Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Interview/Show Time
No full text'Present Attempt' (James Bush, Alex Eisenberg, John Pinder) talk about 'SHOW TiME', it's origins, curatorial process and cultural presence. A nomadic platform for new experimental theatre bringing works in progress and polished pieces together, 'SHOW TiME' is now in its second incarnation at Riverside Studios.
'Interview: SHOW TiME' was originally published at dianadamian.com, 4th November 2011
My Voice and Me
No full textOliver Curry was a well known British opera singer. In the early 1980’s he was asked to appear as the lead in a production of ‘Pagliacci.’ He had not prepared the role and to avoid disgrace he pretended to lose his voice. A few months later his singing and speaking voice disappeared all together, never to return. Now he communicates using the same computer speech device as Professor Stephen Hawking while accompanying himself on the piano. In this way he is able to make the voice more expressive.
This 3 minute preview of a 15 minute piece designed for radio is presented by Oliver Curry himself embodied as a musical score. It explores the experience of communicating through an electronic persona that is stubbornly inexpressive. It touches on melodrama, opera, singing, fibbing and ironic operatic disasters while highlighting the absurdity of some post-human technologies.
Most people dislike computer generated speech. Although the latest voices are more natural and realistic than some of the earlier voices, people are able to tell quite quickly that a machine rather than a human is speaking. One radical way of addressing this problem is to put aside the idea of being more realistic and natural and try to capitalize on the affect generated by a manifestly machine-like voice. In this case the effect is enhanced by putting the emotional content into a musical pastiche. It also researches into the nature of melodrama, the relationship between music and text, by illustrating how much musical underscoring may allow even the least sensitive voice-actor possible to maintain a narrative tension
Cuckoos in the Nest: Performing Place, Artists and Excess
No full textLead artist Sarah Cole invited Sally Mackey to research Nest (part of an arts residency in Basildon, United Kingdom, in 2007–08) as part of Mackey’s longer-term inquiry into how we ‘perform’ place. Could Nest practices provoke new insights into the role performance has in articulating or shifting our relationship with place? After explaining the context of the Nest project and articulating what might be meant by ‘a performance of place’, the article deconstructs two themes that emerged during Nest, which are offered as potentially important for future work of this kind. First, evidence suggests a significant response to place from even the most temporary of denizens, the visiting or ‘cuckoo’ artists, implying that even when performing there briefly, strong relationships with a place can develop. Second, an argument is made for ‘excess’ contributing to performing place – for example, arising from transgression, the non-quotidian and boundlessness – that can enhance participants’ affective response to, and memories of, place
Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century
No full textTheatre-Making explores modes of authorship in contemporary theatre seeking to transcend the heritage of binaries from the Twentieth century such as text-based vs. devised theatre, East vs. West, theatre vs. performance - with reference to genealogies though which these categories have been constructed in the English-speaking world
Guided Practices in Facing Danger: Experiences of Teaching Risk
No full textThe central problem of this thesis is how a teacher may engage with risk. I offer a reconsideration of the term and suggest that risk is individual, perceptual and experientially driven. I use a Heideggerian (1962) frame when I suggest that, when taking a risk, a person is potentially encountering existential death. Using my own practice as a trapeze artist, I reveal how risk is manifested for the students I teach - how it can profoundly challenge and unsettle them- and how I as a teacher am charged with ensuring that they are empowered rather than stultified or domesticated by the risk. I call this enacted skill ‘pedagogic tact’.
By combining Jacques Rancière’s notion of Universal Education (1991) with Martin Heidegger’s ontological appreciation of being-towards-death (1962), I propose that what teachers awaken within students is knowledge of the possibility of death and of not-death within certain pedagogic encounters. I cannot know, measure or prove whether this knowledge has been achieved. However, I can document and describe the students’ relationship with the teacher within these moments. This document therefore becomes a description of student-teacher encounters when the teacher attends towards the emancipation of the student. The combination of reflective research methods from David Tripp (1993), Max Van Manen (1990), Della Pollock (Pollock in Phelan and Lane, 1998) and Jonathan Smith et al (2009) provides a means for phenomenological hermeneutic analysis. I have reflected upon my work with five students over the course of five days of trapeze training, extracted what Tripp would call ‘critical incidents’ between teacher and student and considered their meaning (1993:3). This research is a documentation of engaged pedagogy. It is a performative thesis that ruminates upon how I teach aerial work.
There are many findings that seem apparent at the time of writing up. I repetitively circulate around the notion of death, failure, rupture, domestication, entrapment, sacrifice, vulnerability, sobriety and pain as significant elements that describe my work with risk. These concepts are balanced with words such as poetry, liberation, love, strength, glory, resolution and joy. There appears to be a second paradox of teaching that sits alongside and dialogues with the Kantian ‘freedom through coercion’ (1960:699); it is summed up by aerialist and teacher Matilda Leyser in her description of aerial work as ‘strength through vulnerability’ (2007). In order to enable the students’ strength to be challenged, witnessed and supported, there needs to be vulnerability from them, from their carers, from the teacher and from the institution. This vulnerability is not imposed, or bestowed, but is ‘owned’ by the student and teacher in their anxiety and in their choice to, in a Heideggerian sense, comport themselves to that which matters most (Heidegger, 1962). In these moments, anxiety reminds the student that they might die; it also reminds them that they can be strong in the face of possible death. This paradox of vulnerability and strength is synthesised or ‘held’ by the teacher’s tact. The new knowledge that I assert, therefore, is a description and mapping of pedagogic tact. Through this new knowledge, I explore the possibility of becoming a better teacher
The Pyscho and the Physical in Psycho-Physical Actioning
No full textHow the technique of Psycho-physical Actioning can be used successfully both as a text analysis tool and as an actor training method
Above Me the Wide Blue Sky
No full textA man whose memories are carried by birds. A woman whose children have grown with the trees. A family whose garden is the fathomless ocean. If who we are and what we call home is inextricably linked with nature, what happens when everything starts to change?
Staged within a multi-screen film installation, with a soundscape of birdsong, electronic music and a new score for string quartet, Above Me The Wide Blue Sky weaves together images, movement and sound with stories of love, loss and belonging from an ever changing world.
Ali Beale - Production Manager & design
Synne Behrndt - Dramaturg
Samantha Butler - Direction & design
Laura Cubitt - Performer
Will Duke - Projection Design
David Harradine - Direction & design
Jamie McCarthy - Music
Hansjorg Schmidt - Lighting Design
Charles Webber - Sound Design
Beth Hoare-Barnes - Company Stage Manager
Sam Evans - Technical Stage Manager
Dominic Bilkey - AV Programmer
Scientific Advisors
Robin IM Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, University of Oxford
John Pickering, Lecturer in Psychology, University of Warwic
To Set and Not to Set: Destablizing Abstraction in Scenography
No full textThrough exposing details of the dramaturgy of Elfriede Jelinek's Sports Play and of the process of scenographic development for its English language premiere, the text proposes a critical approach to and use of abstraction in stage design. In particular, it emphasizes the expediency of abstraction's suggestive and multiple semiotic potential in achieving ambivalent structures of understanding of sports, media, body cultures and family life. Precisely established across the stage design, the performer's physical relation to it and the text, these structures' ambivalence reflects and accentuates the contradictory and conflictual two-foldness of both Jelinek's and the audience's involvement and responsibility in the previously mentioned domains of life