social care. The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of care, challenging existing debates in this area by re-thinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance. Through an examination of a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings, the book interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even ‘fake’ and ‘staged’. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates and discussion, the book considers how the field of performance and the aesthetic and ethico-political structures that determine its relationship with the social might be challenged by an examination of inter-human care. By placing socially-engaged performance in dialogue with theories and practices of care, the contributors consider how performance operates as a mode of caring for others and how debates between the theory and practice of care and performance making might foster a greater understanding of how the caring encounter is embodied and experienced
Katie Mitchell and the Technologies of the Realist Theatre
No full textThis article explores the work of European theatre director Katie Mitchell (1964-) by examining her approach to managing the technologies of the realist theatre. It borrows from Heidegger’s analysis of the nature of technology to build upon Ric Knowles’s materialist account of theatre as an ‘ideologically-coded process’ of generating ‘overwhelmingly culturally-affirmative’ products. It does so by examining tensions between Mitchell’s attempts to produce politically critical theatre and the technological configuration of the realist stage. It focuses its analysis on three particular aesthetic strategies developed by Mitchell in the period since 2006: the use of juxtaposed box-sets to create ‘split-screen’ stagings (A Woman Killed with Kindness and Lucia di Lammermoor), the dramaturgical refocusing of play-texts through the aperture of a single character’s perspective (A Dream Play and 4.48 Psychosis), and the technique of ‘live cinema’ (The Forbidden Zone and Waves). The article concludes that the technological apparatus of the realist stage is systemically resistant to both critical political analysis and radical political action, and that a director such as Mitchell can therefore only work against wider political systems of domination and exploitation by working within just such a system. The productions analysed here demonstrate that any politically critical theatrical endeavour must begin from this understanding: that the theatre’s technologies are – in themselves – conduits of hegemonic power, and that it can therefore only take hold if the technological configuration of theatrical realism is radically dismantled
Walk in/Walk As My Shoes: Puppetry and Prosocial Empathy in Healthcare
No full textThis article explores the connections between puppetry performance practice and the activation of empathy, considering the synergies between puppetry and medical practice where empathy is a key factor in healing. I draw on a consideration of the place of puppetry within ritual transitional and healing practices to develop an examination of contemporary modes of performance which require deep listening, response and attention. I examine the connections between neuroscience and puppetry which suggest that attitude-taking engenders empathy, and compare this to my puppetry training practice to suggest that training for and engaging in puppetry practice can encourage and stimulate empathy. This has significance for practitioners of puppetry working in healthcare contexts, and for medical practitioners who undertake some form of puppetry, either within their training or as continuing professional development. Although the different forms of empathy are connected in practice, the article focuses especially on affective (emotional), cognitive and social empathy
Wonder VR: Interactive Storytelling Through VR 360 Video with NHS Patients Living with Dementia
No full textThis article explores the potential of an applied theatre VR360 project with patients in a London hospital, drawing upon the concept of wonder and the potential connections between bespoke VR360 films, and subjective wellbeing. This research focuses on exploring the impact of VR360 on the wellbeing of older adults living with dementia as a response to pressing issues such as the number of older adults in hospitals, the statistical concerns about the number of over 65s leaving hospital with a mental health condition and the need for creative solutions for person-centred care in acute hospital settings. The research investigates the potential offers that VR360 films can provide for patients drawing upon theories of immersion in virtual reality, and connecting the ideas presented to the needs of patients, and Phillip Fisher’s study of wonder and the aesthetics of rare experiences. The findings from the current iteration of the project will be discussed in addition to the limitations and future developments of the potential of VR360 as a tool for improving patient wellbeing
Dossier: Climate Change and the Decolonized Future of Theatre
No full textThis dossier opens up a set of questions about what theatre and performance can do and be in a climate-changed future. Through a series of practice snapshots the authors suggest a diversity of responses to decolonizing and environmental justice issues in and through theatre and performance. These practices include the climate-fiction film The Wandering Earth, which prompts questions about what decolonizing means for China and the impact of climate chaos on the mental well-being of young people; The Living Pavilion, an Australian Indigenous-led project that created a biodiverse event space showcasing Indigenous art making; Dancing Earth Indigenous dance company who use dance as a way to engage Indigenous ecological thinking and Indigenous futurity; water rituals in the Andes of Peru that problematize water policy and ethnic boundaries
