Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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English Play Development under Neoliberalism 2000-2019
No full textWork in Progress: English Play Development under Neoliberalism, 2000-2019 explores how play development practices in state-subsidised English theatres functioned between 2000-2019, under conditions of neoliberal governance. By attending to both institutional and individual strategies and structures of play development, I analyse their economic rationality and co-constitution with the neoliberal statecraft of New Labour (1997-2010), the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition (2010-2015), and the current Conservative government (2015-) in advance of the general election in December 2019. Drawing on Marx’s Capital Volume One (1990 [1867]), this thesis engages a materialist mode of analysis, exposing ideological structures that contribute to making theatre what Ric Knowles calls a ‘culturally affirmative’ product (2009: 56). Taking up the cultural materialisms of Williams (1977) and Dollimore and Sinfield (1985), and the bureaucratic analyses of Weber (1978 [1922]) and Graeber (2016 [2015]), I show how New Labour’s neoliberal higher education and arts policies shaped English playwriting guides and dramaturgy in English theatres. The writings of Gramsci (1999 [1926]), Hall (1988), Brown (2015) and Foucault (2008 [1978-9]) further support an analysis of how play development in English theatres was shaped as a post-Fordist enterprise that encouraged artists to enact forms of neoliberal subjectivity. Furthermore, via the Marxist-feminist standpoint theories of Haraway (1988) and Hartsock (1983), I argue that the coalition furnished play development with a neoliberal ‘new diversity’ (Hargrave 2015: 109). Finally, using the ‘commodity chain analysis’ of Cook (2004) and Coles and Crang (2011), I contend that ‘performances of development’ represent new ways in which artists are attempting to resist neoliberal rationality. The thesis concludes that, over this period, neoliberal capitalist hegemony has fundamentally shaped English play development. By generating a mode of production that conflates the usually distinct categories of development and performance, however, artists have begun to challenge the existent play development paradigms and their ideological underpinnings
Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives: An Interim Project Report on Dunham’s Data
No full textThis interim project report addresses the ongoing work of Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. The project centres choreographer Katherine Dunham’s transnational circulation, and takes a critical mixed methods approach informed by feminist and anti-racist discussions in the digital humanities in order to explore the questions and problems that make data analysis and visualization meaningful for dance history. Dunham’s Data sits on robust datasets that we have manually curated from currently undigitized sources— an iterative and evaluative process that approaches these archives and the histories that they contain from a granular perspective. This update contextualizes our particular conjunction of archival and digital methods within dance history’s precedents for curating data, and talks through our own datasets as tools for dance historical analysis in terms of Dunham’s global legacy
The Theatre of Photography - Special Edition of Photography and Culture
No full textThis issue of Photography and Culture is edited by Joel Anderson and Weibke Leister and casts light on the various meeting points of the Theatre of Photography
In Memory Of A Radical: Cicely Berry
No full textA tribute to the world-wide legacy of voice practitioner, Cicely Berry
A Living Cabinet of Breath Curiosities: Somatics, Bio-media, and the Archive
No full textBreath builds intimate and physical connections beyond the individual, at the same time as it also poses challenges to sharing experience with others. However, performance has the capacity to archive multidimensional sensory experience and recompose it in a manner that is palpable to an audience. This essay addresses the problem of collecting, re-accessing, and sharing breath, from the indexing of breath as biodata to the use of ‘breath media’ in performance. The phenomenology of breath is interwoven with critical theorization of contemporary interactive biofeedback techniques, and grounded in reflexive analysis of creative practice, specifically the practice research project Breath Catalogue, in which experimental choreography and technology create a cabinet of breath curiosities in performance. This living catalogue — distributed between bio-media and somatic tasks of embodied memory — is contextualized within medical humanities, archive theory, choreographic practices, digital performance, and feminist technology studies
When the Lights are Shining on Them: Drag Performance and Queer Communities in London
No full textDrag performance is and continues to be intimately linked to queer communities. This thesis explores drag performances and queer communities in contemporary London. It argues that
these performances offer fertile sites for the emergence and sustenance of queer communities, focusing on the work of twelve performers in contemporary London. Starting
from the understanding that homophobic and transphobic violence is increasingly prevalent in the context of this study, it describes and theorises drag performance and its relation to
the practice of queer communities both in response to and regardless of this violence. Overall, this thesis proposes that drag and the spaces in which these performances happen facilitate queer communities and as such are connected to queer modes of survival. There has been a resurgence in drag performance in the UK both as a result of and a resistance
to the rise in popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race (World of Wonder, 2009). As a result of this show, drag performers and performances are being seen and understood on an international scale. This inquiry, however, argues for the importance of drag as live performance in bars, pubs and clubs, despite and because of the increase of these kinds of queer venues closing in major cities in the UK. As a way of theorising these performances, this thesis proposes a ‘queer-side eye’ as an overarching methodological framework and tactic that recognises the complex and contingent ways in which the researcher is imbricated in the research. A queer side-eye is also a physical position in the world and describes not only a way of looking or watching – and being looked at – but also a playful attitude and position characterised by the acerbic wit of
drag performers. The tactic is constructed through field notes made from extensive observations. It is also connected to ideas of queering knowledge explored by Halberstam (2012) and Muñoz (2009), queer autoethnography proposed and practiced by Adams and Holman Jones (2008 & 2014) and Holman Jones and Harris (2019), and other modes of producing alternative knowledge in academic practice. Alongside the significant new insights that a structure of a queer side-eye offers for the study
of queer performance forms, this thesis argues for the
importance of queer venues and drag performance in the context of homophobia and transphobia in contemporary London and beyond, arguing that drag performance offers queer forms of survival
The Hopeless Courage of Confronting Contemporary Realities: Milo Rau’s “Globally Conceived Theatre of Humanity"
No full text
Snapshots on Theatre Photography
No full text(published article in Slovak)
In this article, I will briefly attempt to offer some perspectives on photography and theatre, in part drawing on ideas I explore in my last book, Theatre & Photography (Anderson 2014). I will summarise some points of intersection between photography and theatre, examples among many, taking as a particular focus theatre photography, which is to say photographs of theatre practice. I will consider how we might come to understand theatre photography by way of a conceptual distinction between two kinds of image, two approaches to photography, and suggest that theatre photography, while sometimes reinforcing one or the other notion, can at points point to their synthesis
Theatre Photography Between Theatre and Performance
No full textÀ partir de l'analyse approfondie de deux corpus d’images – quelques photographies de théâtre prises par le photographe tchécoslovaque Josef Koudelka, et une photographie-performance de l’artiste chinois Ai Weiwei – cet article propose d'envisager la photographie de théâtre non seulement comme la simple reproduction d'une œuvre d’art théâtral, mais aussi comme l'enregistrement d’un événement