Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Auditory hallucinations in non-psychotic disorders – an analytical psychological perspective
No full textAlthough hallucinations are a feature of psychosis, they can present in non-psychotic disorders and may occur in non-pathological states. Jung argues that unconscious complexes underpin hallucinations and further observes that some of the symptoms of ‘hysteric' patients – including hallucinations – were also common amongst patients with schizophrenia. However, the outward presentation of symptoms was markedly different for each patient group. Jung mobilises his complex theory to explain this difference. We argue that Jung’s understanding of hallucinations applies to contemporary healthcare; it frames how hallucinations may manifest in multiple conditions, not just psychosis. This brief report discusses Jung’s theories and their continued veracity in contemporary contexts
Muscle works: physical culture and the performance of masculinity
No full textMen’s fitness as a performance—from nineteenth-century theatrical exhibitions to health and wellness practices today
This book recounts the story of fitness culture from its beginnings as spectacles of strongmen, weightlifters, acrobats, and wrestlers to its legitimization in the twentieth-century in the form of competitive sports and health and wellness practices. Broderick D. V. Chow shows how these modes of display contribute to the construction and deconstruction of definitions of masculinity.
Attending to its theatrical origins, Chow argues for a more nuanced understanding of fitness culture, one informed by the legacies of self-described Strongest Man in the World Eugen Sandow and the history of fakery in strongman performance; the philosophy of weightlifter George Hackenschmidt and the performances of martial artist Bruce Lee; and the intersections of fatigue, resistance training, and whiteness. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity moves beyond the gym and across the archive, working out techniques, poses, and performances to consider how, as gendered subjects, we inhabit and make worlds through our bodies
Lip-synching for (some) life: researching queer/camp bodies through practice-based methods
No full textThis chapter addresses how the queer method of lip-synch performance has been utilised as an embodied practice-as-research method for researching popular camp bodies of the past; such as Kenneth Williams, Larry Grayson and Frankie Howerd. As a self-reflective approach to embodied queer historiography, the lip-synch method enables a way to articulate complex queer subjectivities, such as camp, that are often expressed as an aesthetic of artifice and subject of frivolity (Sontag, 1964). By resisting such phobic tropes that view camp as insipid and artificial, this chapter address how I used lip-synching as a form of reenactment by way of three bodily markers: the mouth, gesture and interaction with objects. This chapter presents an overview of these markers and discusses how such a fragmentary approach to embodiment and historiography builds upon established approaches to theories cross-historical connections of queerness (Dinshaw, 1999; Freeman, 2010)
Crisis theatre and the living newspaper
No full textCrisis Theatre and The Living Newspapers traces a history of
the living newspaper as a theatre of crisis from Soviet Russia (1910s),
through the Federal Theatre Project of the Great Depression in America (1930s), to Augusto Boal’s teatro jornal in Brazil (1970s), and its resonance with documentary forms deployed in the final years of
apartheid in South Africa (1990s), up until the present day in the UK
(2020s). Across this Element, the authors are interested in what
a transnational and transhistorical examination of the living newspaper through the lens of crisis reveals about the ways in which theatre can intervene in our collective social, economic and political life. By holding these diverse examples together, the authors assert the Living Newspaper as a form of Crisis Theatr
Clean Break Theatre Company
No full textClean Break is a women-only theatre company that grew out of a prisoner-led drama workshop that took place between 1977-1979 in HMP Askham Grange. In addition to its considerable impact on criminalised women and public understandings of the socio-political impact of their experiences, Clean Break has had a significant but under-acknowledged impact on contemporary British theatre. We examine three areas of Clean Break’s theatre making history and organisational practices: its origin stories; its education and engagement work; and how the company’s practices have, across four decades, ‘then’ and ‘now’, adapted to directly intervene in carceral society. By highlighting Clean Break’s distinct, activist theatre making processes and practices, the book makes explicit the genealogical connections of the company’s past work and its impacts on contemporary feminist theatre practices
Applied theatre: research-based theatre, or theatre-based research? exploring the possibilities of finding social, spatial, and cognitive justice in informal housing settlements in India, or tales from the banyan tree
No full textThis article draws on a twenty-year relationship of short-term interventions with Dalit communities living in informal settlements, sub-cities and urban villages in Mumbai, that have sought to create public theatre events based on research by and with communities that celebrate, problematise and interrogate sustainable urban living. In looking back over the developments and changes to our working methods in Mumbai, I explore how the projects priorities the roles of the community as both researchers and artists. I consider where a specific applied theatre project, which focuses on site specific storytelling with Dalit communities in Worli Koliwada and Dharavi, functions on a continuum of interactive, participatory, and emancipatory practice, research and performance. Applied Theatre practices should not and cannot remain static, they need to be constantly reformed and as practitioners and researchers we need to constantly re-examine the ways in which we work. This chapter poses two central questions: firstly, can this long-term partnership between practitioners, researchers and artists from the UK and India working with community members genuinely be a space for co-creating knowledge and theatre? And secondly, if so, is this Theatre-based Research or Research Based Theatre? I interrogate Applied Theatre’s potential to create a space of cognitive justice, which must be the next step for applied theatre, along-side its more widely accepted aims of searching for social and spatial justice and which places the community as both artists and researchers. The Dalit social reality is one of oppression, based on three axes: social, economic and gender. The chapter explores how working as co-researchers and the public performance of their stories has been a form of ‘active citizenship’ for these participants and is a key part of their strategy in their demand for policy changes. In looking forward I ask how working in international partnerships with community members can promote cognitive justice and go beyond a merely participatory practice. I consider why it is vital for the field that applied theatre practice includes partners from both the global south and north working together to co-create knowledge, new methods of practice to ensure an applied theatre knowledge democracy. In doing so I will discuss if and how this work might be considered to be Theatre-based Research
Towards a new humanity: Belonging, embodiment, and Quantum Black creative geographies
No full text"In her paper, Quantum Black creative geographies: embodiment, coherence and transcendence in a time of climate crisis, Professor Noxolo explores the qualities of quantum mechanics. She reflects on how the application of its principles to Black Geographies unearths complex entanglements and uncertainty across cultures and geographies while also enabling a reimagining of time. Noxolo’s drawing together of quantum coherence with Black creative geographies is thought-provoking to me as a dance scholar and artist who thinks about creative Black geographies from embodied performance epistemologies. In particular, I am interested in how Africanist dance is a vehicle for creating and interrogating Black worldmaking. Here, in my brief response to Noxolo’s paper, I offer two provocations that resonate closely with my work. First, I add quantum coherence to my extended notion of Kamau E. Brathwaite’s (1993) Tidalectics to think about how my conceptualization shifts through the subatomic. Secondly, I consider how the process of quantum mechanics impacts transcendental lines of flight and fugitivity perceived through a dancer’s embodiment. To conclude, I reflect on the significance of connecting with our bodies as an additional consideration of quantum mechanics in the context of liberatory strategies for Black life and humanity within our already climate-altered world.
BLAME and BAME
No full textThis book addresses the prejudices that emerged out of the collision of two pandemics: COVID-19 and racism.
Offering a snapshot of experiences through counter storytelling and micro narratives, this collection assesses the racialised responses to the pandemic and investigates acts of discrimination that have occurred within social, political and historical contexts.
Capturing the divisive discourses which have dominated this contemporary moment, this is a unique and creative resource that shows how structural racism continues to operate insidiously, offering invaluable insights for policy, practice and critical race and ethnic studies
The People's Kitchen
No full textThe People’s Kitchen was hosted in Rainham, a small town in the east of London in March 2023. It brought together local people, community groups and organisations to cook, eat and converse together.
The project brought together local people, community groups, and organisations to serve over 500 bowls of locally produced soup and provided a space to engage in meaningful conversations about the things that nurture us. The project was more than just a pop-up food kitchen. It offered a space of hope and togetherness where different groups and demographics could co-inhabit the environment. The People’s Kitchen provided a cultural hub right on the town’s high street and helped pose new questions about the role of arts spaces beyond that of galleries, theatres, museums, and libraries.
Through an open-call, over 30 interested local people and activists joined a workshop in Rainham to imagine and discuss the project together, building local connections between councillors, food banks, religious organisations, and youth services. From this, we devised how the project would look, what events we could stage and asked what does Rainham need?
One of the unique aspects of The People’s Kitchen was that it enabled all different groups to exist within the same art experience. The project examined how material design might foster the conditions to bring different group of people together. The design brief was to provide a sense of quality and care, mixing class-based references - create something that was both humble and inviting.
The People’s Kitchen featured pop-up events, including a young people’s dinner, where teenagers from the Rainham Royals youth group worked with chef Megha Kochhar Arora from CREM Kitchen to serve up a tasty meal for adults. The young people did the cooking and the hosting, inviting their adult guests to question where they saw themselves in five years. The role reversal was designed to offer a sense of empowerment for the young people.
A special event was also held where members of the public could nominate someone incredible to attend a special Mindful, Food, and Art evening hosted by Bluerskies community producers Charlotte Trower and Lucy McDonald.
The People’s Kitchen is an example of how art can bring people together to inspire social change and promote environmental and social justice. The project encouraged attendees to slow down, connect with each other, and imagine new futures. The success of The People’s Kitchen demonstrates the power of community-led initiatives and the importance of bringing people together to create new types of art spaces in the heart of our communities and how we have better public conversation.
The People’s Kitchen was a space where people from different socio-economic backgrounds, including those who were homeless, were able to find physical nourishment, while families were able to stop and take a moment out, and commuters returning from work offered a space to decompress. The project explored questions about co-creation and food ecologies within community contexts, showing the potential of art to bring people together and spark social change
Tidalectic unmapping and the performance of African diasporic imagination in the repertory of Katherine Dunham
No full textThis paper foregrounds imagination to consider how African Diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite’s (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African Diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of Diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry the paper traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham’s archive from 1937-1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity and as someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure