Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Odd Anonymized Needs: Punchdrunk's Masked Spectator
No full textWhat is the role of the spectator in interactive performance? What is spectatorship in a one-to-one encounter, in the dark, with a performer? What does it mean to be a masked spectator? Punchdrunk takes a peculiar approach to the problem of audience participation, and offers their audiences strange encounters with their work. Spectators are separated and isolated, then released into vast, dark environments; and it is they, not the performers, who are masked. This chapter examines how this intervention into the practice of spectatorship facilitates interaction, and how the mask enables spectators to become performers in ways that might surprise them. It compares this strategy to other contemporary ways of dealing with the failure of theatre to provide an exchange between performer and audience
Theatre Noise Conference
No full textThree days of Performances, Installations, Residencies, Round Table Discussions, Presentations and Workshops
More than an academic conference, Theatre Noise is a diverse collection of events exploring the sound of theatre from performance to the spaces inbetween.
Featuring keynote presentations, artists in residence, electroacoustic, percussive and digital performances, industry workshops and installations, Theatre Noise is an immersive journey into sound
Round Table: Research Organisations for Theatre and Performance.
No full textLeading figures of four major theatre and performance research organisations discuss the impact of the RAE 2008 and current developments in the field
New Theatre Roundtable
No full textDirectors from Battersea Arts Centre, Fuel, and the National Theatre’s Studio discuss their creative principles and how they develop new work
Noise, Memory, Gesture: The Theatre in a Minute's Silence
No full textAt 12 noon on 7 July 2006, London observed a two minute silence to mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on its public transport system. On pavements outside workplaces, in shopping centres and in tube stations, people paused in their journeys, set down their bags, and adopted familiar poses of silent remembrance. A strange thrall descended, to which the urban permadrone, distant sounds of building works and individual locomotive events, formed a distant perimeter. The two minutes passed, but outside my workplace people did not move. The two minutes became five, before people gently moved away. I tried to imagine a piece of silent theatre comprising nothing more than the same sublime, anxious thrill of pause, in which nothing is said, but in which the mundane becomes monumentally strange and yet fond, in which audience becomes performance; in which the body tingles with memory and sound; in which noise and stray thoughts are allowed to be exquisite rather than guilty interruptions.
This thought provided the impetus for a two-year practical investigation of the minute's silence as theatre. This chapter is not about that research, but offers some thoughts derived from it pertinent to the themes of this book. It looks at the minute's silence as a modern ritualised practice of cultural remembrance, and in particular at the ways in which it connects the inner selves of participants, through the energetically inscribed tissue of the body, to the external environment
Theatre Materials Conference
No full textA two day programme of events, including key notes, roundtables, performances and workshops, taking place at the Central School of Speech and Drama
Fresh, honest dialogue that cuts across the conventional barriers between academics, students and industry professionals with guests from around the world, including Anne Bogart, Martin Green and Pamela Howard..
The Some of the Parts: Prosthesis and Function in Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Schlemmer, and Kurt Jooss
No full textThe period during and following World War I in Germany reconceptualized the physical function of bodies to emphasize activity over structure, as visible in the prosthetic appendages worn by amputees returning from war to be reintegrated into society. Such manipulation of the human form is critical to the dramaturgy of the drama and dance works explored here, which deconstructed bodies in order to reconstitute the identity of the performers. This article moves from the engineering of social function in Bertolt Brecht's A Man's a Man, in which a narrative of altered personality is primarily reflected in the dialogue's metaphors of physical damage and reconstitution, to a progressive reliance on the body as a medium of dramaturgy in the manipulation of physical identity in Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet and Kurt Jooss' The Green Table. By considering the shift in medical approaches to prosthesis and the treatment of onstage bodies to reflect the same changing values from multiple vantage points, the culturally and historically specific medium of the body thus offers an opportunity to think of not only medicine and performance together, but also drama and dance in their engagement with the contemporary body
Federico Garcia Lorca
No full textImmortalized in death by The Clash, Pablo Neruda, Salvador Dalí, Dmitri Shostakovich and Lindsay Kemp, Federico García Lorca's spectre haunts both contemporary Spain and the cultural landscape beyond. Institutionalised as of one of the Spanish language’s most resonant dramatists, his plays have functioned as a complex signifier of Spain on the international stage. This innovative study of his plays – ranging from his largely unknown early works to his rural trilogy, considers both their performance histories and the performance indicators encoded within the texts. In delineating how performance has affected the ways in which we approach Lorca’s life as well as his work, this book considers the ways in which his short but eventful life has proved an enduring trope in reading his poetic and dramatic output. Covering a wide range of his plays, the study merges incisive textual analysis with performance histories that indicate the strategies used by directors when staging plays as formally and conceptually different as Blood Wedding and The Public. The book concludes by tracing the ways in which his life, death and poetry have been reconstructed through the performing and visual arts – in the poetry of his contemporaries; the canvases of Dalí; the laments of flamenco artists and rock icons like Camarón de la Isla, The Pogues and The Clash. Both a treatment of Lorca’s plays and their production histories and his status as a cultural icon, this study offers a fresh examination of one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century theatre
