Collisions

Nic Farr

Desire Paths

Nic (they/them) is a PhD researcher at RCSSD, artist, and designer. In this participatory installation, they will be exploring how walking methods can be used as creative and critical tools in research.

On display in Dench Studio all day:

Recording and presenting practice research: artefacts and ideas c/o David Harradine

From collection stored in the RCSSD Library

Anna Woolf (she/her)

PhD student RCSSD / Digital Producer/maker

Bio: https://londonartsandhealth.org.uk/staff-member/anna-woolf/

During February 2022 half-term, seven young people ranging in age from 11 to 16 coalesced at the Unicorn Theatre in London to participate in a week-long series of workshops exploring filmmaking, digital storytelling, and health. The young people all had one thing in common: they all live with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, (JIA).

In this short reflection, Anna (with permission) will share some of the young people’s films and think aloud about practice as a co-created research methodology, as she asks herself this: how might working with participants help keep research fluid, (in other words, what happens when you find out you are asking the wrong question?)

IG @socialmediamum TW @annabosworth

Chat? Knock now & meet me in Whereby

http://www.annawoolf.net/

Rebecca Hayes Laughton and @4RefugeeWomen Drama Group

Our words for healing: recipes, poems and magic

A recipe is like a poem, and a poem is like a spell, woven words that help us change and heal. A few members of our drama group will be sharing a potent mix of powerful recipes, their poems for social change.

Rebecca is a PhD researcher at RCSSD and a Creative Producer working across video, theatre and TV. She has been facilitator at the Women for Refugee Women Drama Group, based at Southbank Centre London, for seven years. At COLLISIONS 2022 she and two women from the group will be talking about how they devised the Recipes for Healing project following concepts of a Grassroots Dramaturgy that Rebecca is exploring in her doctoral research.

www.refugeewomen.co.uk

@4RefugeeWomen

Paul Edwards

PhD Researcher RCSSD

This is not what I had originally planned…: embracing crisis as a methodology

‘I don’t quite know how to do this. When I started, I thought I had a clear idea of what I wanted to say, but I’m not so sure anymore…’

This presentation takes an unfinished paper from the start of Paul’s PhD and repurposes it as a reflexive tool as he approaches its end, considering his research and process in relation to the practice of rock balancing.

Jane Munro

A movement session - all welcome!

Filomena Campus

Jazz vocalist, theatre director, PhD researcher

Liberate Rame

Campus sheds light on the life and work of Italian performance and theatre maker Franca Rame (1929-2013), who was also an actress, playwright, editor, producer, archivist and political activist. Inspired by philosopher Adriana Cavarero, Liberate Rame explores the relationship between vocal expression and improvisation and theatre improvisation, which was one of Rame’s many talents, being born into a family of traveling actors with roots in Commedia dell’Arte.

This project is part of Campus’ current research on Franca Rame at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, supported by LAHP (London Arts and Humanities Partnership).www.filomenacampus.me

Filomena Campus - vocals/effects

Soundtracks by Steve Lodder

Original composition by Lodder/Campus + arrangements of songs by Dario Fo and Franca Rame

Introduction and welcome to COLLISIONS 2021 from Central’s Principal Josette Bushell-Mingo OBE and Collisions Academic Mentor, Dr Broderick Chow.

Magdalena Mosteanu

PhD candidate at FTT, University of Reading.

Magdalena’s practice encompasses performing, creative research, directing and facilitation of theatre workshops. Most recent projects include creative research on theatre in prison with Jubilo Foundation (interview with Jubilo), research on food storytelling as a mediator for cross-cultural contact (Easy as Pie online installation), research on legacies of displacement (Peeling Onions with Granny Artist Collective) performing in a Polish-Nigerian production On Missing by Wretched Theatre, translating and directing a play by Olivia Negrean FEAST or Women’s Appetite for Shakespeare and an autobiographical performance I Remember. Magdalena is also a Sessional Lecturer and Academic Mentor at the FTT, University of Reading.

The Interactional

This installation stems from her research on cross-cultural theatre practices and explores how performance art may inform and provoke change in the social fabric through facilitating human interaction. Through The Interactional she engineers a place of encounter, a habitat for ethics, where two people connect in a reciprocal gaze. The idea for the installation emerged from the collision of her practice in theatre in prison and research on face-to-face contact. The interactional responds to Levinasian notions of ‘face as a first discourse’ and ‘nudity of face’ and seeks to address the question of how we may truly understand our own individual place in the world, as well as the presence of an Other through face-to-face encounter. The Interactional essentially facilitates the very simple action of facing each other, by setting the stage and giving space. In doing so, The Interactional hopes to create the habitat for ethics and encourage the act of looking which in turn supports a reconfiguration of complex patterns of the social encounter.

Note: The Interactional runs throughout the two days of the festival in The Experimental Studio

Music for The Interactional composed by Jack Webb

Francesca Filatondi

PhD candidate at London Metropolitan University, her thesis is based on a somatic investigation of the being through a trans-disciplinary approach (theatre, dance and artistic swimming) within performing arts.

Francesca is Italian and since 2012 she has been living in the beautiful mountainous Rhone-Alpes region in France. She has been swimming most of her life. After being a member of the National Italian Synchronized Swimming Elite Squad, silver medal at the European Cup in 2001 and gold medal at the World Master Championship in 2012, she continued to train artistic swimming at international level in France, Switzerland and as Head of the Coaches for the Youth National British Squad in UK.

In February 2020, she founded an international company of artistic swimmers named Undine Aquatic Theatre based in France, with the purpose of developing an artistic swimming training and choreographic method to expand performing arts contemporary horizons and backgrounds. Apnea is a short film designed around the aquatic theatre where artistic swimming, theatre and contemporary dance merge together in a liquid scenario. The suffocating sensation of limiting space and lack of relationships due to the sanitary restrictions set by Covid-19 is here represented in a choreography that wants to depict performers’ experience and horizons currently made of absence of contact, physical absence of friendly relations and absence of projects that unite and make people vibrate and be inspired.

Maud Lannen

Maud Lannen is a French artist, choreographer-researcher and poet. Her transdisciplinary practice brings together training in Fine Art and Performance Making, with a focus on postmodern dance. Her research is centered on reproduction (mechanisms and the bodies of) and touch as practice and ethics, which she grounds in the genealogy of resistant and aesthetic movement practices. She is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University under the supervision of Prof Anna Furse.

This performance lecture introduces her PhD practice-research, ‘Per-forming the haptic maternal: dialogical neo-human dances and choreographies’, and preliminary findings, notably the radical dance form that emerged from it, which she names Somato-Intersectionalism (S.I.).

Marina Stavrou

Marina Stavrou is currently undertaking her PhD research at the School of Arts and Humanities in the field of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. Her art practice seeks to visualise entangled states of consciousness.

ET-Her

In which words do we describe an encounter with a force-field that shakes our senses? How can this entanglement of unknown vectors turn into a monologue? ET-Her is a play in 3 acts, revealing the logic of a self that sees its body disappearing for a while, becoming transparent like aether, in an encounter with disruption and its multiple phases.

You are kindly invited to record your response to this audio work, during or after joining us for this performance. The artwork created based on your responses will be delivered by post individually. Whether text, drawing, image or audio, please email Marina.

Introduction by Filomena Campus, PhD Researcher RCSSD

Charlie Pyne is a London based bassist and singer. Her craftsmanship, versatility and joyful approach to music has shaped Charlie’s career, seeing her become the solid backbone of some of contemporary jazz’s most exciting talents, both on stage and in the recording studio.

Charlie has recently worked with the Ilario Ferrari Trio, Down For The Count Swing Orchestra, Issie Barratt’s Interchange, the National Theatre productions ‘The Visit’ (2020) and ‘Paradise’ (2021), Disney’s motion picture ‘Cruella’ (2021), Yazz Ahmed’s ‘Polyhymnia’, Filomena Campus’ ‘Theatralia’ and Joe Thompson at The Ivy Club. She also leads her own project, Charlie Pyne Quartet, who released their debut album ‘Dancing Shadows’ in 2019.

She has performed at many wonderful venues across the UK, including Cadogan Hall, Royal Festival Hall, the Purcell Room, Pizza Express Jazz Club, Ealing Jazz Festival, Crazy Coqs, Jez Nelson’s Jazz In The Round and Ronnie Scott’s. She is also an accomplished singer and in September 2018 won the Boisdale Music Award for “Best Jazz Singer”.

Charlie has a BMus (Hons) from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she studied double bass with Steve Watts and Jeff Clyne.

Panel Host Day One

Dr David Shearing RCSSD

David is an artist and academic creating and researching immersive multimedia environments and spaces. He is interested in how people and audiences engage both physically and conceptually with performance, design and materials and am founder of the multidisciplinary design studio Variable Matter. He makes and researches events that takes place in theatre spaces and in applied and social contexts, exploring audience engagement by creating intimate, and at times spectacular, art and performance installations using video, sound and organic materials. In 2017 he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for Performing Mountains, a 24-month AHRC fellowship project led by Professor Jonathan Pitches.

Anna Woolf PhD student RCSSD

Anna has over 15 year experience in digital marketing working for entertainment companies such as Disney and Netflix. Her research examines socially engaged and participatory art, health and applied theatre in relation to teenagers suffering from the very complex autoimmune disease Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis. Her work spans the interdisciplinary nature of applied theatre and digital practices such as social media, online communities, filmmaking and digital facilitation.

The video and podcast were created in conjunction with participant Wayne and the English National Opera. Wayne had a really traumatic experience of having COVID-19 and had gone from feeling fit and healthy to being relatively debilitated from the virus. He took part in the ENO Breathe programme to feel connected to other people who had experienced a similar thing to him, the added benefit being that singing for his health really impacted his breathlessness and anxiety in a positive way. Wayne was really proud of the end result which was launched and shared in an online event with over 200 people as part of Creativity and Wellbeing week in May 2021.

http://cultureonprescription.org.uk

Kate Duffy-Syedi / Phosphoros Theatre, PhD student RCSSD

Stories for Sleeping

This digital piece explores the practices of care and friendship that ripple through communities of refugee young people, and how the experience of listening gestures inter-relational care and radical hope. The piece sits alongside Kate’s practice research project Stories for Sleeping, whereby refugee young people have been creating audio-narratives to be shared with peers around the UK, as a response to widespread sleep issues that affect this community.

The piece explores nostalgia, belonging and (re)becoming, and the intimate ties forged between friends when family are absent. It decentres secure knowledge of unaccompanied minors as ‘service users’ and instead positions self-authored performance as a way of encountering care, solidarity and community. Crucially, the film extends beyond the participatory nature of Stories for Sleeping, and explores how performance practices might generate alternative forms of allyship and engagement between refugees and settled communities. It sits within a lineage of recent research across disciplines into the experiences of networked care in youth on the move.

www.phosphorostheatre.com

Alison Porter

Alison Porter is a writer and researcher in the third year of her PhD at the University of Warwick where she is researching the use of verbatim theatre to address social injustice. The main enquiry of her research is the relationship between the facts in ‘true stories’ and artistic intervention.

Land of Eagles - The Boyfriend Trick is a creative response to the issues of modern slavery and human trafficking in the UK. The work consists of a dance film and a series of audio monologues based on the story of an Albanian survivor of trafficking for the sex trade. The facts were gathered through The Medaille Trust (safe house provider) and the story is told from the perspectives of the victim/survivor, her trafficker, her mother and her case worker. The monologues were recorded by a cast of professional actors; the dance was performed by Marisa Flamino and filmed by Polina Zelmanova (a post graduate student in Film & Television Studies at The University of Warwick).

Website: whiteknighttheatre.com

At Warwick: warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/theatre/staff/alisonporter

Twitter: @WKnightTheatre

Dr Ella Parry Davies, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow RCSSD

Ella’s research looks at transnational migration, place and performance, and she is currently facilitating a collection of soundwalks made with migrant domestic workers.

Making a soundwalk begins with a migrant domestic or care worker choosing a place that is meaningful to them. After going for a walk and recording a conversation there, we work together to edit the recording for listeners. This involves the collaborator learning how to use a free-to-use sound editing software, and being fairly compensated for their time and creative work.

A soundwalk expresses just a fragment of a person’s experiences and perspectives. As listeners, it asks us to acknowledge the limits of our understanding, as well as our points of affinity, alliance or empathy. This collection of soundwalks aims to centralise migrant workers’ own decision-making about what story to tell; not to fully capture an individual’s life story or an experience shared by an entire population. Processes of making the soundwalks were also shaped by the realities of time, labour, precarity, unpredictability and transience.

Please bring your own device (phone/tablet) and headphones for the walk, which will take place outside Central.

Website: https://homemakersounds.org

Dr Duska Radosavljevic, Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, RCSSD

Post-Verbatim, Amplified Storytelling and Gig Theatre in the Digital Age

This 18-month long research project engages with an increasingly apparent prominence of speech and sound in the 21st century theatre and performance. Postulating that the aural aspects of speech, sound, voice and sound design emerge to replace the late 20th century dominance of literary textuality (new writing) and/or corporeality (physical theatre) as the primary dramaturgical motors in live performance, the project argues that this renewed interest should be viewed paradigmatically. The internationally discernible paradigm includes works specifically designated here under these three mutually porous categories.

In the course of the Fellowship, Duška Radosavljević has worked with the Post-Doctoral Research Associate Flora Pitrolo on the interdisciplinary project which involves original field research in performance-making as well as networking and public engagement activities. In partnership with London-based Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), new work was commissioned from relevant artists selected through an open call, to form part of the primary research. Research findings were designed to be disseminated through ‘Lend Me Your Ears’ podcast (in collaboration with Tim Bano and Digital Theatre Plus), a workshop (to be designed with Jane Boston), a professional practice document for curators (in collaboration with the V&A), an international project conference, a Figshare dataset, a special journal issue and a monograph.

Visit the project website

Dr Jane Munro, Lecturer in Movement RCSSD

Jane’s recent research looks at privilege, borders and participation in dance in an article published in Choreographic Practices in April 2021. She has also developed her movement practice to offer dance with detainees in immigration removal centres. In 2019 she undertook the community dance project: Dance in Detention with Music in Detention (Hear Me Out), working with facilitating dance with detainees and with patients in a psychiatric hospital. The intentions to share this at Tate Exchange in 2020 with Flourishing Lives were put on hold through COVID-19 but will be re-scheduled in Autumn. In 2020, she collaborated further with Music in Detention creating the De-Stress through Movement Activity Pack for detainees held in their cells for most of the day in lockdown. She is currently writing an analysis of the problematics and possibilities of this project for the journal Critical Stages/Scenes Critiques.

Jane will be discussing her practice and the project Movement through Disorientation: a discussion of co-authorship in the making of the activity pack ‘De-stress through Movement’ for immigration detainees.

Rebecca Hayes Laughton introduces poetry performances from three members of the Women for Refugee Women Drama Group, PhD Student RCSSD

They will discuss the resilience of campaigners and movement building throughout the pandemic, and also the opportunities and challenges of live performance practice online. The creative performance project is set against the organisation’s research work into the women’s experiences of seeking asylum in the UK, and the sustained project directly challenges the Home Office’s hostile discourses in cultural, social and political space.

Refugeewomen.co.uk

Panel Host Day Two

Dr Marilena Zaroulia, RCSSD

Marilena Zaroulia’s research focuses on performance and cultural politics, particularly in post-1989 Europe. She has published on performance and migration, politics of representation, and imaginings of national belonging. She recently completed ‘Re-membering Assembly’, a co-authored article exploring dimensions of theatrical assembly, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hawiyya Dance

Hawiyya Dance Company was founded in 2017 as an all-women’s Dance Company who explore identity, culture and resistance through dance. Hawiyya draws upon traditional folkloric dabke with a twist of contemporary dance through their skills and experiences in other dance forms, narratives and musical influences.

The culturally diverse dancers are united in their commitment to the Palestinian cause, and other anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles with the aim to raise awareness on silenced human-rights causes and demonstrate solidarity through dance and culture.

FB: HawiyyaDabke

Instagram: @HawiyyaDabkeCurfew

Contemporary production in partnership with El-Funoun www.curfewdance.com

Dr Alejandro Postigo

In conversation with Jo Leask: Collisions past and present

Alejandro is Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre at the London College of Music. His practice-based PhD from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama explores the Intercultural Adaptation of Spanish Copla songs in international theatre settings. He is leader of HisPanic Breakdown, a theatre collective with works such as ‘Men on the Verge of a HisPanic Breakdown’ (USA, 2009), ‘Wondering Thoughts’ (Bangkok, 2014) and ‘The Copla Musical’ (2014-20), seen in Europe and America. He featured in the West End production of ‘In The Heights’, TV sitcom ‘Episodes’ (BBC) and regularly collaborates with The Royal Ballet.

Chang Gao

Public Intimacy: Online Studio Tour with Chang Gao

Public Intimacy focuses on the ambiguity between the public space and private space. It explores and questions the boundary between farness and nearness and the tension between the very personal matter of the human body and its relations to public space. Chang’s artworks inquire how human desire can provoke the audiences’ bodily reactivity in public space, while Hanxuan’s interest situates between the personal and collective sense of familiarity in the notion of “farness” and “nearness”. Both of them are examining the relations between humans, space and the sense of intimacy. The exhibition presents multiple media works using hologram installations, films, prints, interactive sculptures and mixed media installations.

https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/chang-gao/

PhD candidate at Royal College of Art/ Sculptor/ Public Art Researcher/ Establisher and Director of the International Laboratory of Social Innovation - Central Academy of Fine Art of China

www.gaochangart.net

• Instagram: gao.chang_rca
• Facebook: Chang Gao
• Twitter: @Gao_Chang_arr

Simon Dodi

Both/And

Both/And is a curated video surveying the body of performance work from my current research project on male camp identify in British popular performance. My practice-research uses the lip-synch as a queer strategy of performance re-enactment and approach to historiography. It engages with the repertoires of three historical camp performers to address embodiment by way of three discernible markers: the mouth, gesture and material interactions. These indexical markers are used to speak to and from my embodied research, as an archive of bodily practices.

Both/And brings together studio footage, personal reflection, and prior performance documentation alongside selected historical material. It engages with the performative notion of being both/and through the polyphony of voices present in my work. Both/And is ultimately an experiment in documenting practice-research that aims to draw together a collection of practices over the last five years of study.

Simon Dodi is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. His doctoral thesis is a practice research examination of male camp identity in British popular performance. His research focuses on the work of Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson. His practice combines archival research alongside queer strategies of performance re-enactment and queer historiography.

www.simondodi.com

• Twitter: @simondodi
• Instagram: @simon_dodi

Dr Adelina Ong

Response and Intervention

Adelina Ong completed her PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK in 2018. Her thesis, Compassionate Mobilities, proposes a theory for negotiated living inspired by parkour, art du déplacement, breakin’ (breakdancing) and graffiti. She has published in Theatre Research International, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal and Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance (RiDE). She co-edited a special issue of RiDE ‘On Access’ with Colette Conroy and Dirk Rodricks which was published in 2019 as an edited collection under Routledge.

Critical Shifts: in conversation with Laura Kressly and Jo Leask

Experiencing live performance in a shared space is a huge part of the appeal of dance, theatre, music and other performing arts. But with venues being shut down since the end of March, these forms have been moving online. Whilst artists and makers have been responding and adapting to digital formats, how have critics approached this shift to a new medium? Dance critic Josephine Leask and theatre critic Laura Kressly, both who are PhD candidates at Central, chat through the shifts in criticism over COVID-19.

Laura Kressly

Laura Kressly is a freelance theatre critic and dramaturg from the US who has been UK-based since 2004. She began reviewing in 2013 for Remotegoat and everything theatre, and founded The Play’s the Thing UK in 2015. In 2016, she co-founded the Network of Independent Critics in order to facilitate opportunities for bloggers and independent critics to review at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She was a fellow of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in 2017. Bylines include Exeunt, Fest Magazine, The British Council’s Theatre and Dance Blog, The Skinny, Focus Magazine, Wales Arts Review and Show-score. She is currently doing a PhD on embedded theatre criticism at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Forthcoming publications include the co-edited volume Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia: A Companion Reader.

Jo Leask

Josephine Leask is a dance critic, editor, lecturer and part-time PhD researcher at Central School of Speech and Drama. Her PhD research explores the contribution of New Dance Magazine (1977-1988) to the creation of alternative and feminist intersectional dance writing practices. She has written about dance for a range of mainstream press and dance publications and currently writes for DanceTabs and edits Resolution Review as well as mentoring emerging dance critics.

Anna Woolf

Joint Creativity: what young people with arthritis don’t want to say about transition

Digital / Theatre / Social Media / Practitioner

Anna is a PhD candidate at Central. Her research examines socially engaged and participatory art, health and applied theatre in relation to teenagers suffering from the very complex autoimmune disease Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis. She is a 2017 DMA winner, 2018 Promax EU presenter and was the 2019 prize winner for her postgraduate presentation at the Storytelling Patient Voices conference, University of South Wales. Recent projects have included independent research with Blue Apple Theatre, looking at building digital capacity for change in light of the pandemic, and creative consultancy with playwright Nina Lemon and Peer Productions.

Read about her project Poems for new mums with @UCH

Read her latest research blog When Two Worlds Collide

Read her new blog post on the Arts Health ECRN

• 078900 31729
• anna.woolf.net
• Instagram: @socialmediamum

Maja Milatovic-Ovadia

Growing up with the legacy of war in time of climate change

Maja Milatović-Ovadia is a freelance theatre director working in a range of context including multimedia performances, collaborative and community based theatre practice in post-conflict settings based on the use of humour and comedy. Originally from former Yugoslavia, she is based in London.

Maja is a PhD Researcher at RCSSD.

Thinking Bigly

A Guide to Saving the World

Ben Yeoh performance-lecture in conversation with David Finnigan and an active audience. Shape our story through interactive games and learn about solutions to the world’s climate and sustainability challenges.

Bigly is an anti-TED talk. Think you know the colour pink, koalas and interest rates? Find out why second order thinking plus cultural changes should give you hope on climate. The world is better than in the past; the world is still awful. We can do better.

Ben Yeoh is a theatre maker and sustainable investment fund manager. Ben is current Chair of theatre company, Coney. He was Chair of Talawa Theatre Company. Ben sits as Chair of a Responsible Investment Advisory committee, advising a leading sustainable UK investment trust. He blogs at ThenDoBetter, connect with him @benyeohben

David Finnigan is a writer, theatre-maker and pharmacy assistant from Canberra. He is a member of science-theatre ensemble Boho (Aus) and an Associate of Coney and the Sipat Lawin Ensemble (Philippines). David is a Churchill Fellow and an Australia Council Early Career Fellow. Find him @davidfinig and at davidfinig.com

Dr Naomi Paxton is a performer, writer, broadcaster, and researcher.

Naomi is currently employed as Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. She is also an Associate Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. ​Naomi trained as a performer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). After a decade as a professional actor, in 2011 she started a PhD in the Drama department at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research, completed in 2015, explored the work of the Actresses’ Franchise League and the contribution of theatre professionals to the suffrage campaign. Naomi is a member of Equity, and The Magic Circle.

Eden Rickson, RCSSD Students Union Environments Officer

Eden is one of the Environments Officers at Central Students Union, but is also a climate justice activist who uses the power of the arts when protesting. To find out more about her plans for the Student Union, you can get in touch on Instagram @centralsu_environments, @edenrickson, or read her & Elisha’s manifesto here: Manifesto

That Black Theatre Podcast

The first series launches on Monday 28th September 2020 with twelve episodes taking you through different decades of Black British theatre making. We’ll be speaking to leaders of Black British theatre and sharing exclusive clips from plays in the Black Plays Archive. Guests include Mojisola Adebayo, Lynette Goddard, Ola Ince, Roy Williams, and more.

Nadine Deller, PhD Researcher RCSSD.

Photographs here are from past years of the RCSSD Collisions Festival. This is a work in progress.

Please email rebecca.laughton@cssd.ac.uk with comments, corrections and anything you’d like to add to the Collisions Digital Archive.

Moving our practice online

Here you can see examples of how the RCSSD Research students have tackled the challenges of moving their practice online.

Read blogs about some of our PhD community’s work here: RCSSD Theatre Matters

Phosphoros Theatre

But everything has an ending: an anthology of digital responses to covid-19, as told by those who have had their lives disrupted before. ’

The teenagers that were little children when I left - the babies I’ve never seen - I used to imagine all the hugs I’d missed… but not anymore. Even in my dreams I am too scared to infect them’

One of the producers of But everything has an ending is Kate Duffy-Syedi, PhD candidate and co-Artistic Director of Phosphoros Theatre. Kate’s practice research and wider work engages with refugees and asylum seekers, particularly those who came to the UK as unaccompanied minors. For more information visit www.phosphorostheatre.com

At the Women for Refugee Women Drama Group we’ve continued our weekly Friday sessions but without access to wifi and phones / laptops, being connected is hard and sometimes impossible. You can read about how Lockdown has affected the women in our network, and how we’re making plans for the future at:

www.refugeewomen.co.uk

RCSSD Theatre Matters Blog

Rebecca Hayes Laughton / PhD Researcher

Rebecca.Laughton@cssd.ac.uk

Chang Gao - installations 2 & 3 Oct, Lecture 14h00, 3 Oct

Emotional Encounter is a series of hologram installation projected in public space, which serves as a tool to change people’s perception toward space and society. It interacts with the reaction of the public and allows the public to express desire by encountering a moment of convergence between the private and the public, the day and the night, the real and the virtual.

Chang Gao: PhD candidate at Royal College of Art/ Sculptor/ Public Art Researcher/ Establisher and Director of the International Laboratory of Social Innovation - Central Academy of Fine Art of China

Website: www.gaochangart.net

Marina Hadjilouca - 11h00, 2 Oct

The Role of the Performance Designer Towards Triggering Active Co-Existence

Marina Hadjilouca’s research focuses on the use of performance design methods for social engagement, to encourage ‘active co-existence’ in contested public spaces through temporary interventions. Research interests include politicised art practices, agonistic theory, public spaces and the politics in and around them. During COLLISIONS Hadjilouca will hold a workshop (duration two hours), where the methods developed to date and the notion of ‘active co-existence’ will be introduced, and the participants will be invited to use them in order to plan and execute small interventions in the public space in front of RCSSD.

Marina Hadjilouca: Performance Designer and PhD Researcher at Royal College of Art

Research profile: https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/marina-hadjilouca/

Rebecca Hayes Laughton - 14h00, 2 Oct

Staging the traumatic: my body is / my body is not

When refugee, migrant and asylum seeking women cross geographical borders and enter the UK they are also negotiating personal, political and cultural boundaries. Their bodies, physically present in the nation space, can reject discriminatory labelling and advocate for their human rights. In this performance piece by the Women for Refugee Women Drama Group we ask: What memories do our bodies hold? Who makes decisions about our bodies? Where does the bravery of saying no lead us?

Performers will be punctuating their 20 minute performance with short breaks for audience reaction and feedback

Rebecca Hayes Laughton: PhD Researcher / Community Theatre Director/Producer

@hayeslaughton

www.refugeewomen.co.uk

Kate Scarlett Duffy - 15h00, 2 Oct

All The Beds I Have Slept In (work in progress)

A charpai on my roof in Afghanistan

A stinky bunk in a hostel in Milan

A sleeping bag on a college camping trip

Under a bridge in Liverpool Street on my first day in England

A bed that wasn’t a bed

From a studio flat in North London to the exercise yard of a Greek detention centre, these four lived-experience actors are pulled between time and place as they remember the people who kept them moving forward. This piece is about kindness and care. It explores the hidden moments of hospitality that change the course of a journey, and how to repay them. The intimacy created between friends when family is absent, and how to stay hopeful in a scary world.

This piece has been developed as part of Kate’s practice research PhD project, exploring how self-authored and autobiographical performance practices can resist and rethink dominant representations of the vulnerability and victimhood of young male refugee communities. The work was developed together through an R&D process this summer.

Kate Scarlett Duffy, theatre maker and PhD researcher RCSSD

www.phosphorostheatre.com

Cathy Sloan - 16h30 to 18h30, 2 Oct

A Recovery Arts Café

This is a pop up cabaret and conversational event exploring the possibilities of instigating recovery (and recoverist) communities through collaborative performance events. Hosted by Cathy Sloan, founder of Messy Connections, a platform connecting those interested in performance practice with/by/for people in recovery from addiction. Celebrating the creative insights from people affected by addiction, there will be a range of short performances from arts organisations and independent artists on the theme of ‘recovery: habits of survival’. These include guest speaker Mark Prest (Portraits of Recovery) in conversation about ‘recoverism’, music from Simon Mason (Hightown Pirates), performances from Outside Edge Theatre, Small Performance Adventures, Anna North, Recoverist Theatre Project and Steve Lawless.

Cathy Sloan Applied theatre-maker, performance researcher, recoverist

Clio Unger - 11h00, 3 Oct

We Present a Presentation

The workshop utilises the genre of the contemporary lecture performance to interrogate conventional modes of performing knowledge. We will draw on participants experiences of research and public speaking to explore the ways their presentations could be expanded to include embodied, experiential or collective ways of knowing. By reflecting on their own styles of performing knowledge, participants will be given a space to finetune both their academic and pedagogical practice!

Clio Unger Researcher and dramaturg

Marina Stavrou - 13h00, 3 Oct

Synaptic Galore

Galore: from the Irish Go leor, “Till sufficiently, till plenty, till clarity”. A continuous flow of synapses fired by tactile interactions try to throw clarity on the way we approach an unnamable entity.

A film archive of encounters with the undefined and the uncategorised. To be accompanied by text and sounds based on a personal reading of a theatrical work, this event aims to lead the audience to create their own notations.

Part of PhD research on structures of pathos and resistance through text and image.

Marina Stavrou- PhD researcher Royal College of Art

Peizhi Zeng - 15h00, 3 Oct

‘We are just a by-product of the most radical social experiment in China.’

Even now, the collective identity of the one-child generation remains invisible after the 1979 One-child Policy was repealed in 2015. In most cases, they are nothing more than the pathetic victims, still suffering from forced abortion, human trafficking, etc: the humanitarian disasters caused by the contradictory but eye-catching policy.

What does it truly mean to be born alone in a society where collectivistic values are increasingly emphasised? How did that shape our lived experience?

The performance will take place as a collective memorial of the unborn siblings, trying to explore these hidden contexts and more.

Peizhi Zeng, multi-disciplinary theatre director/writer/dramaturg/musician and PhD researcher RCSSD

facebook: Peizhi Zeng （曾沛之）

Simon Dodi - 16h30, 3 Oct

Tickle Your Fancy

Come on and tickle your fancy,

And let’s see a smile on your face,

‘Cos if we can still smile with a war on,

Then there’s hope for the whole human race.

Tickle Your Fancy is the third iteration of a more extensive research project on the male camp identity in performance and its relationship with everyday effeminacy.

Tickle Your Fancy uses snippets of historical footage from Larry Grayson’s repertoire to abstract and amplify instances of material interactions as the final salient element in the broader triptych of embodiment.

Come on and tickle your fancy.

Simon Dodi – PhD Candidate at RCSSD

Clio Unger

Would Shakespeare Have Given a TED talk?
A Presentation in Progress

This talk poses an impossible question. Consequently, I will not tell you whether Shakespeare would have given a TED-talk had this technology been available to him. But Shakespeare and Ted-talks have much in common. Shakespeare was a master communicator, while Ted Talks are what Steven Johnson called “the defining essay genre of our time”. This talk will playfully engage with the persona of Shakespeare and the dramaturgies of TED-talks to ask: What is at stake when knowledge is both a vital source of empowerment and a commodifiable resource? How are we doing knowledge when we are presenting it?

Clio is a PhD student at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, where she works on a research project on performances of knowledge entitles: ‘The Politics of the Lecture Performance’. Her contribution to the COLLISIONS2018 Festival is part of her thesis and considers the ways global circulation and personal branding have aided the rise of knowledge as commodity. Clio holds an MA in theatre and performance from The Graduate Center (CUNY) and an MA in dramaturgy from the University of Munich. She also works as a dramaturg for theatre, performance and dance.

Josephine Leask

Undoing the review

As I reflect critically on my writing practice as well as on the writing ecology of my profession within my research, I feel that I’m becoming an unstable dance critic. Will my writing disappear into academic jargon or will it be bolstered by new critical mass. Can it help me see differently or write more expansively?

Generosity is important in my writing practice particularly when I am reviewing emerging artists. So how do I deal with a dilemma when I encounter a ‘difficult performance’ in terms of its ethical or identity representations? 

In a self-conscious, deconstruction of my review of Sweatshop Revolution’sBeautiful, I search for another way of communicating my review, which here involves audience members and my subjective, feminist ramblings. I embark on a performance reading in which I test out how I negotiate my uncomfortable and distracted spectatorship in order to highlight tensions within my critical writing practice. What does this ‘questioning instability’ in contrast to the ‘confident, authoritative’ writing of a critic colleague say about the shifting practices within  dance criticism. Can this ‘undoing’ mediate productively between artists and audiences?

I am a dance critic and freelance editor who writes for a range of press, dance publications and digital magazines. I currently review for DanceTabs and Londondance, mentor new dance writers and edit Resolution Review which covers emerging artists at the Place theatre. My commitment as a critic is to cover dance that sits outside of mainstream visibility and to explore other strategies for writing about it. I have recently started a PhD at Central in which I am investigating the contribution of dance criticism to the alternative dance ecology in London. For this research my own writing practice will be explored and shifted.

Barbara Gentili

The ‘lost’ art of vocal registration

I am investigating the ways in which singers of the Italian operatic tradition experimented with vocal registration at the turn of the twentieth-century. In order to do so, I have put in dialectical dialogue early 78s and contemporary vocal treatises and found out what one class of sources can reveal about the other. In my presentation, I would like to use the recordings and show how these singers blended the chest, middle and head registers. I will address these questions: did their ways of blending vocal registers reflect what is prescribed in contemporary vocal treatises? If not, why? How did these new ways of blending registered alter the expressive quality of the voice, and how was this connected with the rise of verismo composers? Is there a way to widen our perspectives on how this very popular repertoire (Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Cilea) can be performed today?

Barbara is completing her PhD at the Royal College of Music after an MA in Singing gained at the Milan Conservatoire in 2012.

Her research focuses on the birth of the ‘modern’ singing in the Italian operatic tradition at the turn of the twentieth century and is informed by her own performing experience as an operatic soprano. As a member of a distinguished touring opera company Barbara performed main roles of the giovane scuola repertoire (Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo) as well as in those of Italian and French romantic operas.

She has published articles for the LED-book ‘2017 and the DAKAM research center, and written for Spectator Magazine, Opera Magazine and Il Giornale della Musica.

Simon Dodi

FLASH BANG WALLOP

“I don’t look upon the humour, which is ostensibly rude, vulgar, lude, obscene – I don’t look upon that as evil, I look upon it as a safety valve, as I think there is much in modern men’s lives, indeed, in all of life, that is very frightening, and every now and again, you very much need the sort of safety valve that laughter supplies…” Kenneth Williams

FLASH BANG WALLOP examines Kenneth Williams and Frankie Howerd, two case studies from my more extensive research project on the male camp identity in performance and its relationship with everyday effeminacy. By unpicking the physical taxonomy of this identity, it will focus on the gesture/body and the voice/face to address two salient elements of the male camp body in performance.  FLASH BANG WALLOP will experiment with the abstraction and amplification of the historical body. FLASH BANG WALLOP is a work in progress about fragmentation, re-enactment, queer and affective historiography.

Simon Dodi is a practice based PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. His thesis examines male camp identity in historical British popular performance and cultural practices through the methods of performance re-enactment with archival material.

Evi Stamatiou

Serious Says in Funny Ways: training the artist as symbolic activist

Serious Says in Funny Ways is a research project that investigated the processes, challenges and ethics of training the student practitioner in socially engaged theatre. Eight trainees from different training backgrounds explore the juxtaposition of the social and the comedic in a training framework that theatricalises Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘field’, habitus, ‘capital’ and ‘symbolic violence’. The researcher uses footage from the process and the final performance showing and also the participants’ interviews to argue that the specific pedagogical approach encourages risk-taking, vulnerability and an exploration of how the symbolic representations of social power dynamics affect meaning-making in performance. What happens when a serious say is performed in a funny way? What can the trainee and the trainer discover about their theatre-making along the way? How does the juxtaposition of the social and the comedic affect the trainee’s artistic and personal growth?

Evi Stamatiou is a senior lecturer in Theatre at the University of Chichester. Her research interests include performer training, socially engaged theatre, musical theatre and practice as research. Evi is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is an award-winning actor, writer and director who works across stage and screen. She has presented her work in Greece, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Estonia, South Africa, Brazil, France, Canada and the United States. She has published essays with academic publishers like Routledge, Intellect Books, Palgrave MacMillan, MacFarland & Co and Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama. 

Image: a collage from screenshots from rehearsal. Images include the group jumping, running, writing, playing with balloons and presenting their mind-maps to each other.

Clara J Nizard

marlenemarlenemarlene

She had pinned a bunch of violets in a place where no woman ever wears flowers – just where the legs part. This legendary Marlene Dietrich red-carpet look opens the door for a half-hour meditation on lesbian histories. marlenemarlenemarlene drags a few historical queers (and their violets) squarely into the present through furious speculation, jokes and poetry. I share some of the things I’ve never told you about being a queer lesbian person with lots of feelings, theories and dance moves all in service of (un)making our relationship to queer archives.

Clara Nizard holds an MFA in Performance Practice as Research from CSSD and a BA in English and Anthropology from McGill University. Her work is usually concerned with archives, queerness, care and dancing. She is a member of London Queer Writers, a poetry collective platforming work for and by voices from the margins.

Chengyu Tan

Monologue from a Chinese queer

A solo autobiography script reading.

A script based on personal history.

A first-person narrative from a queer.

A queer life in China.

A taster of Chinese queer life.

An on marching process towards queer utopia.

Chengyu Tan is a PhD candidate at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests lie in the area of queer theory, performance and Chinese studies. She has experience as theatre performer and devisor. Her current project explores kinship, moral values and queer identities in contemporary China.

Dr Gilli Bush-Bailey

Memory, screens and reflections

Memory, screens and reflections, is the last in a series of performed lectures I have been developing over the past six years in and around my research on women’s performance histories. This made-for-film traces a path through the shifting sands of ‘material remains’: the object, the family photograph, the professional scrapbook and the half-remembered anecdote, to take in the textual traces of bodies in performance, the grainy techno-coloured reminiscence of black and white images, the virtual histories fleetingly present on the web and subject to erasure when interest wanes or when the last memory fades. In dialogue with Frances Maria Kelly’s nineteenth-century performed autobiographical history Dramatic Recollections, I explore my own family’s theatrical ephemera including materials from my own early performance career, making connections between the micro-narratives of autobiographical performance and the meta-narrative of theatre history. Through an exploration of women’s re-membered performance history, spectral metaphors of performance past make way for the more vibrant presence of the performed palimpsest.  As one part of my own past performance is found written into the memories of fictional characters in contemporary literature, the purposes of history take on ever more complex layers in the present experience of what has passed, and what is still to come, for women in theatre.

Dr Gilli Bush-Bailey (Professor Emerita, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London). Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow 2018

https://www.cssd.ac.uk/staff-profiles/prof-gilli-bush-bailey

My first career as an actress began when I was twelve years old. I trained at Arts Educational (London) and started work as a professional actress when I was twelve, leaving school at fifteen to make the televised film series Here Come the Double Deckers (1970) - which will definitely feature in this performed lecture – more work in television and then theatre followed. My academic training began as a mature student at Kingston University (BA English 1995) where I returned as a part-time lecturer to work with a team founding a new drama degree programme (2000).  My postgraduate degrees were undertaken in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London (PhD 2000) where I then took up my first full-time lectureship (2001).  I was Director of Graduate Studies and then Head of Department (2008-2012), taking my most important role in theatre by far, as the lead of the team delivering the department’s landmark Caryl Churchill Theatre. I am currently researching the work of actress Emma Stanley who toured her one-woman show, The Seven Ages of Woman across America in 1856-8.

My work as a child actress on British TV is instrumental in my historiographical approach to my book Performing Herself: AutoBiography and Fanny Kelly’s Dramatic Recollections (2011). It is also the subject of a chapter in Entertaining Children (2014). The chapter in Women and Comedy and the collection of monologues included in Plays and Performance Texts by Women 1880-1930 (edited with Maggie Gale) further my ongoing research in the cultural politics of women’s performance work on stage and screen. Recent research on radio writer and comedienne Mabel Constanduros is forthcoming in Stage Women: Female Theatre Workers, Professional Practice and Agency in the Twentieth Century – 1900-1950s, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Katharine Dorney. My interest in making histories with new generations of female theatre makers can be seen in the collaboration with Tonic Theatre on the Advance programme; Present from the Past project with Northern Stage and, most recently as advisor on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Mary Pix’s The Beau Defeated (1700) re-titled Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich. I have been the Chair of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) 2014-18 and I am an honorary life member of the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD).

Workshop with HAUPTAKTION: ‘ARTISTIC RESEARCH’

In this workshop, participants will work with the performers and creators of HAUPTAKTION to explore the dimensions of doing embodied research about the physical and symbolic histories of the body. Participant will conduct a small artistic-research in the field of „fitness“ and „exercise“. We will read theoretical texts and cultural histories as well as exercise (!) and use auto-ethnographic methodologies in order to produce knowledge on wider social and political implications and functions of „fitness“ and „exercise“. Together, we will try to find ways of telling histories of the body through knowledge presentations that critique the traditional sidelining of the body in knowledge production.

HAUPTAKTION is an association for artistic research formed around the cultural anthropologist Julian Warner and the theatre maker Oliver Zahn. HAUPTAKTION studies theatrical practices using ethnography, archive-based-research and embodiment.

Open to festival presenters and research students from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

This presentation is supported by Goethe-Institut London: www.goethe.de/london

Cathy Sloan

The Antidote

Tuesday 26th September, 3pm & 6:15pm

What is recovery? What does it mean to choose to be in recovery? Is there something that society can learn from those who have grappled with addiction and chosen to live differently?

This presentation begins with a performance of extracts from a piece in development that grapples with the lived experiences of recovery. Created in collaboration with a group of performers who understand recovery processes, it explores what might be an aesthetic of recovery in theatre practice and performance.

My Research: My research thesis proposes an approach to developing applied theatre practice as an ‘affective performance ecology’. I begin with the premise that applied theatre practice and research is a living thing bound up in relations in the world, with others and with theatre practices. My approach as a researcher-practitioner, my sense of being-in-the-world, is embedded in my understanding of ‘affect’ as a way of theorising the flow and exchange of energy or sensation that motivates us to thought, to action, to inter-relation with people, places and things. My practice as a theatre-maker with people in recovery from addiction is an affective expression of my understanding of the world and of those with whom I am collaborating. My research is, therefore, a practice of human ecology and, specifically, a concern with both performance ecology and ecologies of recovery (from addiction).

Cathy Sloan has worked as a teacher, facilitator and director/theatre-maker. She was Associate and later Artistic Director of Outside Edge, specialising in performance with and by people in recovery from drug and/or alcohol addiction. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, exploring a philosophy of theatre-making that supports practices of recovery.

A body is a node of relational process, not a form per se. A complex activated through phases in collision and collusion, phasings in and out of processes of individuation that are transformed – transduced – to create new iterations not of what a body is but of what it can do.

Erin Manning (2013: 17) Always More Than One

Sally Rapier

On the Floor - The Living Analysis of Musical Theatre Applied to the Integrated Musical

Tuesday 26th September, 3:45pm

In the workshop, Sally will be working with actor(s) exploring material from SOUTH PACIFIC through what she terms the Living Analysis – applying aspects of breath, tone, presence, physical dynamic and scale and its relationship to the inner felt experience – as a new way of opening up possibilities for performance, in a singular active analysis which privileges the actor as final auteur in the creative process and aims for those ineffable moments of apotheosis we identify as the distinguishing outcome of the poetics of the genre.

My Research: Sally’s development of The Living Analysis offers a different way of working from conventional script analysis. It is a singular active analysis and genre-specific approach, exploring the distinctive properties and congruent dialogisms of the musical’s theatrical synthesis to open enhanced possibilities in performance. It offers a focus for the development of new directorial or actors’ practices to enable individual responses to different shows and production contexts, beyond those already recognized. In the process, it acknowledges the actor as final auteur in the process of creating musical theatre as performed text.

Sally Rapier is a professional director/choreographer with extensive experience of teaching musical theatre actors in training at leading programmes both in the UK and overseas. She currently contributes to musical theatre programmes at Rare Studios, Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University. Along with Dr Nick Phillips she is part of Musical Theatre Lab UK ‘in pursuit of excellence in musical theatre performance.’

[The musical in any mode remains] Insistently and exuberantly performative, already aware of itself as performance, even in those musicals that observe fourth wall realism in the spoken scenes….Audiences embrace and understand this curious essential bumpiness between modes……gleefully divided and contradictory (Wolf 2011: 3)

Wolf, S. (2011), Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, New York, Oxford University Press.

In relation to the portrayal of character, the artificially intensified emotional state [of Number Time] is read as a means by which performers may transcend their book characters, externally projecting the character’s interior motivations through song, and [simultaneously] affording a heightened recognition of themselves as both performer and character within the world of the musical. (McMillin 2006:42)

McMillin, S. (2006), The Musical as Drama, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Konstantinos Destounis

Greek landscapes turned into sound: Antoniou’s composition Aquarelle for solo piano

Tuesday 26th September, 4:45pm

The presentation will include a live performance of Theodore Antoniou’s composition Aquarelle (1958) for solo piano, preceded by a brief analysis. Aquarelle is of particular interest as it suggests a sound representation of various landscapes spanning over the Greek countryside. It consists of ten short pieces; each one is based on a Greek folk dance rhythm. The music is characterised by the blending of Greek folk musical elements with contemporary compositional techniques.

My Research: My research focuses on the solo piano works by Theodore Antoniou, one of the most prominent Greek composers (b. 1935). My main objective is to locate and define the composer’s personal musical identity in these works and the ways it has evolved through his career. My research is aided by my artistic project of public performances of Antoniou’s music for solo piano, as well as a world première recording of a complete collection of these works, which will be released by Naxos label.

Pianist Konstantinos Destounis (b. 1991 in Athens) is a doctoral student at the Royal College of Music; His research focuses on the piano works by the renowned living Greek composer, Theodore Antoniou. Konstantinos is a prize winner in numerous international piano competitions, most notably the ‘Grand Prix Maria Callas’ 2015. His artistic activity so far includes 3 CD recordings as well as performances in venues such as the Royal Albert Hall and St. John’s Smith Square in London, the Opera ‘La Fenice’ in Venice, the Llewellyn Hall in Canberra, the Glocke Saal in Bremen and the Athens Megaron.

Personal website: www.destounispiano.com

Online video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUuyIngCNqI

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWrqYMhUhDwGbouFf2izv5g

Amelia Cavallo

Woman Performing Blind

Tuesday 26th September, 5:30pm

Blind.

Woman.

Two constructs that manifest in my body. Each comes with a number of expectations that I layer onto myself and that are layered onto me by others. These layers are old, extending from before my childhood and into present day experience.

Blind Woman.

These ideas are not separate. I cannot “just” be blind or “just” be woman. I have to be both.

What does that mean? How does that manifest? How does my past define me? How do I perform “blind woman” and what does it look like to you?

Showing contains audio description and British Sign Language.

My Research: My research examines and deconstructs the ocularcentric, sighted norms and expectations (ocular-norms) that are inherent in performance practice. Utilizing my position as a blind woman performer, I demonstrate and trouble the limiting and exclusionary effects of these norms, identifying potential for reclaiming agency and autonomy over them. This research is positioned in the intersecting fields of disability studies and performance placing me as both the researcher and the researched. Using PaR methodologies in conjunction with a critical framework of crip, queer and feminist theory, I examine how my blindness can become a resistive force to ocular-norms as they manifest in tabooed and stereotypical representations of gender, sexuality and disability.

Amelia Cavallo is a blind theatre practitioner with experience in various styles of performance, including acting, singing, music, burlesque and aerial circus. She is also a workshop facilitator, visiting lecturer and a consultant for performance, and disability studies/culture. Publications include Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre, and “Seeing the word, hearing the image: the artistic possibilities of audio description in theatrical performance” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance.

‘[B]lindness, in and of itself, requires us to be actors every day. […It] douses us daily in an eternal, inextinguishable spotlight — the play-acting invariably becomes more complex. Striving, constantly, to put others at ease, regardless of our own state-of-being, is an exhausting side-effect of blindness which few people recognize. In some ways, blind people are more accustomed to the pressures of acting than many sighted person will ever be.’ 

Hernandez, 2014

Dr. Kiki Selioni

Madame de la Carliere  

Tuesday 26th September, 7pm

The presentation of Denis Diderot’s work Madame de la Carliere is an edgy satire of the bourgeois class of the 18th century with obvious references to modern-day reality. It takes place in a living room of the times and discusses the consequences of the public criticism of the private life of a couple.

Following the presentation, a 30 minute lecture-discussion will take place about the Laban’s systematic analysis of movement as application to the art of acting and it is part of the postdoctoral research of Dr Kiki Selioni at RCSSD.

Director/Acting Coach: Dr Kiki Selioni

Costume and Lighting design: Evdokia Veropoulou

Players: Galatis Nikias, Gkanatsiou Ioanna, Goudeli Santy, Deligianni Eva, Koutantou Efi, Kytidis Vasilis, Pantazis Panagiotis, Sachas Panagiotis, Spyridakou Sapfo,Tsirita Argiro, Psychramis Alexandros.

Talk - Nando Messias

Wednesday 27th September, 2:45pm

Join Nando Messias for an informal chat about his Sissy body of work. We will talk about the process, artistic influences, themes, politics and critical framework that have guided his creative output. Nando will share a few of his favourite books, authors, artists, videos, doubts and fears.

Negotiating Practice Research: A Panel Discussion

Wednesday 27th September, 4pm

Join a panel of academics and artists who come together to discuss the complex relationship between academic and artistic work. The panel will be chaired by Kate Elswit (RCSSD) with panellists Karen Christopher and Simon Bayly (Roehampton).

Participants will speak to the fuzzier margins between the academy and professional life and, as people who engage in both academic and artistic practice, explore how they locate the art in practice as research, and the research in art practice. When do those modes feel complementary and when do they not, and how is that negotiated?

Followed by a wine reception.

Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer and teacher. Her London-based company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, is devoted to examining the collaborative performance-making process. She was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until the group disbanded in 2009. With Goat Island, Karen performed throughout the USA and the UK, and in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. Her focus is on artistic negotiation in the devising process and finding non-traditional structures for working and composing live performance works. Her work includes listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet. Employing both historical and studio-based research she works toward discovering each piece by making it. She is paying attention as a practice of social cooperation. She is an Associate Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London and Artist Research Fellow in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. 

www.karenchristopher.co.uk

Simon Bayly is Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton; publications include the a philosophy of theatricality, A Pathognomy of Performance (2011) and recent articles on waste and gratuitous expenditure, the artistic project and the meeting as primary configurations of contemporary work and sociality. As part of a project funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship, he is currently undertaking research with artist Johanna Linsley on the dynamics, values and meanings of face-to-face meetings, gatherings and assemblies.

Kate Elswitt is Reader in Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and author of Watching Weimar Dance (OUP 2014) and Theatre & Dance (forthcoming Theatre& series). She is winner of the Gertrude Lippincott Award, the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize, and honourable mention for the Callaway Prize, and her work has been funded by sources including a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and the Lilian Karina Research Grant in Dance and Politics. She also works as a choreographer, dramaturg, and curator.

Dr. Kiki Selioni

Oedipus Rex

Wednesday 27th September, 6:30pm

The performance Oedipus Rex is the result of the collaboration between the international director T. Moudatsakis and Dr Kiki Selioni’s research Biophysical Acting. Pr. Tilemachos Moudatsakis invited three actors from Dr. Selioni group of research to play the leading roles of Oedipus (Alexandros Psychramis), Creon (Panagiotis Pantazis) and Iocasta (Argiro Tsirita) alongside with the actors of Theatre Vivi: Hephaestion Vaxevaneris, Petros Tsapaliaris, Chris Baltas. This performance was premiered in Paris, presented in Athens and it is invited to perform in St. Petersburg, Broadway. The performance is part of the postdoctoral research of Dr Kiki Selioni at RCSSD.

A Power Point with English subtitles to be projected during the performance

• Director: Tilemachos Moudatsakis
• Acting Coach: Dr Kiki Selioni
• Costume/Lighting Designer: Evdokia Veropoulou
• Music: Hephaestion Vaxevaneris
• Movement director: Panagiotis Pantazis

Players:

• Oedipus: Alexandros Psychramis
• Creon:  Panagiotis Pantazis
• Iocasta: Argiro Tsirita
• Tiresias / Headsman: Hephaestion Vaxevaneris
• Messenger from Corinth:: Petros Tsapaliaris
• Palace Messenger: Chris Baltas

*The performance Oedipus Rex is funded by:

• Greek Ministry of Culture

• Michael Cacoyannis Foundation

• Drama School ‘Mary Vogiatzi-Traga’

Dr Kiki Selioni is a movement teacher and acting coach in various Drama Schools and Institutions internationally. She has completed her studies in Dance Theatre at the Laban in London (BA and MA, City University. She holds a doctorate in Movement Training for Actors and in Acting (RCSSD). She is currently Affiliate Research Fellow at RCSSD in a post-doc research project (The British Acting School: Biophysical Acting) regarding a complete acting method based on Laban’s work and Aristotle’s theory.

Chi Ying Gigi LAM

My Musicking Practice I: Landscape – Soundscape

Thursday 28th September, 3:45pm & 6:15pm

In this presentation, Lam will share about her practice of music making in her hometown during summer. Who can make music?  Local communities, classical trained musicians and educators were invited to participate in this exercise. They listen to the world (Landscape) and make meaning of it( Soundscape) . Sharing and conversations are encouraged during music making practices.

What would happen if this exercise brought into your “daily lives”? Items found in the city during practice will also exhibit during the presentation. Take the opportunity to see if you would like to bring anything home while you enjoy the presentation.

My Research: The full study is to examine the experiences of musicians who involved themselves in community music practices in Hong Kong. Through engaging in dialogues with musicians who involved in these practices, my aim is to describe the unique community music scene in Hong Kong and provide insight into how this in turn to shape the local music development. Through engaging in the “My Musicking Practice” project, researcher put her working definition of community music into practice and get the general interpretation of the local communities.

Gigi Chiying Lam is a Hong Kong born community music facilitator based in London. She holds a MA in Music Education and Bachelor of Education (Honours) from The Education University of Hong Kong. She specializes in creative and inclusive music making with a variety of instruments including traditional Chinese Instruments. She is currently focus on researching community music scene development in Hong Kong and actively developing new projects with various organizations and charities.

‘Musicking is music as activity rather than music is as an object.’  Small, 1998

Nando Messias

Where 4 Roads Meet: Death and the Sissy (excerpt of work-in-progress)

Thursday 28th September, 7pm

An exclusive peek preview of a one-off piece by the provocative performance-maker Nando Messias.

Where 4 Roads Meet: Death and the Sissy marks the culmination of his decade-long Sissy trilogy, facing up to the social disappearance of the sissy and the violent fatality inherently at stake in the queer condition.

The scene is a roundabout where four roads meet, a site of memory, death and rebirth. What is the Sissy’s legacy? How can it be mourned? What is discarded?

Alongside the performance stands a Museum of the Sissy, a curiosity cabinet for the genuine and the phenomenal.

My Research: Nando Messias’ research focuses on the figure of the Sissy, social violence and visibility. His work for the stage straddles performance art, dance and theatre. While focusing on his genderqueer body, Messias creates beautiful images, combining them with a fierce critique of gender. Research interests also include walking—as a queer identity marker and as an art form. More recently, his research has turned to representations of death and rebirth in performance.

Publications include ‘Sissy that Walk: The Sissy’s Progress’ in Queer Dramaturgies, International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (2016) and an upcoming chapter on ‘Performance and Activism’ (Routledge).

Messias has performed at prestigious venues such as Hayward Gallery, V&A, Tate Tanks, Tate Britain, Roundhouse, Royal Vauxhall Tavern and ICA, among other spaces across the UK. His solo work has been curated by the Live Art Development Agency as part of the programme ‘Just Like a Woman,’ shown in the City of Women Festival (Slovenia, 2013), New York and London (2015). In 2015/16 Nando completed a national tour of The Sissy’s Progress to much acclaim and press interest, followed by a tour of Shoot the Sissy to prestigious LGBTQ festivals and venues across the UK in 2017. 

www.nandomessias.com

Collisions Closing Event hosted by Meth and Joe Parslow

Thursday 28th September, 8:00pm

Join all of the Collisions participants for a round up of the festival, hosted by International Superstar Drag Clown, Meth, and PhD Candidate Joe Parslow (sometimes know as #BoyfriendJoe). Take this opportunity to mingle, speak to the participants and one another, and enjoy a glass of wine.

Meth and Joe will be interrupting your evening to respond to the question “What is a practice?” as Meth performs and Joe tries to find out about the practice of drag, how drag might be practiced, as well as something that is practiced, and often practiced on stage. Furthermore, they will begin to explore how their work as co-owners of queer bar Her Upstairs, as researcher and researched, and as partners (in all the complex, contingent, polyphonic and euphemistic ways that term might function), they will explore how their relationship(s) might be practiced on and off stage.

Wine and food will be available throughout.

Joe Parslow is a PhD Candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a lecturer teaching across the fields of drama, theatre and performance. Their research focuses around drag performance, and the potential ways in which queer communities can and do emerge in contemporary London, particularly around performance. Alongside their research, Joe is the co-Director of queer bar, performance and cabaret space Her Upstairs and queer club space Them Downstairs in Camden, London, which house performance events from across the drag, queer and cabaret performance scene in London and beyond.

With a look reminiscent of a clown on acid going to the met gala, Meth has earned an infamous reputation around the world for her bizarre and beautiful spin on drag. Having performed across Europe (Berlin, Helsinki, Reykjavik, Stockholm, Zagreb) and America (New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Austin, LA) and calling London her home Meth has stormed the international drag and cabaret scene in a relentless revolutionary charge of strange and seductive extravagance. In 2016, alongside his partner #BoyfriendJoe and close friend George Anthony, Meth opened her own queer cabaret bar Her Upstairs in Camden. In just 6 months of opening they expanded the business and opened queer club space Them Downstairs. These spaces have rapidly become a staple in London Queer Nightlife. Proudly providing a safe space and home to the LGBTQ+ community.

https://herupstairs.co.uk/