Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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One Person’s Journey at One School: Preventing Transgender Discrimination
No full textThis article presents a case study of good practice to demonstrate the ways in which some schools are meeting the Public Sector Equality Duty in relation to the support they provide for young people who are expressing gender variance or are identifying as transgender or genderqueer . This article will also identify common examples of practice in schools where discrimination on the basis of a young person’s gender identity occurs. These concrete examples enable a reflection on how procedures, policies and practices relating to the Public Sector Equality Duty, with specific regard to gender reassignment, can impact positively on young people’s individual experiences of being part of an institution’s community. The examples also seek to demonstrate the detrimental impact that poor practice, or a lack of support and intervention can have on young people in school setting
Eerie Prostheses and Kinky Strap-Ons: On the Ableist Ideology of Mori’s Uncanny Valley
No full textIn his paper 'The Uncanny Valley' (1970), Masahiro Mori advises designers to avoid high degrees of human likeness in prosthetic body parts in order not to evoke uncanniness. Building on a discussion of the difference in the commonly experienced uncanniness of 'realistic' looking prosthetic hands and strap-on dildos, this paper argues that Mori's hypothesis and his approach to design are based on an essentialist concept of the human body, which is complicit in the persistence of ableist body ideologies. Reading recent empirical research on the uncanny valley in the context of Jentsch's and Freud's writing, it is suggested that the design of body-related artefacts should promote, rather than avoid, repetitious uncanny experiences. Such a project aims to diminish uncanniness through 'force of habit', thus facilitating the acceptance of a broader variety of bodies as equal
Thinking Critical / Looking Sexy: A Naked Male Body in Performance
No full textTheatre as Voyeurism usefully (re)defines the notion of voyeurism as an 'exchange' between performers and audience members in contemporary theatre and performance. Pleasure (erotic and/or aesthetic) is here privileged as a crucial factor in the way meaning is produced in the encounter with a theatrical work.
George Rodosthenous has drawn together an intriguing selection of authors and the ten chapters make a significant contribution to the overarching critical project of assessing the value of approaching theatre through – and as – voyeurism. The authors focus on a range of case studies including specific theatre artists such as Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, Ann Liv Young, Olivier Dubois and Punchdrunk. This edited volume is therefore relevant to prospective readers interested in various aspects of visual experience in the theatre today
(Ad)Dressing the Female Body
No full textThis visual essay presents a body of work that uses a ‘language of flesh’ and fabric to make explicit the relationship between the body, image and our increasingly material world. Recognizing that our skin is a site of inscription for social and cultural ideals, it considers how these images have been internalized and appropriated onto the body. As the temptation to sculpt our body through clothing and cosmetic surgery becomes increasingly pressing, it is important to pose questions as to how and why we are fashioned. Weaving together feminist concerns, and touching upon (syn)aesthetic discourses to frame and embellish these samples of practice, it is hoped that certain assumptions about the female body are ruptured. Using the site/sight of the body to try and expose these fabrications, I have created these ‘articulate’ costumes to unpick them.
These costumes are critical as they deny their conventional function, instead opening up and celebrating the visceral, living body. These subversions, in undermining typical narratives of fashion and flesh, create a space to (re)present this body; allowing it to speak for itself. (Ad)dressing the female body here refers to material and physical strategies to un/dress; in order to readdress our corporeal and conceptual understanding of the body
Theatre and an Intellectual Concertina: Interview with Simon Stephens
No full textContemporary theatrical productions as diverse in form as experimental performance, new writing, West End drama, musicals and live art demonstrate a recurring fascination with adapting existing works by other artists, writers, filmmakers and stage practitioners. Featuring seventeen interviews with internationally-renowned theatre and performance artists, Theatre and Adaptation provides an exceptionally rich study of the variety of work developed in recent years. First-hand accounts illuminate a diverse range of approaches to stage adaptation, ranging from playwriting to directing, Javanese puppetry to British children's theatre, and feminist performance to Japanese Noh.
The transition of an existing source to the stage is not a smooth one: this collection examines the practices and the complex set of negotiations each work of transition and appropriation involves. Including interviews with Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Handspring Puppet Company, Katie Mitchell, Rimini Protokoll, Elevator Repair Service, Simon Stephens, Ong Keng Sen and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the volume reveals performance's enduring desire to return, rewrite and repeat
Actor Movement: Expression of the Physical Being
No full textActor Movement: Expression of the Physical Being is a textbook and video resource for the working actor, the student and all those who lead and witness movement for the actor, including movement tutors, movement directors and directors.
Great actors are not simply great interpreters of text; they are also great interpreters of movement; able to 'embody' all aspects of a character's life, with body and imagination as their instruments. In their work they are expected to become many bodies, all behaving differently from their own. Actors have to construct, inhabit and offer each character's body, with its multiplicity of known and unknown physical expression.
Featuring:
Over 155 exercises
Four full actor movement processes for creating character
Over 20 illustrations and images
Complementary online footage supporting 26 of the practical elements
Inspiring confidence in the actor to make fully owned physical choices and develop a love of movement, this essential new textbook is ideal for those actors seeking to give to their movement all the complexity and range possible for great acting. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/actor-movement-9781408134412/#sthash.v2OFkU5O.dpu
Work and Shoot: Professional Wrestling and Embodied Politics
No full textThis article describes and conceptualises a period of auto-ethnographic research in which the author trained in the physical performance form of professional wrestling at a small wrestling school in East London (UK). The author describes his experiences of wrestling as a practice of cooperation, improvisation, and care for the other, which counterpoints the outwardly manifested antagonism and violence of the practice. In the argot of wrestling, the creation of the illusion of violence through cooperation is termed ‘work’, which stems from the association of wrestling with the culture of late 19th and early 20th-century carnivals and fairs. As a physical and embodied practice, work demonstrates an ethics of care, trust and openness to the other. The author reads his embodied observations of working against the labour economy of professional wrestling in order to theorise work as a practice of subversion and resistance. While the precarious labour economy of professional wrestling disciplines its workers into adopting certain dangerous and deleterious practices, the cooperative nature of the performance form practices and models a politics of friendship
Live Intermediality: A New Mode of Intermedial Praxis
No full textThis Practice as Research thesis is a contribution to and intervention in the fields of intermedial performance studies and live media practice. Its arguments are formulated through live intermediality, a mode of practice whereby the solo performer activates image, sound, object and body in the presence of and sometimes with the ‘experiencers’ (Nelson 2010), in order to compose a series of shifting intermedial combinations.
The thesis interrogates current discourses around intermediality in performance, the role and actions of the live media performer and the generation of events in intermedial and live media practice, arguing that each can be productively re--viewed through live intermedial practice. In positioning the practice clearly within the various lineages from which it draws and positing the particular ‘knowings’ it produces, live intermediality is formulated as distinctive ‘praxis’ or ‘doing-thinking’ (Nelson 2013). In addition, the specific characteristics of live intermediality – the dualities, discourses and collisions it generates - are presented both as form of new knowledge through practice and employed as the tools to pierce existing thinking from an ‘insider’ perspective.
Working from a Practice as Research methodology, live intermediality is placed in dialogue with resonant conceptual frameworks, such as the work of intermedial theorists, Kattenbelt (2008) and Lavender (2006), new media theorists, Bolter and Grusin (2000), as well as broader paradigms of presence (Power 2008), autopoiesis (Fischer--Lichte 2008, Maturana and Varela 1987) and event (Derrida 1978, Deleuze 2006). The praxis, through its dialogue with such frame works, reconfigures current theories around the activation, operation and experience of intermediality in live media forms. In addition, through its distinctive features and the ‘knowings’ they generate, live intermediality is proposed as new mode of praxis within these fields
Integrative Performance: Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer
No full textIntegrative Performance serves a crucial need of 21st-century performers by providing a transdisciplinary approach to training. Its radical new take on performance practice is designed for a climate that increasingly requires fully rounded artists. The book critiques and interrogates key current practices and offers a proven alternative to the idea that rigorous and effective training must separate the disciplines into discrete categories of acting, singing, and dance.
Experience Bryon’s Integrative Performance Practice is a way of working that will profoundly shift how performers engage with their training, conditioning and performance disciplines. It synthesizes the various elements of performance work in order to empower the performer as they practice across disciplines within any genre, style or aesthetic.
Theory and practice are balanced throughout, using:
Regular box-outs, introducing the work's theoretical underpinnings through quotes, case studies and critical interjections.
A full program of exercises ranging from training of specific muscle groups, through working with text, to more subtle structures for integrative awareness and presence.
This book is the result of over twenty years of practice and research working with interdisciplinary artists across the world to produce a training that fully prepares performers for the demands of contemporary performance and all its somatic, emotive and vocal possibilities