As a specialist centre of excellence, Central is pre-eminent in the UK with regard to the industry-specific facilities which can support research through practice. These specialist facilities are at the forefront of what is available in the university sector. PhD study gives you the opportunity to engage with an area of drama, theatre, scenography or performance in depth and at the highest level of scholarship. Central is an obvious home for such research. We have developed extensive connections with all sectors of the theatre industry, as well as expanding international links. As a college of the University of London we continue to building bridges between leading-edge practice and advanced academic enquiry.
What are the other benefits to a research student studying at Central?
- first and second supervisors of complementary expertise: With the largest grouping of drama/theatre/performance specialists in the UK, Central offers a wide choice of potential supervisors
- being part of one of the largest gatherings of specialist postgraduates in Europe
- opportunity to participate in Central’s annual Postgraduate Conference, presenting your work, in a variety of formats, to your peers
- involved in a community which includes visiting artists and staff who are practitioners in their own fields
- regularly exposed to, and participate in, the creation of new work in showings and festivals of outcomes throughout the year
- develop and share your work in an environment that is equipped for practice-based research
- undertake training in research methods that are appropriate to your own field of study, including fieldwork, workshop-based enquiry and experimental practice
- close to the British Library and the University of London’s Senate House library, to which Central students have access
- easy access to the cultural centre of London with its performance venues, archives, museums and theatres.
Central has active research clusters in the following areas, within which academics share ideas, develop collaborative projects, and disseminate their findings:
- Theatre Applications
- Bodies and Culture
- Documentation and Archiving
- New Techniques in Contemporary Theatre
- Puppetry and Object Theatre
- Sonic Dramaturgies
- Space and Performance.
Areas of staff research at Central include the following:
- actor training
- dance
- devising and creative processes
- digital, telematic and mixed-media production
- drama therapy
- dramaturgy
- light and sound design
- movement direction
- music(al) theatre
- participatory performance
- puppetry
- regimes of the body
- scenography
- site-specific performance
- social and political theatres
- Shakespeare and early modern drama
- theatre history
- theatre for development
- theatre and philosophy
- verbatim and witness testimony
- voice.
You will undertake training in specific and relevant research methods geared towards the demands of your own area of enquiry. Central’s research degrees also offer a full programme of professional development activities, including pedagogies sessions which lead to possible teaching opportunities on our undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
You will develop your work in a facilitative environment, sharing the outcomes of your research with peers. You will present aspects of your work at Central’s annual Research Conference in January and the practice-based Research Festival “Collisions” in September. At the successful conclusion of your study you will have produced original research that is worthy of publication in appropriate formats and media.
If you are thinking about a research degree, but are unsure whether you are quite ready, you could consider the MA Performance Practices and Research, which inducts students into thinking about and making work at the cutting edge of the discipline.
Alternatively, if you are more interested in developing a knowledge of the workings and history of theatre as an institution, see Central’s MA Theatre Studies (Performance and the City), which is taught by foremost theatre journalists, arts managers and historians and uses the course’s London setting as its raw material.
In the Research Assessment Exercise 2008, 55% of Central’s submission was judged world-leading or internationally excellent. In its report, the sub-panel for Drama, Dance and Performing Arts noted, ‘The sub-panel is struck by the emergence of a new kind of research institution in the performing arts, bridging the creative industries and the academy, and producing a range of outputs relating to performance practices, many through PaR (Practice as Research).’
Some PhD students are currently researching the following:
- Dramatherapy and children and young people with depression: an investigation into evaluation models
- Witnessing change? Problematising the impact of participatory theatre with vulnerable groups at Kids Company
- Navigating irony in female comic performance that proposes, exploits, and implodes a funny/sexy binary
- Towards a theatre of psychagogia: an experimental application of Sesame’s methodology to ancient Greek plays, within the context of psychophysical actor training
- Intercultural exchanges in theatrical culinary practices: can the performative elements of food and drink be used to explore processes of cultural hybridity through performance practices?
- Intermediality as a process of creation. Intermedial performance praxis-practices and concepts of performance events which, at once virtual and actual, problematise the notion of what is ‘real’ in performance.
- Epistemic performance: mapping the idea of the epistemic performance subject in contemporary live art performance
- Rediscovering Spanish musical theatre: exploring an intercultural adaptation of Copla
- Collaborative artistic vision in theatre-making: a study of the interplay between capital, collective ownership and creating performance
- Puppets and manipulators: ontology, embodiment and presence in contemporary puppet theatre
- To what extent, and how, might the London Turkish Cypriot youth perform their identities through changing spatial narratives and mobility?
- A re-evaluation of Laban principles for actors in view of the Aristotelian Concept of Mimesis.
Recently graduated PhD titles:
- Towards a New Sissiography: The Sissy in Body, Abuse and Space in Performance Practice
- The Sense and Nonsense of Comedy and Revolt: relocating the political dimension of performance comedy.
