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
Watching Weimar Dance
No full textWatching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw in the peculiarly turbulent and febrile moment of the Weimar Republic. It closely analyses the reception of various performances, from cabaret to concert dance and experimental theatre, in their own time and place - at home in interwar Germany, on tour, and later returning from exile after World War II. Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archived not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the stage to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to the functioning of human-machine hybrids in an era of increasing technologization. These accounts offer offer limit cases for the body on stage and, in so doing, speak to the preoccupations of the day. Approaching a range of performance artists, including Oskar Schlemmer, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Mary Wigman, Bertolt Brecht, Anita Berber, and the Tiller Girl troupes, through archives of watching, the reception of these performances also revises and complicates understandings of Ausdruckstanz as the representative dance of this moment in Germany. They further reveal how such practices came to be reconfigured and imbued with new significance in the post-war era. By bringing insights from theatre, dance, and performance studies to German cultural studies, and vice versa, Watching Weimar Dance develops a culturally-situated model of watching that not only offers a revisionist narrative, but also demonstrates new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history.
* Brings insights from Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies to Weimar Studies and vice versa to develop a culturally-situated model of watching
* Considers the transnational connections and afterlives of Weimar-era dance, including historicizing the post-World War II usage of Ausdruckstanz
* Offers new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history through, rather than despite, the instabilities of performance
* Based on a collection of rare archival materials, from published cartoons and annotated 1920s scrapbooks to legal case files from a copyright sui
Blast Theory: Intermedial Performance Praxis and the Generative Conditions for Performance Subjectivity
No full textThe work of the British theatre company Blast Theory explores intermedial dramaturgies that this thesis claims can be categorized as radical because they present a generative characteristic. Intermediality, understood here as the impact of analogue and digital technologies in theatrical performance, establishes complex relationships between physical and virtual spaces, structures that create a rich polyphony of multiple temporal orchestrations, and narratives that present a multiplicity of performative arrangements. Intermedial performance, as a performative and experiential event, encompasses a triad of performative interactions between performers, spectators and the media itself executed at and concentrated on the moment of the performance encounter. This research argues that this encounter displays a generative character – a moment at which all the attending performance variables come together in a constant process of performative re-activation thus generating the intermedial performance event.
Within this descriptive parameter, this research claims that recent performance conceptualizations fail to account for the work of Blast Theory. Contemporary performance and liveness debates focus principally on the ontology of performance. So, notwithstanding their differences, performance theorists such as Lavender (2002), Fischer-Lichte (2008), and Schechner (2003), and presentness/presence theorists such as Phelan (1993) and Power (2008) all agree that performance is an ontological, ephemeral, and fleeting event. While there are many valid points in these diverse approaches, they only offer a partial account of the specificities of the work of Blast Theory and, by extent, the intermedial performance event.
This thesis therefore relocates the terms of the debate on a constructivist epistemological basis. In this way, the thesis proposes that an intermedial performance event must be understood beyond the ontological approach by specifically interrogating the conditions of intelligibility; that is, its operative and intelligible architecture of attending elements and the participating subject. The key hypothesis shared is that in introducing a constructivist reading of epistemology, as described by Alfred Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, a new account of intermediality in performance emerges as a radical dramaturgy, incorporating generative aspects, and with this, a unique type of intermedial performance subjectivity is enabled
Towards an Understanding of How London Turkish Cypriot Youth ‘Perform’ Their Diaspora Identities Through Emplacement and Mobility
No full textThe London Turkish Cypriot (LTC) community has been described as ‘invisible’, a community at the point of eradication (Aksoy and Robins 2001). For three generations of LTCs the process of cultural identification has seen an evolution from migration and ‘homeland’ association, to critical displacement, assimilation and different perceptions of what is ‘home’. The growing diversity in cultural identification is further reflected in enhanced access to spatial consumption, mobility and choices of emplacement for its younger generations.
This PhD is driven by practice-as-research. The practice, and therefore line of reasoning, behind this research is an ongoing, organic process that has shifted throughout the course of the thesis. The documentation of the practice-as-research is included in the accompanying DVD and is integral to the findings of this thesis.
The thesis asks how LTC youth ‘perform’ their identities and negotiate a diaspora identity that is in constant flux. The enquiry consists of two main lines of enquiry. First, I am exploring how young people use public spaces through mobility and a ‘mobile’ culture, using mobile initiated technology to further explore the idea of movement and flux. Second, I progress towards a greater understanding of the participating young LTCs’ concept of ‘home’ and what elements of their every day performative behaviour, their environment and relational spaciality construct and support these home-making practices.
The thesis addresses complex issues arising out of auto ethnographic practice-as-research of the LTC community, conducted through applied drama practices with its youth. Issues include identifying young participants’ relationship to cultural space, place making and notions of ‘home’ as part of their identity construction process. The thesis also discusses the ‘fit’ of applied drama as a qualitative research tool within this context and the fluidity of changing technologies that can be, and are at times, used to document examples of practice
Foreword
No full textForeword by Diana Damian Martin
Werner Schwab’s final work, also known as a theatre-extinction comedy, is a brutal, irreverent and bizarrely comical piece about what happens when an emerging stage production is sabotaged by outsiders. Following a dispute with the cast, the director replaces all the actors with pensioners from a nearby home for the elderly. At first compliant and polite, the ‘forgotten and dispossessed’ gradually start to question the director’s authority, leading to a ‘coup d’état’ where the theatre’s cleaning lady is selected as the group’s leader. Not everybody survives the new order.
Werner Schwab was only thirty-five years old when he was found dead in his room following a New Year’s Eve drinking spree in 1994. He was, at the time, the undisputed star of German speaking theatre who effortlessly rose to fame for his unique talent with language and his darkly humorous, confrontational narratives. In only four years, he completed fifteen plays with Dead at Last, At Last No More Air (Endlich tot, endlich keine luftmehr) being his last
Shifting Screens: The Child Performer and Her Audience Revisited in the Digital Age
No full textThis chapter takes a cautiously autobiographical route through the memories of the 1970’s child performer and her audience - then and now. Set against the backdrop of the struggle between Romantic constructions of childhood ‘innocence’ and the lived experience of a professional child performer enacting ‘real’ childhood, the chapter reflects on a personal experience of making Here come the Double Deckers within the television industry for British children in the 1970s and considers conditions for training and working in current legislator advice. The chapter also unpacks the vexed relationship between notions of children at work and play in the creation, commodification and consumption of the child performer through personal memories of her 1970s audienc
Poetic Text in Contemporary Voice Training: A Repositioning
No full textThe article examines the practice of verse text as a key element in spoken voice work in UK conservatoire actor training. It lays out the context for a historical debate that challenges practitioner essentialism and re-positions voice practice in the light of the adoption of a range of critical and reflective approaches. It suggests that the imbrication of a number of critical frames within the practice renders the work more transparent than was previously the case and, thereby, offers a new model of studio practice. The article draws on sources such as neuro-science, literary studies and poetics in triangulation with practice- led case studies from an auto-ethnographic voice practitioner perspective. Previously undocumented conservatoire voice practice is also signalled in the work of two voice coaches, Elizabeth Pursey and Betty Mulcahy. The former is representative of a long tradition of voice practice in the mainstream UK acting conservatoires and the latter is a professional verse reader with a practice that adopts similar values. Their work is situated alongside my own verse speaking practice and in combination, it provides a context for framing existing voice traditions with suggestion about new studio frameworks. Conclusions reached include the notion that transparent concepts of authorship and listener receptivity will enhance studio work and that research-led reflection on voice and verse practice will foster an enhanced perception of the auditory message in live performance more widely
Performing Places
No full textA website for arts practitioners working in communities and interested in exploring ‘place’ as a focus for workshops or performance work
Drama and Performance Studies (2014)
No full textThe omnipresence of digital technologies and social media has affected the recording and dissemination of histories—both personal and institutional—in ways that render the distinctions blurry between what is real, edited, or simulated. In recent years, Drama and Performance Studies have responded to this context by becoming increasingly interested in the challenges faced by, and the forms and possibilities of, dramatizing, performing and documenting histories and understandings of reality. The chapter is divided into two sections: 1. Performance Art, Histories and Institutionalizations; 2. Realistic Theatre and Theatricalized Reality: Experiments with ‘Theatre of the Real’. These two sections focus on work in Drama and Performance Studies published between 2012 and early 2013; one of the texts published in paperback in 2012 originally appeared in hardback in 2011. In the first section, Daniël Ploeger reviews current debates on the historicization..