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
'The Biggest Youth Festival on the Planet': A year in the life of the National Theatre Connections Project.
No full textPolitics of City and Nation: Tragic Politics and the Incommunicable Experience
No full textThe chapter examines the nature of 'tragic experience' in modern theatre from Arthur Miller to Heiner Müller, arguing that while the modern stage eschewed the classical tradition of tragic drama, what it nonetheless discovered, through the ghastly lessons of the twentieth-century, was a new kind of tragic experience that it made thematic: the death of experience itself - where tragedy permeates the very essence of everyday living
Hopeful Acts in Troubled Times: Thinking as Interruption and the Poetics of Nonconforming Criticism
No full textIn his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’ (1926), Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique.
Negotiating conflicts that shape a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment. What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance.
In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ (2015, 13) under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake (ibid.
Postcolonialism and Hybridity in British Puppetry
No full textPuppetry is, in its essence, a hybrid of the visual and performing arts; hybrid in its construction and conception: alive and not-alive; anthropomorphic but not human; straddling worlds, cultures and identities. This article, dedicated to the late Margareta Niculescu, former director of the Romanian company Țăndărică and the first director of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, in France, explores some of the ways in which postcolonial questions emerge in contemporary British puppetry
Michael Chekhov: Directing an Actors' Theatre
No full textThis chapter argues that Michael Chekhov's work is incompletely understood unless we consider him as both an actor and a director and as a theorist not only of acting but of theatre more widely. It offers an overview of his directorial work and analyses his directorial process, from which it derives some exercises for use in the rehearsal room
Nine Questions on Teaching Directing for Puppetry: a Trans-cripting Recreation of a Dialogue
No full textThis article discusses, through a dialogue between puppeteers, teachers and academics Cariad Astles and Mario Piragibe, processes and questions for training puppet theatre directors
The Verbatim Formula: Caring for Care Leavers in the Neoliberal University
No full textBritish universities have historically excluded sections of society from entering and from participating in decision-making. The neoliberal university has entrenched these inequalities in insidious ways that are resistant to change. By drawing on critical feminisms, we delineate a politics of careful solidarity that can mitigate the erasure of marginalised young people in university governance structures. We outline a participatory methodology that uses arts-based evaluation to provide channels for democratic discussion and listening. Our methodology centres the voices of young people with an experience of the care system – a cohort who are heavily excluded, and whose knowledge is stigmatised
“Dance Touring and Embodied Data: Some Approaches to Katherine Dunham’s Movement on the Move.”
No full textThis article represents the first stage of a larger research project that considers the kinds of questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for the study of dance in a historical context. We pursue this work through the exemplary case study of mid-century African American choreographer Katherine Dunham and the global legacy of her international touring. In this short piece, we focus on a dataset we manually curated to document Dunham’s location nearly every day for the four years between January 1st, 1950 and December 31st, 1953. We use this daily itinerary to consider patterns of her travel and their implications, engaging with dance both as a mode of thinking about archives of moving bodies, and as an object of historical study
Stage Women 1900-50: Female Theatre Workers and Professional Practice
No full texthis book presents a collection of cutting-edge historical and cultural essays in the field of women, theatre and performance. The chapters explore women's networks of professional practice in the theatre and performance industries between 1900 and 1950, with a focus on women's sense and experience of professional agency in an industry largely controlled by men. The book is divided into two sections: 'Female theatre workers in the social and theatrical realm' looks at the relationship between women's work - on and off stage - and autobiography, activism, technique, touring, education and the law. 'Women and popular performance' focuses on the careers of individual artists, once household names, including Lily Brayton, Ellen Terry, radio star Mabel Constanduros and Oscar-winning film star Margaret Rutherford