Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Using Men's Changing Rooms When You Haven't Got a Penis: The Consitutive Potential of Performing Transgendered Masculinities
No full textThis article is a consideration of the ways that transgender performers and queer bodies in performance contribute to the ongoing formation of the category of gender. It explores the relationship between performing transgendered masculinities and the constitutive potential of the law (namely the Gender Recognition Act 2004) surrounding (trans)gender identity. The article looks at examples of performance by transgender performance artists, Jason Barker staged as part of the annual Transfabulous International Festival of Transgender Arts in 2006 and 2007 and Lazlo Pearlman in He Was a Sailor, the Sea Was Inside Him (Drill Hall, London, 2007). Trans and queer performance work is still, for the most part, left out of academic discourse within performance studies. Engaging with trans art and trans artists in relation to shifts in legislation around gender brings very specific readings into the public domain. This record of performance that takes place beyond the mainstream brings transgender and genderqueer performance practice to the fore
Invitation
No full textInvitation is a participatory dance performance inspiring trepidation and comfort. One dancer invites individual audience members onto the stage. First, the performers are figures in a restoration show dancing in this period style, only to return to the stage in their training clothes. In this contemporary section they invite the audience one by one to join them in a simple release-based movement sequence that draws on images of the familial
Towards Theatre Noise
No full textTheatre noise is a conceit, a pairing of words that seemed to tease meaning out of each other. This chapter explains how the formulation of this conceit relates to the broader epistemology of sound, perception and understanding, the phenomenology of theatre audience and a polemical objection to theatre's phobia of noise
Noise, Conceptual Noise and the Potential of Audience Participation
No full textThis chapter is a discussion of actual noise, and the sounds that are manipulated by theatre makers, but also a concept of noise as described by Jacques Attali, amongst others, as "the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for the receiver" (1985, 27). My strategy is to read audience behaviour, both its explicit participation in a performance and its ambient activity in the theatrical event, through the concept of noise, paying particular attention to the noise making and silences of audiences. My aim is to discuss how this may help to develop ideas of the value and purpose of participatory performance, which involves considering the politics of the differentiated roles in theatre events - that is the differences between the behaviour that is proper to audience members and performers - and what the alteration of these roles can mean
Invisible Things: Documentation from a Devising Process
No full textInvisible Things is a book about devising new work for performance.
Taking the research, development and performance of Fevered Sleep's An Infinite Line: Brighton as its focus, Invisible Things is structured as a series of themed chapters intercut with case studies of key elements of the creative process.
Through a combination of text, photographs, drawings, extracts from artist's notebooks, critical commentary and dialogue, Invisible Things offers a rare and personal insight into each stage of a creative journey, revealing all the complexities of a devising process from the point of view of the people at its heart.
The chapters explore areas such as collaboration, dramaturgy, working with animals, developing conceptual frameworks and design. Case studies cover things such as light, sound, structure, organising rehearsals, and roles within a company.
Invisible Things is also an experiment in how to document and remember a live event in another form: how to turn an ephemeral performance into a book
The Usefulness of Mess: Artistry, Improvisation and Decomposition in the Practice of Research in Applied Theatre
No full textThis chapter contends that the awkward positions implicit in applied theatre research and practice provide useful perspectives from which to re-examine relationships between theory, practice and research that underpin wider knowledge-making practices in theatre and performance and the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underpin those practices. Applied theatre’s responsiveness to invitations to practice and research in diverse contexts and its commitment to effecting social change complicates any easy categorisation of ‘method’ of practice and research. The chapter argues that different ways of thinking and doing implicit in applied theatre research and practice may be profoundly reflective of a contemporary moment. This moment is characterised by the contestation of overarching political and/or philosophical explanatory frameworks and evidence of global upheaval that has made the search for responsive, embedded and ethical knowledge practices a pressing imperative. The first part of the chapter provides a philosophical and theoretical positioning using a discussion of two prevalent ‘modes’ of research in applied theatre, namely broadly conventional social science research and reflective practitioner/action research modes. The second part of the chapter explores three case studies that exhibit distinct approaches to applied theatre research but that overlap in very instructive ways in the methodological and epistemological challenges and questions they generate
Exchange: Enhancing Collaborative Models of Learning and Teaching in the Performing Arts with Higher Education Institutes and their Professional Partners
No full textThe Exchange research project explored current and innovative examples of partnerships between universities and cultural industry or community organisations. Looking in particular at internships, apprenticeships and placements, the Exchange research project focused on collaborative learning, teaching and assessment and aimed to outline distinctive models of practice and offer guidelines on how best to make such collaborations work