Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Negotiated Hopes: Reconfiguring Narratives of Self-worth (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textNegotiated Hopes: Reconfiguring Narratives of Self-worth is a multi-component practice research project that identifies fears experienced by young people (between 15 and 21 years of age) in Singapore where narratives of self-worth are too narrowly defined by academic performance. Through the development of these two new practice research interventions that took place in two education contexts in Singapore, and theorisation developed in two peer-reviewed articles, this practice research establishes new urban art-inspired applied performance practices that are highly relevant to young people in Singapore. In my practice research, I use Art du Déplacement (ADD) and breakin’ moves to resist the pervasive discourses of failure and disavowal that frame the lives of many Singaporean young people deemed “un-academic” in formal education. Using an adapted narrative inquiry as my methodology, findings emerging from this socially engaged practice research indicate that students can resist the temptation to seek external validation by developing a narrative of self-worth based on their own experiences of conceptual learning and understanding outside of the formal education system. Creating these counternarratives of self-worth through this novel urban art-inspired applied performance practice is a vital tool in countering the stigmatisation and social invalidation experienced by many Singaporean students, which have been identified as triggers for self-harm, depression and suicide. The principal contribution of this applied performance practice research lies in using ADD and breakin’ to create a new applied theatre practice that reconfigures Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques for the formation of more hopeful narratives of self-worth amongst young Singaporeans. This practice research has been disseminated through one peer-reviewed article, one book chapter in an edited collection, 14 workshops in universities and community theatre organisations within the UK and five conference presentations
Theatre and its Discontents
No full textIn 1973, the Trilateral Commission asked whether democracies were becoming ‘ungovernable’. Warning of the ‘rise of anomic democracy’, it identified threats that we are more than familiar with today, as we confront – once again – the ‘crisis’ of democracy: ‘the disintegration of civil order, the breakdown of social discipline, the debility of leaders, and the alienation of citizens’. In this chapter I revisit this ‘problem’ of anomie, locating it at the very heart of democracy and the historical problem of its governance. In the Laws, Plato had already used the disparaging term ‘theatrocracy’, which drew on the analogy of the theatre and its audience, to describe the unruly nature of democratic forms of life. Just as the theatre audience is an ill-disciplined rabble so, he argued, the members of a democratic society are prone to various disorders. Thus the pathologies of the democratic polis qualify it for one of Plato’s ‘diseased cities’, where popular discontentment collapses democracy into something far worse: tyranny. I pursue this ‘theatrocratic’ problem as a means of understanding democracy’s central dynamic, particularly visible in an age of popular discontentment, namely its constitutive proneness to displeasure, incivility and antagonism.
The first part of the chapter re-examines the legacy of theatrocratic discourse by reframing it in relation to the discourse on play. I argue that for theatrocratic discourses ‘play’ – often understood as ‘idleness’ – constitutes the core problematic of democratic or ‘common’ forms of life, and that for Plato, and for many commentators who later followed him, democracy must be viewed as ‘dangerous play’. I show how the modern State sought to neutralise the ‘theatrocratic’ threat associated with democracy’s dangerous play by means of ‘education’, converting incivility into civility; disorder into orderly conduct; idleness and illegality into productive labour. The second part of the chapter, focusses more closely on this educational solution, arguing that it leads to a further paradox and one with which we still contend today. This paradox becomes particularly acute in Schiller’s notion of the ‘aesthetic education of man’ and in his tract on theatre as a tool for (deontic) instruction. While Schiller sees ‘play’ as central to human emancipation, in advocating theatre as a tool of moral instruction, designed to reconcile the demos to the State, aesthetic education reverts to a discourse of two humanities – one civil, the other barbaric. Nonetheless, I argue Schiller’s insight that ‘man’ is ‘only wholly Man when he is playing’ remains useful to understanding the theatrocratic ‘crisis’ afflicting contemporary democracies with the rise of populism across Europe and beyond. Thus in the final part of the chapter, I turn to consider how we might understand democracy through the figure of theatrocracy today. Following the political theorist, Chantal Mouffe, I argue that the solution to the crisis of democracy is not less but more democracy. I suggest that what this involves is the need to reconstruct democratic engagement around two senses of the term ‘play’. First, that play is indeed correctly understood as a ‘subversive’ force – a productive ‘incivility’ – and that an ‘aesthetic education’ today requires ‘playful resistance’ to the total mobilisation of the social by capitalism; second, that democratic politics must be reconfigured around the notion of a radical ‘politics of rehearsal’ – where play signifies, not something subservient to an instrumental goal, but the opening of an autonomous space, emancipated from productive labour, in which new ‘identities’ can be created
Problems of Stasis in My Country: The National Theatre and the Crisis of General Enculturation in Post-Referendum Britain
No full textThis essay explores the discursive invocation of ‘civil war’ to describe the polarization of the political terrain in post-Referendum Britain in order to contextualize the National Theatre’s production of Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris’s ‘verbatim’ play My Country and its representation of Brexit. It shows how the political reality of Brexit, understood as a crisis of ‘general enculturation’, undermined the NT’s attempt to transcend the impasse of the political context. It argues that in identifying the NT with the play’s central figure of Britannia, an image of reconciliation, the theatre failed to account for its own implication in the wider crisis of enculturation
Messy Connections: A Posthumanist Approach to Performance Practice Engaged with Recovery from Addiction.
No full textIn this thesis, I examine UK performance practices that involve people in recovery from addiction. I offer a theorising of such practices as recovery-engaged. By this, I refer to applied performance activity that is imbricated with an understanding of lived experiences of addiction and the particular practices used to maintain a recovery-orientated way of life. My research intervenes in the contemporary context in which advocacy for ‘arts on prescription’ has gained momentum in UK public health discussion, yet a cohesive network of recovery arts practices does not yet exist. Supporting the development of a network, I identify the distinctness of this arts practice.
Specifically, by drawing on posthumanist concepts of addiction, I identify recovery from addiction and performance practices with people in recovery as contingent on the varied assemblages comprising particular interactions with people, objects, space and socio-political systems. Building upon Manning’s discussion of the body as ‘an ecology of processes’ (2013), I offer the term bodies-in-process to frame recovery as an ongoing ecology of survival and regeneration. Connection with supportive others and atmospheres is considered vital for the continued development of recovery-orientated ways of being.
I apply my discussion of the ecology of recovery to my analysis of recovery-engaged performance practices and theorise these as systems of messy connections. Performance activity is thereby conceived as bodily encounters with other bodies-in-process, objects and their surroundings. These encounters are driven by the sensorial force, or affect, instigated through interaction with others, objects, space and socio-political environment. Through these layers of interaction, I offer what I consider to be the ethical and political priorities of recovery-engaged practice and indicate where further development might emerge. In particular, I consider the political potential of this performance activity to generate ‘atmospheres of recovery’ (Duff 2016) by instigating collaborative communities of recovery that facilitate active citizenship and, thus, become a potential site of ‘radical democracy’ (Mouffe 2013)
Epistemology of the Locker Room: A Queer Glance at the Physical Culture Archive
No full textThe physical culture movement began in Europe and America the nineteenth century and was a precursor to today’s forms of fitness and exercise. It also encompassed a mediascape that included popular theatre, magazines, collectible photos, and advertisements. According to many traditional historical accounts, this scene of mainly male-identified embodied practice is ‘closeted’. The practice of muscle building and bodily cultivation constructs a heteronormative and hegemonic masculine ideal while at the same time serving as a hidden or secret site for gay desire.
I argue that the concept of the closet (encompassing notions of hiding and outing) obscures the ways in which physical culture has challenged and queered rigid binaries of gender and sexuality from its origin. Through this trope, the locker room is re-framed as a public site of male homosociality and a closeted site of male homosexuality. In contrast, this article takes the ‘epistemology of the locker room’ – a site of semi-public exposure, relationality, competition, and shame – as an approach to the twentieth century archive of physical culture, a problematic set of documents in which physical culturists perform a heightened, theatrical self-presentation. How might such a conceptual shift to ‘partial exposure’ enable us to re-read the lacunae in the archive that have often been considered ‘secretly’ queer? ‘Outing’ archives, here, is an action that marks the way in which the embodied practice of physical culture was not a secret but openly queer history, in which exceptional and extraordinary performing bodies invented new modes of sociality
Jordi Galceran and Juan Mayorga: Unravelling the Present, Narrating the Past 1
No full textWhile Juan Mayorga frequently deploys irony and absurdist comedy within a dramatic register, Jordi Galceran writes comedies that have made him, in words of his press team, the ‘Rey Midas del teatro español’. Killing Words’ rhyming wordplay presents particular demands on translators and this may be one reason why despite enjoying runs in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Medellín, and Mexico City, it has been translated less widely than Galceran’s later plays. Mayorga has German ask Claudio to stay away from his house while the teenager closes narrative, trumping his past mentor as he shifts story’s focus from Ester to Juana. Mayorga’s theatre is underpinned by a belief that theatre contributes to ‘those images of the past that nourish and foster what we call “collective memories”. It is a theatre rooted in the need to bring the past into the present and one which has proved particularly resonant in a country still coming to terms with legacy of 36-year dictatorship
From ‘Future Memory’: A Triangulation of History, Theory and Practice (REF 2021 Practice Research Submission)
No full textThis multi-component output comprises a piece of professional practice on which I was dramaturg and historian, plus two single-authored essays. The three components reflect upon and extend one another to address both historical questions, and the artistic and scholarly questions that arise in relation to inquiry into them. They use multiple registers of research to triangulate an investigation of ‘dance’s alternative histories,’ specifically engaging with works and archives previously unstudied, but that reveal and remedy the erasure of German dance’s transnational past.
Methodologically, there are two interrelated core concerns: 1) how scholarly historical research and professional practice can work in tandem in both critical and reparative modes to build and share with audiences a view of history in which a minor work becomes central and simultaneously 2) the performance practice of such an alternative history can develop further insight into dance historical narratives and canons. Developed over eight years, the research draws together primary source materials in three languages from formal archives, as well as from personal archives, oral histories, and embodied practice.
The research has been shared through performance practice, printed academic and non-academic publications, invited academic lectures, public workshops, reading circles, and performance talk-back sessions. The practice component appeared in key performance festivals in Europe and Asia, and two additional performance works were commissioned as a result. The research has been presented in eight invited talks and two artistic workshops in seven countries. The first print essay was one of Dance Research Journal’s five most downloaded articles in 2014, has been cited in nine peer-reviewed publications to date, and an expanded version was published by invitation in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (2017). The second more recent essay has been cited twice to date, both in the context of new directions in the field of dance
Dragging the Mainstream: RuPaul's Drag Race and Moving Drag Practices Between the USA and the UK'
No full textIn the wake of the ever-growing popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race (Logo TV, 2009), an American television series in which drag performers compete for the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar, drag is increasingly considered in homogenised forms across national and international boundaries. Alongside this programme, the increase of the presence of drag performers on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has meant that access to drag and drag performance is increasingly available outside of venues in which the performances occur, whilst the presence of make-up tutorials on YouTube allows those interested to practice the aesthetics of drag from the safety of their bedrooms without stepping heel on stage. Furthermore, it is often argued by established drag performers in the UK that younger performers only learn their drag via Drag Race, not through local drag traditions or more individuated exchanges between performers.
Beyond a simple binary of British and American (or “drag race”) drag, this chapter explores the ways in which drag performance is a form that is usually learnt, rehearsed and developed on stage in front of an audience. In order to explore this, this chapter will consider a particular London-based drag competition, Not Another Drag Competition, as a semi-formal mode of learning drag. The competition takes place in Her Upstairs, a venue in Camden, London, known for producing drag, cabaret and burlesque performance events. It proceeds over a period of 10 weeks, with each week being framed around a particular challenge that allows performers to explore tropes of drag performance including lip syncing, live vocals and celebrity impersonation. This competition is one of a number of competitions across London and beyond, and is knowingly derivative of Drag Race, whilst maintaining a set of localised references and practices specific not only to the geographic area, but also often to the venue itself.
Discourses on the contemporary British drag scene either paint Drag Race as the saviour or nadir of drag; it has either revitalised a stagnant field of entertainment, or turned all drag into an “American” form of that ignores UK practices and histories. Taking the time to consider with more care the agency of younger and/or newer performers, this chapter explores how this mainstream manifestation of drag, and the contemporary drag competitions it has facilitated, might work to produce alternative forms of drag training which still place performance and performing as the first term. Working from performance as a place of both doing and learning drag, this chapter argues that the mainstream and the local emerge at the level of the performers’ bodies in problematic and productive ways
Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 1
No full textIn recent years drag performance has moved from the fringes to emerge as a mainstream phenomenon, showcased on TV shows in the US and the UK. This collection offers a diverse range of critical engagements by drag performers, makers, scholars and writers reflecting on work from the UK, USA, Israel, Germany and Australia. Moving beyond discussions of gender theory, the essays consider contemporary drag performance practices, connecting them to the histories, communities and politics that produced them. Chapters range across discussions of drag kings in the US, UK and drag and activism; the influence of RuPaul on the generation of new forms of work in New York; transfeminist critiques of drag; 'bio'/faux queens; engagements with race and ethnicity through drag performance; drag andragogy; audience concerns; drag intersections with animal personas, and how drag performance relates to personal narratives of history and identity. Collectively the contributions focus on drag as a mode of performance that is diverse and that uncorsets the easy thought that drag is simply a cross dressing man in a dress or a woman in a suit
Towards an Ecological Dramaturgy of Dining: Plate as Landscape Device
No full textThis article explores culinary performances across a range of chef-led restaurants, including Noma, Next, Atelier Crenn and The Fat Duck, exploring how their practices develop a dramaturgy focused on changing narratives around climate change. Considering both the presentation of individual dishes and the ways these are structured within and across meals, I argue that through staging such images and embedding them in storytelling, chefs deploy affective encounter to produce performative challenges for the diner, who is encouraged to engage issues of climate and sustainability. Through the interplay between literal taste and the other senses, chefs including René Redzepi, Dominique Crenn, Bun Lai, Grant Achatz, and Heston Blumenthal frame dining encounters, embracing sociality and narrative. Through creating versions of landscapes on the plate, both in explicit (post)representational imagery and in the relation to the plate itself, these gastronomic performances map the terrain of global food issues as simultaneously visible and digestible, inviting the diner to participate in finding solutions, and calling for attention to the literal tending of the earth. Contemporary chefs refract the classical notion of landscape as a lens through which we understand and see the world, staging dramaturgical questions and posing narratives about relationships between nature and culture, encouraging the diner to question human impact and responsibility to the world, recalling the environment as always already in front of us, but through a range of gustatory encounters, they extend a hand of invitation, reminding us of the need to engage globally through closer sensual engagement and detailed focus