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
'Drama as Therapy' research seminar
No full textThe RCSSD’s CDthAN (Central Dramatherapy Alumni Network) hosted a seminar celebration of over 1000 citations of the book - 'Drama as Therapy' (Routledge 1996, 2007) by Professor Phil Jones. This research based seminar consisted of eight groups of therapist-researchers from Australia, Cameroon, Canada, Israel, Palestine, the UK and the USA presenting their work and being involved in dialogic interviews with other therapist-researchers and MA/Doctoral students from different parts of the world, including those from the RCSSD’s MA in Drama and Movement Therapy. The focus concerns their published research in relation to their citation of ‘Drama as Therapy’, focusing on the book’s theory and research concerning the ‘core processes’ of dramatherapy.
What are the Core Processes?
‘The core processes aim to ‘define the key processes which operate within dramatherapy and show how they can be used in different ways according to the needs of the client group or context…’ (Jones 1996: p99).
‘Jones describes nine core processes derived from theatre...(these are) particularly appropriate because dramatherapists agree that it is involvement in the process of drama...that creates the potential for change in dramatherapy’ (Langley 2006: p 22).
‘First articulated by Jones (1991) the drama therapy core processes are common factors across drama therapy approaches that represent universal in-session process variables and are theorized to be therapeutic and bring about client change’ (Frydman et al. 2022: p1).
There are eight presentations/interviews by therapist-researchers
Presentations and interviews featuring:
1. Leigh Bulmer, Dr Christine Novy, Amy Thomas and Susan Ward about 'Introducing Movement and Prop as Additional Metaphors in Narrative Therapy' (2005) Journal of Systemic Therapies 24: (2) 60-74. Interview by Akinyi Oluoch.
2. Dr Reem Shamshoum about 'Extracts from ‘Dancing in Nazareth' (2016) from ‘Beyond the Boundary: is there something called real knowledge?’ ALARA Monograph. Interview by Dr Ditty Dokter and Dr Sandra El Gemayel.
3. Rinat Feniger-Schaal about 'Using Drama Therapy to Enhance Maternal Insightfulness and Reduce Children’s Behavior Problems' (20210 Frontiers in Psychology (11): Art. 586630. Interview by Anat Geiger and Professor Phil Jones.
4. Genevieve Smyth about 'Solution-focused brief dramatherapy group work: working with children in mainstream education in Sri-Lanka' (2010) from Arts Therapies in Schools: Research and Practice (ed. Karkou, V.), Jessica Kingsley. Interview by Lujain Faqerah and Dr Emma Ramsden.
5. Lucy Lu and Dr Felice Youen about 'Journey women: Art therapy in a decolonizing framework of practice' (2012) The Arts in Psychotherapy 39: (3) 192-200. Interview by Madeline Montgomery and Professor Phil Jones.
6. Professor Paul Animbom about 'Therapeutic theatre: an experience from a mental health clinic in Yaoundé-Cameroon' (2017) Arts & Health 9:(3) 269-278. Interview by Lanjo Neindefoh and Dawisu Ndzewiyi.
7. Dr Joanna Jaaniste about 'Dramatherapy with Elders and People with Dementia' (2022) Routledge. Interview by Dr Alyson Coleman, Tammy Ivensha, Sam Ruston, Jordan Rapacchi and Dr Chanaphan Thammarut.
8. Dr Angelle Cook, Dr Jason Frydman and Dr Chyela Rowe about 'Understanding school-based drama therapy through the core processes: An analysis of intervention vignettes' (2021) The Arts in Psychotherapy 73: (2) 101766 and 'The drama therapy core processes: A Delphi study establishing a North American perspective’ (2022) The Arts in Psychotherapy 80: (1) 101939. Interview by Dr Alyson Coleman and June VanWeelden.
9. Seminar Recording October 16 2024
Note on Ethics: The seminar interview process was approved by the RCSSD Research Ethics and Integrity Sub-committee (2024) and interviewees signed a consent form. This included consent for the inclusion of the interviews in this respository. All research referred to within the interviews is: from published articles and chapters; within the public domain and was subject to ethical approval within the contexts of the researchers
Their Majesty Drag Performance and Queer Communities in London
No full textThis book explores drag performance in London since 2009 via the pubs, bars and clubs that make LGBTQ+ communities thrive.
It studies the complex relationship between drag performance, LGBTQ+ venues and queer communities. In exploring drag performance, the book develops a greater understanding of the connection between drag performance and queer communities, in particular exploring how drag might facilitate queer communities and offer queer modes of survival and resistance for queer people. Through this, the book describes a contemporary moment in which drag performance is increasingly popular and increasingly important at a time when homophobic and transphobic violence is prevalent, and LGBTQ+ venues are often under threat of closure. Understanding the increased/increasing mainstream popularity of drag, the book examines drag performance that is connected to and resists mainstream attention in order to account for its complexity in London (and beyond).
This book takes the author’s engagement with and love for drag and exerts a critical, political and queer pull in order to develop new terrains of queer studies and queer performance studies
Working it out together: lessons and insights into inclusive research in an arts context
No full textBackground: I'm Me is a creative research project co‐created between York St John
University and Mind the Gap, investigating learning disabled and autistic artists’
understandings of identity, representation and voice.
Methods: In this paper, we use Walmsley and Johnson's criteria for inclusive
research to reflect on the involvement of people with learning disabilities and autism
in I'm Me.
Findings: Researchers need to carefully reflect on who benefits from research. Long‐
term relationships allow genuine allyship and for research design to emerge in an
inclusive manner. Taking the time to develop access and clear structures for
decision‐making can support people with learning disabilities’ participation and
control over research. Part of access is sharing our findings in accessible ways, in this
case, by using plain language and artistic outputs.
Conclusions: Working out how people with learning disabilities and autism should be
involved in research has involved establishing structures, reflecting and responding
to create as much involvement and enable as much decision‐making as possible.
KEYWORDS
collaborative practice, ethics, learning (intellectual) disabilities
Accessible Summary
• I'm Me is an inclusive research project. As an inclusive research project, people
with learning disabilities need to be involved and care about the research. Non‐
learning disabled researchers need to respect people with learning disabilities.
• We tried to make I'm Me inclusive and we learned that:
• Non‐learning disabled people need to build long‐term working relationships with
people with learning disabilities and their support organisations.
• Non‐learning disabled people need to think about if the research is serving
learning disabled people.
• Understanding access needs takes time and energy. Everyone needs to work on
access
Staging difficult pasts: transnational memory, theatres and museums
No full textThis collection of original essays brings together museum, theatre, and performance case studies with a focus on their distinctive and overlapping modes of producing memory for transnational audiences.
Whether this is through narrative, object, embodied encounter or a combination of the three, this volume considers distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies. This book is underpinned by three areas of research enquiry: How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators staging historical narratives of difficult pasts? How might comparisons between theatre and museum practices offer new insights into the role objects play in generating and representing difficult pasts? What points of overlap, comparison, and contrast among these constructions of history and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism, and communism might offer an expanded understanding of difficult pasts in these transnational cultural contexts?
This collection is designed for any scholar of its central disciplines, as well as for those interested in cultural geography, memory studies, and postcolonial theory
Radical accounting: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s data as a framework for historical imagination
No full textThese three time-based interventions transform archival materials to visualize the interconnections of time, space, and bodies across the history of The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The series traces the retention and transmission of embodied knowledge across generations of dancers. It particularizes how the AAADT grew from a small touring company to a global phenomenon. And it helps us understand the importance of Alvin Ailey not only as a choreographer but also as someone who shared a living history of dance with audiences around the world.
The underlying datasets were composed over three years from more than 30,000 documents gathered from archives across the United States. Materials ranged from programs and tour itineraries, to performer diaries and other personal materials, as well as data previously compiled by AAADT. Drawing movement out from static records, the process of intentional data curation and visualization constructs a new framework for historical imagination. Radical accounting brings each artist, performance venue, and choreography into view, foregrounding how dance histories are collective.
The Radical Accounting series consists of:
“Generations of Embodied Knowledge: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Dance Artists, 1958-2023”, Radical Accounting Series 1 of 3, 2024
“Global Architectures: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, City by City and Year by Year, 1958-89”, Radical Accounting Series 2 of 3, 2024
“Repertory as Living Dance Museum: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Performance History, 1958-89”, Radical Accounting Series 3 of 3, 2024
All datasets and underlying visualizations have been created by Moving Data, led by Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench, with project team members Antonio Jiménez-Mavillard and Tia-Monique Uzor
Elisa Carricajo: Piel de Lava and El Pampero Cine in dialogue
No full textActress Elisa Carricajo, a member of the Piel de Lava theatre company here discusses the collaboration between Piel de Lava and El Pampero Cine on Mariano Llinás film 'La flor'. The interview, contextualised by an introduction by Maria Delgado also covers Carricajo's collaboration with Laura Citarella on 'Trenque Lauquen' and the wider context of El Pampero's work and its relation to Buenos Aires independent theatre sector
Radical accounting and the edges of archives: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre's historical data
No full textChapter for the exhibition catalogue related to Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Includes a fold-out of visualizations.
Book synopsis: Alvin Ailey is one of the most celebrated choreographers of the twentieth century. The creator of iconic works such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and Cry, he is widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958 when he was just twenty-seven years old. Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of dancers and choreographers. This expansive volume situates Ailey within a broader social, creative, and cultural context, looking at the artists who influenced and collaborated with him, the spaces and scenes he frequented, the dynamic themes within his dances, and how his vision and work changed contemporary dance.
Essays by artists, scholars, and critics cover topics ranging from the Black church, the South, and the Great Migration to nightclubs, musical influences, and queerness. With more than four hundred images including photographs of works Ailey choreographed, archival materials such as notebooks, sketches, letters, and never-before-published behind-the-scenes photos, and conversations about the legacy of the company with Sylvia Waters, Judith Jamison, and Masazumi Chaya as well as several contemporary dancers and scholars, this study offers an unprecedented full picture of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists and the way his work continues to inspire today’s generation of dancers
The Scale of Research Has Already Changed
No full textContribution to "Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field", with Sissi Liu, Derek Miller, Erin B Mee, Kate Elswit, and Sarah Bay-Cheng
Performing care with refugee youth: solidarity, interruption and precarity
No full textThis thesis aims to challenge representations of unaccompanied minor refugees in media and state asylum processes by showing how they choose to represent themselves instead, when given the opportunity to do so. In fact, self-representation is precisely what the asylum system and public debates on migration systematically deny to refugees. To counter this pervasive silencing, the thesis employs devised performance projects with refugee youth which develop new modes of collective and self-authorship, created with Phosphoros Theatre, a company I co-founded. The first part of the thesis elaborates the methodological basis underpinning the practice, examining the position of refugee actors in performance making, and how their roles as storyteller, witness, collaborator and audience member might be better understood. Through examining the process of making four new performance projects, over Chapters 3-5, the research reveals how performance practice can make explicit and indeed heighten tacit acts of solidarity and self-sustaining modes of care and interdependence already present within refugee youth communities. In combining ideas around participatory performance with discourses of care, the thesis fosters new insight into performance’s capacity to form collective resistances to the dehumanising processes of the asylum system. This analysis supports the thesis’ argument that through participatory and collaborative practices, performance can not only renegotiate the pervading cultural imaginary and its misrepresentation of refugee youth, but establish more empowering processes of performing life narratives which foreground friendship, care, and solidarity. In sum: while the thesis focuses on advancing new understanding and knowledge of participatory practice in theatre and performance, it places theatre in critical dialogue with care ethics and migration studies. Thus, the research generates new thinking about agency and co-authorship when creating performance with those who have experienced displacement and how this reconfigures our understanding of the ethics and politics of creative practice when working with refugee communities