Professor Sally Mackey Receives Major New Grant for Performing Places Bexley
Image (c) Adelina Ong
Professor Sally Mackey’s successful AHRC grants for her work on Performing Place in several research projects include work in the borough of Oldham (with alumni James Atherton, DE96, and Becky Proudfoot, DE10, among many others) and a project in Camden with adults with mental illness (with alumna VishniVelada-Bilson, T94, and visiting lecturer Sam Adams). PhD candidate Adelina Ong has been a key part of these projects also. As winner of the David Bradby Memorial Prize for international research, awarded for her previous Performing Place research projects, Sally gave her keynote speech at the TaPRA conference in Salford University in September 2017 entitled: Performing places: anatopia, time and the new global.
Following these earlier research projects, Sally and ‘Performing Places Bexley’ has been awarded nearly £200,000 of a major new grant given to Bexley Council. The project will focus on the town of Bexleyheath, creating an imaginative fiction with and for the townspeople including extensive outreach workshops in schools and community groups. It will take place in the summers of 2018 and 2019. Sally and Adelina will be working with alumna Suha Al-Khayyat (DE99) from Little Fish Theatre Company, Ross Bolwell-Williams (DE08) from Emergency Exit Arts and many others.
In their press release announcing the collaboration, The London Borough of Bexley noted that Bexley was set to benefit from a range of community initiatives following the successful funding bid for four projects. These will help the borough gain more up-to-date information on the make-up of the local population and would support community events and initiatives designed to foster good relations between existing and new residents.
Leader of Bexley Council, Cllr Teresa O’Neil OBE, welcomed the success of the bid:
“This is good news for the borough and shows how seriously we take our responsibility to ensure that Bexley is a place at ease with itself, with an engaged population and integrated communities, where everyone feels they belong and can get on in life. This funding will help us access more up-to-date information to understand how the borough is changing, adapt our services to meet changing demands and fund activities to bring different communities together.”
Professor Sally Mackey is Professor of Applied Theatre and Performance, and Associate Director (Research and Projects) at Central. See Sally’s recent TEDx talk about performing place here: