Profile
I have been at Central since 2004, in the main teaching on Drama, Applied Theatre and Education (DATE), BA , while also contributing to the MA and PhD programmes. I teach theory and practice: at Central I have directed, co-directed or devised 18 plays and productions, mostly with students on DATE.
I trained at Bretton Hall College where I formed Armadillo Theatre with David Gilligan, Nina Anderson and Tim Dowan – a Theatre in Education company making performances for schools, hospitals and other non-theatre venues. Following that I worked with other companies as an actor and facilitator, as well as teaching at Wimbledon School of Art, South Bank University, Richmond American University, Roehampton University, and Goldsmiths College, University of London. I completed my PhD at Goldsmiths, Control and Agency in Audience Participation, in 2007.
My teaching and research overlaps in my focus on collaborative creative processes and participatory practices. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, a monograph theorising how spectators are transformed into performers, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. Applied Theatre: Aesthetics, a short monograph with accompanying essays from other researchers, was published by Bloomsbury Methuen in 2014: it explores the idea of the aesthetic in performance practice with social aims. I am writing a new monograph, to be published by Routledge, provisionally titled Meaning in the Midst of Performance: Contradiction, Enaction and Participation.
I was principal investigator on the AHRC funded Playing with Intimacy and Intensity network from 2019 to 2020 (https://www.piinetwork.org/). I am co-investigator on the follow up project Re-Imaging Intimacy: Immersive and Participatory Performance in the Age of Covid-19, led by Bruce Barton, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
I am Secretary to the Standing Conference of UK Drama Departments (SCUDD). From 2014 to 2016 I was co-convenor of the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s working group on Performance, Identity and Community.
Areas of Expertise
- Methods of theatre making
- Collaborative, cooperative and participatory practice
- Performance theory
- Aesthetics of participatory and applied theatre
- Audience participation and immersive theatre
PhD Supervision
To date, I have supervised four PhD thesis to completion and externally examined seven more in areas including immersive and participatory theatre, applied theatre, ecological performance, acting practices in postdramatic theatre and surveillance as performance. I am currently supervising or interested in supervising doctoral projects in the areas of participatory performance practice and immersive theatre.
Key Publications
2019. ‘The Audience in Intermedial Theatre’, in Intermedial Theatre, Principles and Practice, Edited by Mark Crossley (London: Red Globe Press).
2019. ‘The Promise of Participation Revisited’ in Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself!, Edited by Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schutz and Sophie Nikoleit (Abingdon: Routledge).
2016.‘Theatre in the “Forest of Things and Signs”’, The Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4:1, pp. 21-33.
2015. Applied Theatre: Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Methuen).
2013. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (London: Palgrave Macmillan).
2012. ‘On Immersive Theatre’, Theatre Research International 37:3, pp. 221-235.
2011. ‘Noise, Conceptual Noise, and the Potential of Audience Participation’ in Theatre Noise, Edited by Lynne Kendrick, L. and David Roesner (London: Cambridge Scholars’ Press).
Register of Interest
Nothing to declare.
