Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
Central Research and Creativity Online - Royal Central School of Speech and DramaNot a member yet
743 research outputs found
Sort by
Biljana Srbljanovic and Ivana Sajko: Voice in the Place of Silence
No full textIn this chapter, the author advances an argument that the local context(s) can be seen to have shaped a very specific type of dramaturgy that is well exemplified by the respective authorial idioms of playwrights Biljana Srbljanovic and Ivana Sajko. She proposes that this work demands to be seen in new ways, rather than by reference to existing taxonomies and discourses. Srbljanovic and Sajko’s post-Brechtain authorial voice abolishes the traditional hierarchies while deploying a more relational form of self-inscription. They make themselves audible within the stage directions to engender a metadialogue with the text and engage the reader/audience in a relationship. Voice has been as integral to the feminist discourses as ecriture feminine, although Briony Lipton and Elizabeth Mackinlay note that the advent of neoliberalism has complicated this agenda and opened up the potential of silence. The chapter opens up avenues for further research at the intersection of voice studies, feminism, trauma, politics, and the Balkans
Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves? Listening to Migrant Domestic Workers’ Everyday Temporalities
No full texthis essay draws on multi-sited, performance art-led research with Filipinx migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. It explores a dichotomy at work in the portrayal of some workers as bagong bayani or ‘modern heroes’—a phrase coined by then Philippine president Corazon Aquino—and as ‘modern slaves’, a term more recently associated with the humanitarian and state processing of survivors of human trafficking and labour abuse. Simultaneously victimising and venerating workers, I argue that both terms spectacularise experiences of migrant domestic work, untethering it from lived, material conditions. In so doing, the everyday nature of exploitation and abuse encountered by many migrant domestic workers is obscured, as well as the everyday expertise that enables them to evade, de-escalate, and survive it. Through making collaborative soundwalks with migrant domestic workers—a creative form similar to site-specific audio guides—my research identifies ways in which performance methodologies can be attentive to the specific temporalities of their lived experiences and to their decisions about self-representation
This Grief Thing (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textThis Grief Thing is a participatory arts project that encourages people to talk, think and learn about grief, by creating new public spaces, physical objects, visual materials and mechanisms for interpersonal engagement. Historically articulated and experienced in social, relational ways, grief has been rendered largely absent from public, social settings by shifts in societal attitudes as a consequence of two World Wars, developments in medical technologies and consequent disengagement with death. This has resulted in a lack of developed skills for communicating about grief, with recognised impacts on health and wellbeing. This Grief Thing renders grief visible, through material cultures, through social encounters and by interventions in public space, and develops new partnership and participation models for engaging diverse publics with grief, helping build resilience in individuals, families and communities.
At the heart of the project is a collection of clothing and accessories that incorporate words and phrases about grief, proposing new strategies to think about it and communicate it. These objects are distributed via temporary shops which also function as spaces for meetings and exchange, through which people engage with the subject of grief. A billboard campaign and a free leaflet, distributed through spaces such as libraries, cafes and print distribution channels, make grief even more visible in public spaces. In a context where the social invisibility of grief diminishes opportunities for engagement with it, research and creative projects which offer mechanisms for learning and exchange are increasingly necessary.
In development since 2015, the project appeared in UK towns and cities from 2018–20. During this time, over 3569 participants directly engaged with the project by visiting temporary shops, 351 people participated in structured conversations about grief, over 1400 free leaflets were distributed and over 535,000 people encountered the billboard campaign
Creating Something that Feels Alive: Sound Design for Katie Mitchell, Donato Wharton in Conversation with Tom Cornford
No full text
Katherine Dunham's Global Method and the Embodied Politics of Dance's Everyday
No full textKatherine Dunham travelled the world for decades as a choreographer, dancer, teacher, scholar, writer, and activist. This essay develops the ‘everyday’ as an intersectional analytic through which to understand the global method tying Dunham’s transnational mobility to her practices of making-do as an African-American female artist in the mid-twentieth century, and the ways the ongoing pursuit of solvency propelled her, her performers, and her work into the world. Our critical mixed methods approach scales up from a manually curated itinerary of Dunham’s daily locations over four years (1950–3), to the politics of the everyday they cumulatively reveal. Analyzing transnational travel patterns of stays and returns can rebalance the geography of Dunham scholarship, including revealing the centrality of nightclub and other non-concert performances to sustaining the company over time. Looking further into the archives, we turn to a paradigm of friction and flexibility in order to elaborate the many factors that shaped Dunham’s touring pathways, as well as the ways that Dunham’s bodily wellbeing haunts her relentless momentum. Focusing on the bodies in the data from a perspective that combines dance studies with digital humanities points to the ways digital methods can evidence and elaborate bodily experience on- and offstage
Sound Effect: The Theatre We Hear
No full textSound Effect tells the story of the effect of theatrical aurality on modern culture. Beginning with the emergence of the modern scenic sound effect in the late 18th century, and ending with headphone theatre which brings theatre's auditorium into an intimate relationship with the audience's internal sonic space, the book relates contemporary questions of theatre sound design to a 250-year Western cultural history of hearing. It argues that while theatron was an instrument for seeing and theorizing, first a collective hearing, or audience is convened. Theatre begins with people entering an acoustemological apparatus that produces a way of hearing and of knowing. Once, this was a giant marble ear on a hillside, turned up to a cosmos whose inaudible music accounted for all. In modern times, theatre's auditorium, or instrument for hearing, has turned inwards on the people and their collective conversance in the sonic memes, tropes, clichés and picturesques that constitute a popular, fictional ontology.
This is a study about drama, entertainment, modernity and the theatre of audibility. It addresses the cultural frames of resonance that inform our understanding of SOUND as the rubric of the world we experience through our ears. Ross Brown reveals how mythologies, pop-culture, art, commerce and audio, have shaped the audible world as a form of theatre. Garrick, De Loutherbourg, Brecht, Dracula, Jekyll, Hyde, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, James Bond, Scooby-Do and Edison make cameo appearances as Brown weaves together a history of modern hearing, with an argument that sound is a story, audibility has a dramaturgy, hearing is scenographic, and the auditoria of drama serve modern life as the organon, or definitive frame of reference, on the sonic world
And The Rest of Me Floats: Capturing Queer Potentiality through a Dance-floor Dramaturgy (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textAnd The Rest of Me Floats is a multi-component practice research output incorporating a professional production, that I conceived and directed for Outbox Theatre, performed at internationally renowned theatre venues (the Bush Theatre, London; The Birmingham Repertory Theatre); the play text published by Oberon Books; an article based upon the methodology; and a series of funded workshops delivered to LGBTQIA+ youth groups across the UK. This research invents a methodology, ‘Dance-floor Dramaturgy’, establishing a distinct approach to theatrical form that explores and captures queer potentiality. I define ‘potentiality’ as the set of possibilities and potentials that exist outside of the present.
Central to this practice is a performative exploration of the ‘dance floor’, which I reconfigure as a transformative framework allowing the performer (and audiences) to explore their past and future selves, their dreams, and desires. This practice mobilises queer futurity, looking to the past to illuminate the future, using a philosophy of hope and collectivity to reach for the utopic. Dance-floor Dramaturgy proposes an alternative to the exclusion and lack of representation of queer and trans* narratives and performers in mainstream theatre. I use the term ‘trans*’ with the asterisk indicating that there is not a fixed destination to gender transition.
The production has been recognised by the V&A, who have included a digital recording of it in the National Video Archive of Performance. The practice research has also led to changes in theatre industry practices as major arts organisations, such as National Theatre, Southbank Centre, and Spotlight, have invited me to engage in consultation on transgender-inclusive routes into training, casting, and performance