Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Women on Screen
No full textAfter seeing countless talented women have their ambitions thwarted, Amanda Brennan asks what can be done to achieve gender equality in film and TV
The Path is Place: Skateboarding, Graffiti and Performances of Place
No full textThis article reflects on two performances of place involving graffiti and skateboarding: the first looks at a graffiti intervention by SKL0, an urban artist in Singapore, and the second examines the Long Live Southbank (LLSB) campaign to resist the relocation of Southbank's Undercroft, an appropriated skate space in London. SKL0 and LLSB have galvanised significant public support, suggesting that it is possible to negotiate the aesthetics of a city (in the case of SKL0) and the visibility of (sub)cultures within publicly funded cultural institutions at Southbank Centre. Extending Michel de Certeau's concept of walking as a speech act that articulates possible paths of movement across a landscape, the article suggests that these performances of place demonstrate the possibility of outcomes initially perceived as impossible
A Close Friendship Among the Debris. Acting, Breath and Truth in Jasmin Vardimon's Justitia
No full text[BOOK ABSTRACT]
This book offers a series of compelling responses to the Jasmin Vardimon Company’s production of Justitia, a multilayered, multimedia dance theater piece. Through an innovative, visually annotated text, which includes the original script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the book attempts to record the experience of the performance. Also included are nine critical responses from scholars and theatrical practitioners who consider the performance through lenses relating to time, collaboration, writing, confession, and the law
British Movement Directors
No full textA movement director works as part of a creative team on the physical life of a production. That might entail creating a movement language or choreography or movement training with actors. Movement direction is a vibrant, ever-growing practice in British theatre, as well as in opera and film. This practice has a longstanding connection to Lecoq's pedagogy, and this chapter traces a lineage of movement direction from an early Lecoq-trained practitioner, Claude Chagrin, to the present -day practices of four movement directors. They also trained at the Lecoq School in Paris and are currently movement directing in a range of mainstream theatre settings in Britain. I will be referring to conversations with Joseph Alford, Joyce Henderson, Toby Sedgwick, and to my own movement direction practice.
When researching the roots of movement direction in 2009, I stumbled across a set of rehearsal photographs for the 1964 production of 'Royal Hunt of the Sun' in the archives at the National Theatre. They show a movement person, Claude Chagrin, on the rehearsal room floor demonstrating movements that look like positions of 'le passer', capturing the diagonally extended arms of actors wielding imaginary poles. The next image is of actors with knees bent, centre lowered in a wide-legged stance. Perhaps because of my own background with Lecoq, I was able to recognise across five decades a developing movement language, anchored in the Lecoq training, on the rehearsal floor os a seminal National Theatre production. I will draw on several evidences as I look at Chagrin's work, but I will first start by briefly setting the context for postwar movement direction and then use an analysis of current practices to illustrate some commonalities between movement directors who share Lecoq in their training
Between Theatre and Photography, Between Photography and Performance, Between Performance and Theatre
No full textThere is no certainty that we can even speak of theatre and media, since it can be argued that theatre is itself a medium, an instance of media; certainly if we follow McLuhan’s broad notion of media as ‘extensions’, we must consider theatre an apparatus, a means of communication, of distribution, of circulation, one needing to be defined in terms of its particularities in relation to and comparison with other forms of media.
But theatre seems at odds with our habitual understandings of a medium, through its hybrid constitution as much as by way of the limitations of its setup. Certainly, theatre can seem distant from the notion of ‘the media’ (referring to new technologies and/or the ‘mass media’). Indeed, much discussion around theatre in relation to media is organised around the encounter between the two, or it plots theatre’s shifts (for the better or for the worse) in contact with (new) technologies. Frequently, scholars are concerned with how theatre and performance adapt themselves (by way of appropriation or resistance) when met with media.
In scholarship, the staging of an opposition between theatre and media can tend to summon theatre as an emblem of the pre-technological, an old form and practice facing the new. With the intention of avoiding such a theatre-‘centrism’, although with little hope of succeeding, I seek here to examine two examples of theatre/performance and photography
Actioning and How To Do It
No full textActioning – and How to Do It is the indispensable companion to a vital component in every actor’s toolkit.
Actioning is one of the most widely used rehearsal techniques for actors. It helps bring clarity to every moment or thought in the text, energising rehearsals and bringing performances to life.
Actioning will enable you to discover and unlock newfound energy, range, variety and clarity of body and voice, by:
Interrogating the text and making initial action verb choices
Playing your chosen actions, both verbally and physically
Maintaining an imaginative and emotional connection with each moment
Signposting each thought to your scene partner
From the publishers of the internationally successful Actions: The Actors’ Thesaurus, this is the first in-depth exploration of Actioning for student actors, those who train them, and professionals working in the industry, whether they’re brand new to the technique or have been practising it for years.
This step-by-step guide draws on concepts from Stanislavsky, using sample scenes from classic plays such as The Seagull and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as contemporary pieces, and is filled with exercises to demonstrate the technique at work
Theatre in the Forest of Things and Signs
No full textThis article uses the experience of a piece of immersive theatre (Coney’s Early Days of a Better Nation) to inform a discussion of spectatorship in works that demand performances from audience members. It asks how we value spectatorship where the spectator-participant and their actions are placed at the centre of the performance. Initially proposing that a model of body-based intersubjectivity is appropriate to understand how meaning arises in these performances, it goes on to examine how the challenge to participatory performance that is given in Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ can be used to discuss the value of participation. Rancière’s contention that reforms of audience-performer relationship are ‘stultifying’ rather than emancipatory is read as a kind of negative intersubjectivity. The importance of the independent will to the process of subjectivation is seen as key to an emancipatory participatory spectatorship