Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Experiencing the Historical Record: A Psychosocial/Psychodynamic Method for Working with Archival Materials
No full textIn this chapter, we propose that an acknowledgement of subjectivity in archival work cannot ignore the ways in which our psychology, experiences, and emotional reactions shape, in productive ways, our engagement with specific types of archival material. The formulation of our interdisciplinary method involves contributions from records specialists at The National Archives, mental health professionals, academics, and participants as co-researchers. Combining autoethnographic and arts-based methods, our group work is conducted within the parameters of a psychotherapeutically-contained space aimed at creating opportunities for reflection that honour the place of emotions in archival research. Practices and activities are mobilised to help process reactions to archival documents that capture past traumas. Responses have included rage, grief, memories of both individual and collective trauma, and embodied reactions. The theories of psychoanalysis are mobilized – under the supervision of psychotherapists and psychosocial researchers – to facilitate understanding and frame tentative interpretations. Such an interdisciplinary method is not without its challenges – including the added value of such an approach when compared to other archival practices – and these will be discussed further. In developing this method, our intention is not only to create greater space for the place of emotions in archival research, but to break down barriers preventing more robust public engagement while offering to archive professionals and historians tools and theoretical frameworks to enrich the histories they tell. This could include the mobilisation of arts-based methods to give voice to the emotions encountered and the development of genosociograms to complement and deepen an understanding of the researcher’s motivations and journey into archival materials
Theatre after Covid: innovation or path dependence?
No full textIn early March 2020 the most severe crisis to affect the performing arts since the Second World War took hold. By the middle of March the world was in the grip of unprecedented lockdowns to prevent the spread of the Corona virus Sars-Cov-2 and its associated illness Covid-19. Most theatres and indeed cultural venues of any kind were closed throughout 2020 and were subjected to intermittent closure and restrictions well into autumn 2021. How can we as theatre scholars approach this once-in-a-century event? Crises of this magnitude could be expected to cause both institutional and aesthetic transformations on a significant scale. In the depths of lockdown this seemed to be true as theatre artists, administrators and scholars embarked on a process of introspection regarding the future of their medium.
To address these questions the authors present results from a research project that has been conducted in the UK at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in collaboration with a project in Germany. The project investigated, among other questions, whether the pandemic produced artistic and institutional innovation on a scale that was to be expected. And secondly, did the effects of the pandemic play out differently in the heterogeneous institutional frameworks of German-speaking and UK theatre? The former with its high level of public funding, the latter with a theatre system that is much more ‘sensitive’ to market forces
The body is not (only) a metaphor: rethinking embodiment in the digital humanities
No full textBook synopsis: A cutting-edge view of the digital humanities at a time of global pandemic, catastrophe, and uncertainty
Where do the digital humanities stand in 2023? Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 presents a state-of-the-field vision of digital humanities amid rising social, political, economic, and environmental crises; a global pandemic; and the deepening of austerity regimes in U.S. higher education. Providing a look not just at where DH stands but also where it is going, this fourth volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series features both established scholars and emerging voices pushing the field's boundaries, asking thorny questions, and providing space for practitioners to bring to the fore their research and their hopes for future directions in the field. Carrying forward the themes of political and social engagement present in the series throughout, it includes crucial contributions to the field-from a vital forum centered on the voices of Black women scholars, manifestos from feminist and Latinx perspectives on data and DH, and a consideration of Indigenous data and artificial intelligence, to essays that range across topics such as the relation of DH to critical race theory, capital, and accessibility
GR@PQ23: A RARE GATHERING
No full textThis publication was realised in the context of the Hellenic national participation in the Prague Quadrennial 2023, organised by the Athens Epidaurus Festival and funded by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports
Kings, queens, monsters and things: digital drag performance and queer moves in artificial intelligence (AI)
No full textThe Zizi Project is a series of connected art and performance pieces created by artist Jake Elwes in collaboration with Me The Drag Queen and members of London’s drag performance scene. The works – currently Zizi: Queering the Dataset (2019), Zizi & Me (2020; ongoing), and The Zizi Show (2020) – sit at the intersection of drag performance and Artificial Intelligence (AI), playing with and queering facial recognition software, deepfake technologies, and Machine Learning algorithms. I consider The Zizi Project as an example of work at the vanguard of an emergent field of queer AI performance. The project intervenes in complex conversations surrounding AI and Machine Learning, including the lack of representation of diverse identities and communities in datasets used to train these systems and the complexity of creating datasets which include queer and trans bodies and identities. However, in aiming to use drag performance to expose and demystify these complex technological systems to audiences, I propose that queerer forms of art making and performance emerge that push at the boundaries of both drag and the technologies used. Ultimately, The Zizi Project articulates drag and queer futures where the digital and the actual interact in increasingly complex ways to explore notions of diversity, inclusion, and access that speak to fundamental questions of what counts as drag, what counts as queer, and, indeed, what count as human
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
Voice Praxis: Social Positionality in UK Spoken Word Practice
No full textThe work of the practitioner voice educator has changed dramatically over the past decade. Inclusive and accessible education and training requirements have made new paradigms essential. It is no longer assumed in UK higher education and conservatory actor training contexts that the student experience will be subordinated to the pedagogical leadership of the tutor. To the contrary. Pedagogical design has increasingly engaged with the idea of re-situating the student/tutor learning dynamic to give value to multiple positions of knowledge in the training studio and to reflect diverse student experiences around race, class, gender, sexuality, and neurodiversity. The work to expose and reflect upon the impact of the re-positioned personal and professional knowledge of both trainer and student in the voice studio, is the focus of this article. The author argues that student interests are best served by practices informed by transparent and intersectional principles of engagement. The author discusses several ways in which to regard the social construction of vocal materiality as a baseline for work in the experiential studio. The account offers a critique of existing voice pedagogy and practice and suggests a theoretical framework by which to develop innovative and socially responsive voice praxis
Felt Dramaturgies of Light
No full textThis chapter outlines how the felt experience of light can be used to craft an atmospheric reception of performance. It develops Juhani Pallasmaa “atmospheric sense” (Pallasmaa 2019, 130) by proposing two dramaturgical conceptions of ‘felt light’ in performance. The chapter outlines felt experience in performance and immersive events in which the audience is central to its reception. The chapter examines the design, production, and audience experience of immersive performance ‘and it all comes down to this… (2012), a 45-min design-led experience without actors. Framed within the flow and construction of aesthetic experience, the author proposes this and that light as a model in which to consider the dramaturgical reception of light in performance. This light accounts for the generalised and often preconscious reception of light, where memories are forged through the fluxes and flows of a body commingling with performance material. That light foregrounds the intentional application and use of light that puncture or stand out from everyday experience
Dancing with Coronaspheres: Expanded Breath Bodies and the Politics of Public Movement in the Age of COVID-19
No full textThis essay develops the concept of the ‘coronasphere’ to grapple with how breath shifts the perceptible extent of the body during a pandemic, and the implications of such a radically altered sense of proximity for the choreography of public movement. Coming into being through an act of perception that is entangled with responsibility to others, the coronasphere is offered as a sensory alternative to fixed-distance models of social distancing approaches to risk, one that overrides the false dichotomy between the seeming stasis of shelter-in-place on the one side, versus ‘freedom’ of movement on the other. Redefining the extent of bodies relationally by the range of their breath has implications for understanding the uneven impacts of COVID-19 in terms of tactile entanglements and the vulnerability to uninvited touch that may violate bodies as individual and impermeable, in particular when the capacity for movement is limited. Ultimately turning to the coherence of such expanded bodies in terms of individual versus communal mobilization through a series of protests, the essay shows how the pandemic can not only reify but challenge the conflation of freedom and mobility, and the sensory ramifications of this in terms of finding new ways to rebuild public life