Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice
No full textExplores relationships between sound and theatre, focusing on sound's interdependence and interaction with human performance and drama. Suggesting different ways in which sound may be interpreted to create meaning, it includes key writings on sound design, as well as perspectives from beyond the discipline
Bad Faith and the Actor: Onto-Mimetology From a Satrean Point of View
No full textThe article develops Sartre's remarks on the paradox of the actor in two ways. Firstly, it derives from them an 'existential ontology' of mimetic performance -- an 'onto-mimetology'. Secondly, it uses this reconstruction in order to put pressure on Sartre's analogy of the actor with bad faith. In grasping the problem of acting from a Sartrean perspective, I show that this analogy is not as clear cut as he assumes and that a crucial difference exists between the situation of the theatre and that of bad faith. To master the paradox of his own being I argue the actor's technique indeed utilizes the same 'nonpersuasiveness-of-belief ' thesis identified by Sartre as the condition of possibility for bad faith, yet in the actor's case it need not necessitate the condition of bad faith. In conclusion, I propose that through the notion of play, the actor sheds intriguing light on Sartre's notion of freedom
Central School of Speech & Drama's AHRC Fellows in the Creative and Performing Arts
No full textRecipients of AHRC funding discuss their practice and research in clowning and acting, telematic theatre, and the life and death of objects and puppets.
Creative Fellows:
Jon Davison (JD), clowning and acting
Julian Maynard Smith (JMS), telematic theatre
Nenagh Watson (NW), the life and death of objects and puppets
Chair:
Andy Lavender (AL), Dean of Research, Central School of Speech & Drama
This event was held at Central School of Speech & Drama on 7 October,
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The Mystery of Revival: Performance and Reception of Susanna Centlivre on the Modern Stage
No full text“The Public’s Open to Us All”: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England considers the relationship between British women and various modes of performance in the long eighteenth century. From the moment Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the question of women’s status in the public world became the focus of cultural attention both on and off the stage. In addition to the appearance of the first actresses during this period female playwrights, novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, theatrical managers and entrepreneurs emerged as skillful and often demanding professionals. In this variety of new roles, eighteenth-century women redefined shifting notions of femininity by challenging traditional representations of female subjectivity and contributing to the shaping of eighteenth-century society’s attitudes, tastes, and cultural imagination. Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century studies reflects a heightened interest in fame, the rise of celebrity culture, and new ways of understanding women’s participation as both private individuals and public professionals. What is unique to the body of essays presented here is the authors’ focus on performance as a means of thinking about the ways in which women occupied, negotiated, re-imagined, and challenged the world outside of the traditional domestic realm. The authors employ a range of historical, literary, and theoretical approaches to the connections among women and performance, and in doing so make significant contributions to the fields of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies, theatre history, gender studies, and performance studies
Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late-Stuart Stage
No full textDrawing on feminist cultural materialist theories and historiographies, 'Treading the bawds' analyses the collaboration between actresses Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle and women playwrights such as Aphra Behn and Mary Pix, and traces a line of influence from the time of the first theatres royal to the rebellion that resulted in the creation of a player's co-operative.
Bush-Bailey offers a fresh approach to the history of women, seeing their neglected plays in the context of performance. By combining detailed analysis of selected plays within the broader context of a playhouse managed by its leading actresses, Bush-Bailey challenges the received historical and literary canons, including a radical solution to the mysterious identity of the anonymous playwright 'Ariadne'. It is a story of female collaboration and influence with the spotlight focused on the very public world of women in the commercial business of theatre
S-27
No full textMay is an idealist. She’s fighting for a better world and has sacrificed more than most. So when the old regime is destroyed, she is rewarded with a job as a prison photographer.But as the enemy pass one by one before her unflinching lens - both strange and familiar faces - can they shake her belief in this world she helped to create?
Inspired by the work of the photographer Nhem En, who photographed the inmates of the Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, and by painter Van Nath who painted Pol Pot and was one of the only seven survivors of Tuol Sleng, playwright Sarah Grochala draws on prison records and interviews with both prisoners and Khmer Rouge cadres to create a startling and affecting drama.
S-27 won the first Protect The Human Playwriting Competition in 2007, run by iceandfire in conjunction with Amnesty International and Soho Theatre, and was in production at the Finborough Theatre in June 2009
The Craig Lecture: Michael Levine on the Role of the Designer
No full textCSSD’s Craig Lecture is given in honour of leading 20th Century Modernist Edward Gordon Craig, author of The Art of Theatre, and director of Stanislavski’s epoch-defining production of Hamlet.
The Craig Lecture is presented by the Central School of Speech & Drama in association with the Society for Theatre Research.
[The] inaugural speaker is Canadian theatre designer Michael Levine who talks about the design process and creative collaboration on two very different scales
ORLAN-Vertigo/Self-Touching-You
No full textOver 10 years ago, I first encountered the work of ORLAN in the confined room of a French gallery. The piece was a wall-sized recorded video projection of ORLAN's face surgically altered. It was presented with very little distance allowed between the image and the viewer. The close-ups of ORLAN's face, magnified by the environmental conditions of the video's presentation seemed to locate the viewer within the surgeon's viewpoint.
I found my body and my senses disturbed: sight blurring, going greyish, ears buzzing, I passed out and woke up in the garden of the gallery. As I headed back into the gallery to explore the other rooms and artworks, the temptation to return to ORLAN's piece raised some anxiety. I was confused. Was my anguish originating from empathy with the viewed body under literal deconstruction, with the augmented off-stage presence of the surgeon, with with the ambiguous intersection? the camera's presence was posited as another surgical tool, thereby propelling a blur between the corporeality of ORLAN, of her surgeon, and of her audience. The ambiguous contact at work in the video invested the actual room of the gallery and the viewers. And although I then knew what to expect in form and content, I could not be sure that this blur would not trigger another physiological attack of vertigo. I headed back into the room for a second time.
My interview with ORLAN attempts to explore the textures and implications of what I describe as an effacement of carnal and technical delineations of experience and the critical collapse of internal and external modalities of (re)presentation of the body. This 'dis/connection advanced in the logic of the prosthesis' can be seen as 'the trauma of lost unity': 'leaving the body behind ... anti-human ... apocalyptic'. Yet in ORLAN's work, it is celebrated as what Donna Haraway has called 'fruitful couplings', or '"pleasurably tight couplings" ... erotically charged violations with potent new fusions [where] the cyborg becomes the stage on which are performed contestations about the body boundaries that have often marked class, ethnic and cultural differences'. Indeed, ORLAN herself has said that her work is concerned with 'pleasure and sensuality'. The following discussion strives to clarify the discursive layers at stake behind this sensuous and heuristic logic of dis/connection in ORLAN's work
Dancing Giants and Bigheads: Processions and Puppets in Catalonia
No full textDancing giant puppets, human and beast, and the giant masks/body puppets known in Catalonia as bigheads (capgrossos) are widespread and hugely popular throughout the region. These typical process on the central day of the festa major, or local holiday/sain't day, of each Catalonian town or village. The festes majors usually take place over several days, with one day (often a Saturday) nominated as the day for ritual celebration and speeches. The festes are celebrated at different points over the summer months, with some as early as April and some as late as November. During the day of ritual and speeches, the giant puppets and bigheads process from a pre-designated location through a route which is repeated year after year, to a central square. Here, local dignitaries, officials and prominent citizens make speeches and say pryers in honour of the community, and the festival is toasted