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 Mums and Babies Ensemble: A Manual
No full textThis publication is a performance script which has elements of an instruction manual, invitation, ideas book, collage, template and recipe. It is also a document of a creative process. The Mums and Babies Ensemble was a series of public workshops and events convened by three mums/theatre-makers and their babies. It was prompted by the desire to integrate the structure and chaos of performance-making and motherhood, to create a space that would meet the needs of the parents and babies equally, to capture some memories, to grow a community, and to pass something on eventually. This book is our offering to anyone who has ever been a baby as well as any artistically-minded parents and their newborns.
The Mums and Babies Ensemble was part of an AHRC-funded script development and public engagement project led by Duška Radosavljević
Queer Practice as Research: A Fabulously Messy Business
No full textThis short piece highlights a current spurt in queer researcher–practitioners doing practice as research (PaR) in higher education and explores potential reasons why PaR is so vital, appealing, useful and strategic for queer research. As a starting point, we offer the idea of messiness and messing things up as a way of describing the methods of PaR. Queer mess is to do with asserting the value and pleasure of formations of knowledge that sit outside long-standing institutional hierarchies of research. The latter places what Robin Nelson calls ‘hard knowledge’ above tacit, quotidian, haptic and embodied knowledge. The methodological and philosophical impulses of PaR make space for a range of research methods inherently bound up with the researcher as an individual and the materiality of lived experience within research. Yet, in our experience, although each PaR project is individual, PaR projects follow certain shared modes evolving largely from embodied and heuristic research methods adapted from social sciences, such as (auto)ethnography, participant observation, phenomenology and action research. PaR methodology in theatre and performance is composed of a bricolage of these openly embodied methods, which makes PaR, as an embodied resistance to sanitary boundaries, somewhat queer in academic terms already. It is unsurprising, then, that PaR is so attractive to queer practitioner–researchers bent on queering normative hierarchies of knowledge
Scene in the Dark: Sounding Out 'The Scenographic Turn': Eight Position Statements
No full textThis multi-authored article collects a range of position statements made by leading scholars/practitioners in the fields of theatre aurality, music theatre/opera and sound design. Contributors independently prepared short statements in response to a central provocation – namely, the mooted ‘scenographic turn’ and its implication for theatre sound studies. The article provides snapshots of current opinions about theatre sound design and scenography. It does not advance a single, unified argument but rather outlines some key ways in which sound/music and scenography are operating, and have operated, in theatre, and have been discussed in aesthetic theory. The article ultimately reinforces the importance of attending to sound and scenography as co-constitutive elements, and suggests there is no single or best way of doing this
A Pedagogy of Utopia
No full textA short article exploring the relationship between pedagogy and utopia for the 20th anniversary of Research in Drama Educatio
Research and Practice in Voice Studies: Searching for a Methodology
No full textAs more and more actor training conservatoires become subsumed into university structures there is a growing pressure on practice based teachers of voice to become active researchers. At the same time there is a growing area of scholarly research within Voice Studies. This article examines the shifting patterns of research and practice within Voice Studies and uses, as a case study, the author’s experiences of teaching at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (RCSSD). The author examines tensions between practice and research within a conservatoire setting and explores potential research methodologies in relation to this. The author proposes Practice as Research (PaR) as a suitable methodology for research within practice based Voice Studies and draws on current discourses relating to PaR within Theatre and Performance. The author proposes a model for Voice Studies PaR, which is based on the work of Robin Nelson, and demonstrates how this is being applied within Voice Studies research at RCSSD. The author addresses issues of dissemination of PaR and briefly relates the work in the UK to growing research agendas internationally
Foreword: With One Voice: Disambiguating Sung and Spoken Voices Through a Composer’s Experience
No full textVoice Studies brings together leading international scholars and practitioners, to re-examine what voice is, what voice does, and what we mean by "voice studies" in the process and experience of performance. This dynamic and interdisciplinary publication draws on a broad range of approaches, from composing and voice teaching through to psychoanalysis and philosophy, including:
voice training from the Alexander Technique to practice-as-research;
operatic and extended voices in early baroque and contemporary underwater singing;
voices across cultures, from site-specific choral performance in Kentish mines and Australian sound art, to the laments of Kraho Indians, Korean pansori and Javanese wayang;
voice, embodiment and gender in Robertson’s 1798 production of Phantasmagoria, Cathy Berberian radio show, and Romeo Castellucci’s theatre;
perceiving voice as a composer, listener, or as eavesdropper;
voice, technology and mobile apps.
With contributions spanning six continents, the volume considers the processes of teaching or writing for voice, the performance of voice in theatre, live art, music, and on recordings, and the experience of voice in acoustic perception and research. It concludes with a multifaceted series of short provocations that simply revisit the core question of the whole volume: what is voice studies
Understanding Students Needs in Theatre Practice
No full textMasters level study requires a distinct set of approaches to teaching, learning and assessment, yet there is often little discussion of these issues, or support for staff. This much needed handbook redresses that balance by providing targeted support for those working with academic, professional and applied Masters programmes.
Ideal for newly qualified and experienced staff alike, this book covers everything you need to know to develop effective practices in Masters teaching, including designing, managing and reviewing a curriculum, and delivering effective student support. The text brings together contributions from a wide range of academics who have extensive practical experience of teaching at Masters level nationally and internationally.
Through sharing examples of innovative practice and student-centred learning advice, this book provides thought-provoking support for all those working to develop and enhance Masters programmes
It's The Skin You're Living In
No full textIt’s the Skin You’re Living In is a multi-format film project, that explores and challenges images of climate change. Shot in a series of locations from the islands of Svalbard in the High Arctic to a kitchen in a house in London – via the beaches and headlands of Barra and Vatersay in the Outer Hebrides, the M11 motorway, a dairy farm in Bedfordshire and the outskirts of Hackney and the Olympic Park – the project suggests that climate change isn’t a matter just concerning distant landscapes and threatened animals, but is an ever present part of everyone’s daily lives.
There is a man dressed like a bear; a polar bear. Sometimes he looks like a person dressed like a bear – human, fake – and sometimes he looks like he might actually be a bear – animal, real. Over the course of a fragmented journey from the northern reaches of Europe, through Scotland, to the south of the UK, the bear-skin-costume is dismantled, revealing the man inside the animal.
It’s the Skin You’re Living in is an attempt to make images of climate change that remind us of how profoundly we’re connected to both nature and culture, how we’re all undergoing change, on a journey, searching for home. It’s language is one of broken images, repeated actions and walking, walking, walking; a strange, sad and funny meditation on being human and being animal, lost in a changing world