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
Spain: Engaging with 'La Crisis' Through Theatre
No full textIn depth production reviews of Juan Carlos Rubio’s Las heridas del viento (London’s Courtyard Theatre, 2015), Federico García at the Grec Festival (2015), Alberto Conejero’s La piedra oscura (Centro Dramático Nacional, 2015), Atchúusss! (Madrid’s Latina theatre, 2015)
Playing With Time: Gay Intergenerational Performance Work and the Productive Possibilities of Queer Temporalities
No full textThis article examines the tendencies of LGBT intergenerational theater projects. By engaging with ideas of queer time, temporal drag, and the pervasive heteronormative imagery of heritability and inheritance, this article explores the possibility that LGBT intergenerational projects may generate some of the problems they aim to challenge. Through the lens of queer time, the article describes the normativity generated in LGBT intergenerational theater projects as a form of restrictive interpellation. The article explores the temporal complexities at play in such theater productions as The Front Room, a specific LGBT intergenerational theater project performed in the United Kingdom in 2011. The article concludes by noting some ways in which intergenerational theater projects might seek to work through the embodiment of the historical quotidian as a mode of resistance to normativity’s recirculation
That Lip-Syncing Feeling: Drag Performance as Digging in the Past
No full textThis chapter starts with a curious observation: given that drag queens are often known for their quick acidic wit, it is puzzling why many of them give so much stage time to other people’s voices through lip-synching. The discussion that follows looks at drag as a queer performance form, rather than as an activity that exemplifies theorising around gender performativity. The chapter is interested in seeing drag, in part, as a manifestation of a voice and channel to the past. Of course, the gender aspect of drag is crucial to its functioning but here a slightly different journey is taken: one that looks at what drag does, enacts or brings about without a singular focus on gender. Rather this discussion examines drag form as a material effort in the making of local community through a performance practice that is commingled with popular culture and — apparently — strangely de-voiced. In particular, the chapter will focus on lip-synching as a key technique in drag’s dramaturgical toolkit, proposing that drag performance in specific locations serves to communicate or exchange historical material related to local LGBTQ communities without recourse to heteronormative structures of heritability. Importantly, the chapter also explores the practices of performers via a particular drag queen, Meth, who stands as an exemplar of how performers develop their lip-synch skills and put them to use in performance
Through the Looking Glass: Dimensions of Reflection in the Art Therapies
No full textArts Therapies and the Intelligence of Feeling reflects the theme of the September 2011 ECArTE conference held in Luca, Italy. 'Intelligence' has come a long was since Binet: the brain's autonomous capacity for adaptation is now seen not as a single but as a multi-dimensional capability (Howard Gardner, 1983), and is understood to include emotions as well as mental reasoning (Daniel Goleman, 1995). If the arts therapies can claim to work with the intelligence of feeling the the prospect of an intelligible Method might be within reach. The present volumes include contributions from therapy professionals from seven different countries
Towards an Ecological Performance Aesthetic for the Bio-Urban: A Non-Anthropocentric Theory
No full textAs current precarious ecological conditions require urgent and multi-scalar responses, performance has an opportunity to creatively respond to the ecological situation, opening up new ways of thinking and engaging the public’s imagination. Problematising differentiating practices that divide humans from ‘nature’, I suggest performance may highlight the interconnectedness of humans and the more-than-human world by theorising, revealing and critiquing ecological relationships. My research into an ecological performance aesthetic takes up this opportunity and conceives of new ways of critically thinking about performance. I engage a range of ecological philosophy, combined with ecodramaturgical analysis of performance, to theorise the intersection of performance and ecology. Ecodramaturgy (May 2010) combines ecocritical and applied approaches to performance with ecological ways of performance-making, and represents a critical extension to the discipline of performance studies.
Drawing on the ecomaterialism of Bennett (2010), Latour (2004), Alaimo (2013) and Barad (2012), I theorise ‘nature’ as a set of interconnected relationships, which disrupts the binaries between urban/nature, nature/culture, human/nonhuman. I coin the neologism the bio-urban to reflect the vibrancy and material agency of ecological relationships in urban settings. The focus on urban-based practice resists the rural bias present in much ecological writing (Harvey 1993b) and addresses a gap in scholarship around urban ecology in relation to performance. This research centres on a wide variety of illustrative, broadly site-based performance events, including urban gardening performances (and my own practice), walking and cycling performances, installation, live art, theatre pieces and work in places such as streets, mountains, (urban) meadows, cemeteries and rivers. I consider the way in which performance engages with the world, through the interrelated and overlapping discourses of postcolonial ecology, human geography and urban ecology.
An ecological performance aesthetic informs modes of practice, presentation and reception, within current ecological conditions. From the provocation of the bio-urban, I theorise immersion and ‘environmental participation’, drawing on the corporeality of our relationship to the space around us, following ecological phenomenology. I then examine oikos as (earthy or planetary) home and consider it in relation to dwelling, suggesting that ecological performance opens up a space for critiquing these ideas. The complex relationship between the local and global is characterised in performance through eco-cosmopolitanism (Heise 2008). Finally, I suggest a non-anthropocentric paradigm for performance, one that employs an ‘ecological anthropomorphism’ that accounts for the material agency of the more-than- human, as well as the human as a geophysical force (Chakrabarty 2012). The aim of the research is to articulate an ecological performance aesthetic, extending and developing the field of performance and ecology
