Intersections

Schedule - Monday 21 March

9:00 – Room opens with coffee and pastries available

9:55 – Welcome

10:00 – Panel 1 – 11:00 [Q&A – 11:10]

“Indoor Spaces”:

• Kate Duffy-Syedi - ‘Welcome habibi, I’m glad you’re here’: gestures of care within stories told by and for refugee youth
• Olivia Turner - Visceral Intimacies and Encounters with the Examined Body
• Holly Luton - Practices of Manaakitanga: Staging Antigone in a pandemic
• Alexandra Antoniado - Intersections of Performance, Feminism and Care

Short break

11:25 – Panel 2 – 12:35 [Q&A – 12:30]

“Pedagogical and Processual Spaces”:

• Megan Burns - Teacher Performers and Radical Care: By reimagining the Drama School Classroom as a space of care, can a radical love ethic ripple into the theater industry?
• Erin Power - ‘That’s where the magic happens’: Creating ‘safe enough’ spaces for care within the carcerally volatile prison
• Chris Dupuis - Curating Dance in a Moment of Crisis

Short break

12:50 – Panel 3 – 13:50 [Q&A – 14:00]

“Community Spaces”

• Jemma Llewellyn - Using Practices in Critical Studies in Improvisation and Applied Theatre to Live and Learn through Crisis and Recovery
• Maria Tivnan - Creating and Sustaining a Community of Care: A Study of Theatre57, an independent theatre artist collective Galway, Ireland
• Hannah Ringham - Poetry and systems of care: understanding my role as an artist in creating ‘acts of care’

Lunch

15:00 – Panel 4 – 16:00 [Q&A – 16:10]

“Bodily Spaces”:

• Hilary Baxter - The Menopause Crisis
• Broderick Chow & Eero Laine - British lads hit each other with chair: Care, Masculinity, and Speculative Possibilities
• Sarah Shear - Facilitating The Lens of Body Neutrality: Identifying and applying Body Activism concepts in Performer Practices to destabilise anti-fat bias.
• Josephine Leask - Empathy and care in New Dance Magazine’s embodied critical practice.

Break

16:30 – Panel 5 – 17:30 [Q&A – 17:40]

“Outdoor Spaces”:

• Cucuta Felicia - Care and crisis: diasporic ethics of care in Wajdi Mouawad’s spaces of performance
• Noha Bayoumy - Designing and Defeating Oppression: Nora Amin’s Theatre of Crime
• Hara Topa - (Un)veiling the disappearing body: acousmaticity and self-care

Break

18:00-18:10 Introduction to Keynote

18:10-19:00 – Keynote, Emma Dowling

Friday 14th May

09:55(BST) - Welcome

10:00-11:15(BST) PANEL 1: ‘Creating Space, Medicine and Emotion’

10.00-10.05 – Introduction

10.05-10:20 – Katie Paterson: ‘Lived vs Learned: performing the boundaries of medical knowledge’.

10:20-10:35 – Stephanie Bonnici: ‘Four Theatre Performers met on a Zoom Call: Creating an online theatre performance within the confines of the coronavirus pandemic’.

10:35-10:50 – Rebecca Hayes Laughton: ‘The Role of Love in the Poetry of the Borderline: Why amateurs matter’.

10:50-11:00 – Anna Woolf: ‘Mum’s the word’

11:00-11:15 – Q&A

11:30-12:30(BST) PANEL 2: ‘Contemporary Border-Crossings in Brit(ish) Theatre: Deconstructing genre, reshaping the canon’

11:30-11:35 – Introduction

11:35-11:50 – Önder Çarkirtas: ‘Getting out of the Stereotype: Muslims Across the Borders of British Theatre’.

11:50-12:00 – Leila M. Vaziri: ‘“They’ve built a wall. Plastic wall as high as the canopy”: Fear and the crossing of borders in Thomas Eccleshare’s Pastoral’.

12:00-12:15– Mary Ann Vargas: ‘Barrio, a Latinx variety night’.

12:15-12:30 – Q&A

13:15-14:30(BST) PANEL 3: ‘At the Border: Rethinking parameters on identity and performance’

13:15-13:20 – Introduction

13:20-13:35 – Maja Milatovic-Ovadia: ‘Trespassing’.

13:35-13:45 – Alex Lyons: ‘Crossing Borders: Rethinking gender thought the representations of vulvas in contemporary performance’.

13:45-14:00 – Alison Andrews: ‘Taking an Invitation for a Walk’.

14:00-14:15 – Sarah Ashford Hart: ‘Affective Witnessing: moving-with stories of deportation.

14:15-14.30 – Q&A

14.45-16.00(BST) PANEL 4: ‘Living Borders: Bodies at the margins’

14:45-14:50 – Introduction

14:50-15:00 – Daniel Gonzalez: ‘Gatos in the 15M Movement@ collaborative urban strategies in Madrid’.

15:00-15:15 – Charlie Ely: ‘Conte: an emerging transnational dance movement in late 20th century East Africa’.

15:15-15:30 – Kathryn Stamp ‘Shifting the Lens’ (TBC)

15:30-15:45 – Gurkiran Kaur Wariabharaj: ‘Breaking Old vs Breaking-In New’.

15:45-16:00 – Q&A

16:15-17:30(BST) KEYNOTE: Dr Kene Igweonu ‘The Ignorant Researcher: Transgression as Emancipatory Practice’

17:30(BST) - Conference End.

Panel 1. The discipline: directions of future research

Bex Tadman (Royal College of Art / University of Roehampton) 

Radical Co-conspiration: Queer, Crip live art as revolutionary praxis

Abstract

While equality, inclusivity, diversity and accessibility now regularly appear in mainstream discourse, the UK’s Equality Act (2010) paradoxically preceded a year-on-year increase in recorded cases of hate crime and discrimination based on protected characteristics such as (perceived) gender identity, sexuality and disability (Home Office, 2019). This hostile environment can be traced through ongoing cuts to Disability Living Allowances, Personal Independence Payments (Machin, 2017) and the “trans moral panic” (Barker, 2017) around the Gender Recognition Act. These trends suggest that visibility and “awareness raising” are no panacea for discrimination and may in fact expose individuals to increased levels of public scrutiny, exclusion and in some cases physical and emotional danger.

Using the lens of my doctoral practice-as-research project around queer, crip live art as disidentificatory praxis (Muñoz, 1999) this lecture weaves visual performance extracts with excerpts from publicly available reports and articles to highlight the challenges that queer, crip identified performance artists have levelled at the structural, institutional, political, environmental and social inequalities they continue to face. Examining artistic indictments of the impact of these inequalities, this multimodal analysis provides insight into the precarious alterity of queer, crip live artists in continuingly inaccessible/impenetrable social and artistic settings. 

Dissecting the political interplay of in/visibility with the realities of making the personal public, this lecture explores the tensions in producing radically challenging, self-exposing works that serve as affective and affirmative provocations, poignant acts of resistance and of defiant survival in a culture insistent on commodification, commercialisation and spectacle. Advocating emerging methodologies of co-conspiracy (Upton, 2017), this lecture will unpack how queer, crip identified live artists create revolutionary communities of practice by building and sharing productive tools to disassemble politics and practices of exclusion and the implications of this for the future of live art and activism in the academy and beyond.

Bio

Bex is a lecturer in applied critical theory at the Royal College of Art and an interdisciplinary technē funded PhD candidate at the University of Roehampton, working at the intersection of social science and visual/performance art. She is Chair of the Board of Trustees for Raze Collective, a charity that supports queer performers and queer performance venues across the UK. Rebecca has built expertise in equality, diversity, accessibility and inclusion through working in arts and cultural organisations, higher education and research institutions in the UK, Europe and Australia for over 15 years. 

Jaelyn Endris (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)

Critically Feminine: Figuring a critical femme politics

In her 2019 article “The Pink,” feminist scholar and activist Andrea Long Chu argues that “contemporary feminism is arguably defined by its refusal of woman as a political category” (Chu, 2019), whereby feminist politics today has become the agent of other political movements, resulting in a feminist politics that is “thankless, sentimental, and impossible to do without” (Chu, 2019). If as feminist scholar Tegan Zimmerman argues, our contemporary feminist moment is currently occupying a shifting landscape that “must also distance itself ideologically” (Zimmerman, 2017: 56) through “a repoliticization of second-wave politics” (Zimmerman, 2017: 57), then how might one build a “female imaginary” (Irigaray, 1985: 30) that is politically and ideologically distinct from feminist movements that have come before? Rather than re-inscribing what Chu’s describes as a “politics with a hole in it,” (Chu, 2019), this paper will examine how contemporary feminism might be re-examined and re-articulated through a re-investment in femme subjectivity as a means of resisting patriarchal and colonial understanding of femininity and femininity’s place within feminism. This paper will interrogate received notions of femininity through an investigation into critical femininity studies. Through an articulate of femme as “femininity reworked, (re)claimed as one’s own” (Hoskins, 2017: 99), I will uncover the potential for a contemporary feminism predicated on femme shapes of vulnerability, where femme vulnerability might not be seen as essentializing or oppressing but as “an affective state of openness” (Dahl, 2017: 44). Through this reinvestment into and re-figuration of femininity through femme vulnerability and desire, I will gesture to how femme might offer new critical strategies, particularly how femme might offer a new critical disposition for feminist criticism.
 

Bio

Jaelyn Endris is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama whose research explores intersections in feminism, femininity studies, literary criticism, and dance studies. Her PhD research examines how the intersections of critical femininity studies, postcritical literary criticism, and dance studies and might formulate a femme reading practice for the development of new critical approaches to feminist performance studies and criticism. Jaelyn holds an MFA in Performance Practice as Research from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a BFA in Theatre from Ball State University. Jaelyn has worked as a performer and teacher in the US and the UK, and her teaching interests include feminism and dance, critical femininity studies, literary criticism, and performance-based practice research.

Nina Lemon  (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama )

Unwelcome, Unwanted, Dangerous, Censored, Unsettling

In this paper, I will examine the vulnerable position of theatre that seeks to make change as it falls between the gaps - dismissed as ‘theatrically impoverished’ by most arts funders, censored by many education gatekeepers and labelled as dangerous by some social funders. 

Whilst the UK environment for artists making didactic work is becoming increasingly precarious and creativity is ever more squeezed from the curriculum, British teenagers are facing a crisis of mental health and well being. Social media continues to promote unrealistic and unhealthy images and, with unrestricted access to hardcore pornography, teenagers are bombarded with confusing and damaging ideas about sex and relationships.  

Drawing on extensive experience making theatre and tackling challenging issues in schools, I will argue that this adolescent self worth crisis is fuelled by a breakdown in empathetic understanding. I will explore the Golden Thread of Empathy running through my own practice as I make the case that, by watching theatre, young people can sharpen their empathic abilities and that, with these skills, they can be empowered to make more positive choices for themselves and their peers. 
 

Bio

Nina Lemon is a playwright, theatre-maker, researcher and feminist. As Artistic Director of youth arts charity Peer Productions, she has spent the last fourteen years developing new plays tackling the risky issues that young people most want to talk about but that many teachers fear and dread. Her PhD research explores what strategies playwrights could use to affect change in teenage attitudes to early sexual relationships in both the UK and in India. Outside of her research and practice, Nina is mum to two Autistic daughters and is especially interested in inclusive theatre practice and creativity in neuro-diverse people. She is Senior Practitioner on Playing A/Part, a Kent and Surrey University collaboration funded by AHRC exploring creativity in Autistic girls.  

Keynote speech: Dr Broderick Chow (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)

Endless Summer: Desire, Mourning, and the Academy
In a recent excerpt from his forthcoming book on the university and institutionalized knowledge, theorist Nick Mitchell proposes a utopian posture he calls the“summertime self”, a fantasy that one can be “in, but not of the institution.” My talk departs from Mitchell’s proposal to consider the temporalities of “summer”, that is, the promise of freedom and self-actualisation in the interstices of the institution. How does a projective desire for transformative in the future move actually existing alternatives in the present? To consider this question, I return to my archival work on the utopian experiment of the original Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, California. From 1934 to 1958, this strip of white sand was the site where, everyday, young athletes, gymnasts, weightlifters, and bodybuilders would gather to train, perform, invent astonishing forms of hand-balancing and adagio, and simply pass time. But there was no show that the daily training was a rehearsal for, aside from creating new assemblages of bodies. The archive thus indexes a polymorphous politics of queer kinship, in a delayed time of loitering (but not leisure), outside of the rhythms of family and factory. The experiment persisted, in the interstices of the state and capital, for 24 years, before disappearing overnight. This talk argues that mourning such lost futures enables us to work through the contours of our desire in the present: our relationship to institutions we know are bad for us; our pursuit of lost causes; and our institutional identifications and disidentifications.

Bio

Broderick D.V. Chow is Deputy Director of Learning at Teaching at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London. He is an interdisciplinary scholar engaged in questions of theatricality, performance, and the sporting body. From 2016-2018 he was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project Dynamic Tensions: New Masculinities in the Performance of Fitness (www.dynamictensions.com), a cultural history of men’s fitness and its intersection with the theatre in Britain and the United States, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. He has published widely in journals including TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, and Performance Research. He is co-editor with Eero Laine and Claire Warden of Performance and Professional Wrestling (Routledge, 2016) and is co-editing a new collection with Laine entitled Sports Plays. He is Assistant Editor of Contemporary Theatre Review in charge of its online site, Interventions. Broderick is a competitive Olympic Weightlifter and qualified coach. Contact: broderick.chow@cssd.ac.uk, Instagram: @dangerology, Twitter: @broderickchow

Workshop

Elvira Crois (University of Antwerp)

Researcher as Resource. Participatory Methodology and Fair Practice

How can we think of academic practice as a defiance of neoliberal logics in conducting research? This, not through open science, which considers the equality of knowledge distribution, but through the act of research in cooperation with artists.

How can we value the time and energy an artist devotes to facilitating researchers in their artistic practice? To what extent can we speak of equal added value for both artist and researcher? Is the traditional return of exposure in the shape of academic writing an equivalent surplus for an artist’s practice to the impact an artist has on a researcher’s career by disclosing their work? Are there alternative ways of working with and supporting artists? What if the time a researcher invests into an artist is not merely in favour of their research outcomes, but as well to enrich an artist’s practice, by engaging themselves as a resource? Furthermore, in what way does this reciprocity align with the values of fair practice? Does it succeed to resist structures of neoliberalism? And in what manner could the researcher as resource further insight into their object of study? Or does this last question expose an implicit logic of commodifying value?

Instigated by these questions, I propose a creative dialogue, an opportunity to exchange questions and ideas with peers on the role of the academic researcher. Passing through several steps of interactional protocols, you are able to reflect on your own and each other’s research practice.

Bio

Elvira Crois (1992) works at the University of Antwerp in preparation of a PhD dissertation. Through participatory methodologies her research aims to identify training contexts in the work ofKatrien Oosterlinck, Seppe Baeyens and Sarah John for the development of a performer’s capacity to interact with an audience in embodied interactive and participatory performance. By considering these contexts and introducing the concept of ‘immaterial drafts’ and ‘practice as macrogenetics’, the project wants to further research into creative processes, called theatre genetics. This contribution has the intention to expand the scope of genetics to other forms of performing arts than (text-driven) theatre.

Elvira Crois holds an MA degree in Theatre and Film Studies from the University of Antwerp. From 2015-2017 she worked as a socio-cultural worker in Schaarbeek, Brussels. She is an organising member of the interuniversity doctoral course “What does it mean to be a researcher in 21st century Academia?” and co-president of the informal body of doctoral students of the department of literature.

Panel 2. The institution: on exclusions

Kirsten Hawson (University of Alberta)

Navigating structural problems of returning to university mid-career

After 35 years in the business and over 15 years of coaching, I found myself in an odd predicament; I was mid-life, mid-career and unfulfilled. I loved my job and the work I was doing but something was missing. One of my goals when moving to Canada had been to secure a job as an accent coach on TV shows and I was now working with a number of Hollywood production companies, yet I found myself seeking more. I began professional development courses and participated in a number of voice and acting workshops, which led to my decision to go back to university and obtain a terminal degree. While I do not regret the decision, I was not prepared for the challenges I would face.

Before the 2000s, many UK drama schools did not give GPAs; it was a pass/fail system While most universities in North America have GPA entrance allowances under the Guidelines of Life Achievement, this does not directly translate into allowances within the funding models. Without a GPA, scholarships can be, and are routinely, denied. If the drama department itself offers the candidate funding, it is not at all guaranteed because of scholarship GPA guidelines. “Life achievement” does not apply here. Professionals leave successful and lucrative positions to change their career paths because they feel directionless and unmotivated only to face undue challenges when trying to re-enter the university system.

These days, a number of theatrical voice pedagogies are taking a more neuroscientific approach which complicates funding matters even further. The dissemination of interdisciplinary information is essential to successful research, yet departments are reticent to communicate with each other. Keeping artistic disciplines on the cutting edge of ethical creativity should be encouraged. We must look at the fast-paced, shifting landscape of the arts and develop a better support system for those returning to university mid-career

Bio

Kirsten is a British/Canadian vocal coach and performer who has clients in multiple cities around the world. Her current base is in Edmonton, Alberta where she is completing her Masters in Fine Arts in Drama specialising in Theatre Voice Pedagogy. Kirsten obtained her BA degree at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in Acting. She has worked in theatre, film, voice-overs and TV as well as hosted English language TV shows whilst working in South Korea. Currently, Kirsten balances her studies and coaching with being an active session singer.

Her rich teaching profile has seen her secure positions at The Institute for Creative Arts in Seoul, South Korea and the Sarah McLachlan School of Music in Vancouver, Canada. More recently she has been running a successful performance studio, KCH Studios. (www.KCHstudios.com). Recent professional development includes Linklater, Fitzmaurice and Knight-Thompson Speech work (KTS). Kirsten is an active member of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association.

Gabriel Vivas-Martínez (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)

Actors ‘as researchers’?Reflecting on what actors-researchers can bring to Academia.

In this performative lecture, I will reflect on the importance and the potential institutional impact of having more actors / performers in Academia. As an actor, I have come across a wide variety of texts reflecting on the role of the actors in the creative processes of devising and staging of a play. Also, I have found different papers and academic texts related to our physical and vocal training, acting methods, coaching techniques, casting requirements, the importance of the actors ‘as researchers’  in devising processes… but what does it happen when we, the actors, are the researchers? What and how are we supposed to research? And, as part of Universities’ staff… what can we contribute with? 

Drawing from my own experience as a researcher and Applied Drama facilitator, I will reflect on how my actor training has influenced my research, arguing that my practical and technical education has contributed to enriching my academic writing. I will argue that academics with an actor’s training background can bring important and valuable inputs and ways of doing Academia. Specifically, I will draw on Marc Duby and Paul Alan Barker’s concept of ‘Embodied Knowledge’ (2017) and Maiya Murphy, Jon Foley Sherman and Claire Canavan’s ideas on collaboration and ensemble work to define those inputs and the ways of working that we could contribute with. I will argue that the presence of actors in Universities, and the dynamics that our work can bring, could constitute forms of institutional critique and could open new possibilities towards an institutional reorganisation. Thinking of the precarious nature of the new university, my argument is that it is important to start reflecting on the challenges and possibilities of academia to produce and share knowledge in more embodied and collaborative ways, as an act of resistance to the precarity conditions that might influence our future (and present) research careers.

Bio

Gabriel Vivas-Martínez is an actor, facilitator, and researcher. He holds a BA (Hons) with distinction in Drama by the Superior Dramatic Art School of Castilla & León (Spain). He has experience designing and implementing Applied Drama and Voice/Body Expression projects with young people with disabilities, young migrants and refugees, Roma community and LGBTIQ+ young people. He also has worked as a trainer of youth workers, teachers, and educators in countries such as The Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Romania, South Africa, and the UK. He holds an MA in Artistic, Literary and Cultural Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid and an MA in Applied Theatre (Drama for the Community and Drama Education) by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama - University of London. He is currently studying his PhD in Central, researching the connections between Applied Drama, Gender Performativity and Sociological Paradigms.

Becky Moses (Independent)

The Potential in the Performative: Queer Performance Practice-as-Research Disrupting Hetero/Cisnormativity in UK Higher Education

This paper emerges from a critical concern regarding the experiences of LGBTQIA+ students in UK Higher Education. Contemporary educational research suggests that these students are subjected to verbal and physical homophobic, biphobic, transphobic and queerphobic discrimination, violence and exclusion (Ellis, 2009; Grimwood, 2017; Stonewall, 2018; University of Birmingham, 2018; University of Cambridge, 2019). Whilst certain institutions have attempted to mitigate these experiences through the implementation of inclusive policy and curricula, research indicates that 31% of UK Higher Education institutions do not have policies which protect LGB students and 50% do not have policies which protect transgender students (Stonewall, 2018). Inclusive curricula often emphasises a politics of identity, contributing to essentialist ideology and positioning the student as the subject of discrimination and violence. These inquiries also indicate the inadequacy of institutionalised epistemologies and methodologies to document and represent these experiences.

This paper therefore appeals to queer approaches to educational research, insisting upon affective, embodied and experiential epistemologies and contesting established notions of ‘evidence.’ Through an interdisciplinary, multi-mode and multi-method approach to queer performance practice-as-research, I examine the experiences of twelve LGBTQIA+ postgraduate students at the University of Cambridge. Through queer performance workshops we produced an ‘archive of the ephemeral’ (Muñoz, 1996 in Halberstam, 2005: 161). Using these ephemera, I created a short performance which I share alongside this paper. If popular culture is indeed ‘the stage where we rehearse our identities’ (Muñoz, 2009: 104) then queer performance practice-as-research might allow insight into these experiences, together with the meanings and feelings embedded in these experiences.

This queer performance practice-as-research inquiry is therefore concerned with potentiality: the potential of queer performance practice to disrupt heteronormative and cisnormative ideology; the potential of queer practice-as-research to resist institutionalised epistemologies and methodologies; and the potential of queer performance practice-as-research to document and represent the experiences of sexually and gender non-conforming students in UK Higher Education.’

Bio

Becky Moses is a queer and genderqueer poet, facilitator and researcher. They are a founding member of grassroots collective London Queer Writers and have performed in venues including the Lyric Hammersmith, the Roundhouse Theatre, the Museum of Cambridge, TEDx and Sofar Sounds. As a poet, Becky uses queer approaches to writing for performance to explore significant moments within the political and activist history of the LGBTQIA+ community. Their poetry blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political, often touching upon the concepts of relationality, kinship and belonging.

Keynote speech: Dr Royona Mitra (Brunel)
 

Agitating the Futures of Dance Studies

As university educators we find ourselves in a particularly rife moment having to operate in an increasingly hostile global climate of xenophobia and racism. The enormous responsibilities that we bear in this moment,  and the crucial roles that we must play to ‘educate, agitate and organise’ (Ambedkar) our students into compassionate, committed, and critically driven citizens, is not lost on us. In this presentation I use key case studies from my own recent research projects to ruminate on the activist potentials of dance studies education. I consider what training and nurturing ‘accomplices, not allies’ (Indigenous Action Media, 2014) would look like in and for our discipline. And I advocate for antiracism with its focus on dialectics and antagonism, over diversity initiatives and their fondness for friendly pluralism, as ways of agitating the futures of dance studies by dismantling the dominant whiteness of our field. 

Bio

Royona Mitra is the author of Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Palgrave; 2015), which was awarded the 2017 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award by the Dance Studies Association (DSA) and the 2016 Runner-up for the New Career Research in Theatre/Performance Prize by TaPRA. She is Reader in Dance and Performance Cultures at Brunel University London where she is also Associate Dean of Equality and Diversity for the College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences. 

Royona’s scholarship contributes to discourses on new interculturalism, antiracism and decolonialities in dance and theatre studies. She has published in Performance Research Journal, Dance Research Journal, Feminist Review, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and has contributed to several edited anthologies on performance, cultures and embodiments. She has recently completed the British Academy funded ‘Contemporary Dance and Whiteness’ project alongside Simon Ellis (Coventry) and Arabella Stanger (Sussex), which focused on interrogating racism in contemporary dance in the UK. Royona is also a subpanel member for Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies for REF2021.

Film

Lorena Cervera Ferrer  (UCL)

#PrecarityStory

A day in the life of a precarious female academic worker

30 minutes (UK / Spain)

What do a cleaner and an academic have in common? #PrecarityStory follows an ordinary day in the life of Isabel, a cleaner, hourly-paid lecturer, and researcher in the same British university. Her story stands as an example of the increasing casualisation of university labour and its human consequences. The film raises the issue of the precarious situation of these workers and fuels the ongoing public debate on the effects of neoliberal policies in British higher education.

In a recent report, the University and College Union discloses that 71,000 teachers are employed as ‘atypical academics’ in the United Kingdom. The majority of these casual workers are on hourly-paid fixed-term contracts, which means that 45% of the time invested in preparing for teaching is not paid for. More than half of these casual workers have more than two jobs, struggle to make ends meet, believe their mental health is deteriorating, and cannot make long term financial commitments or family plans.

Isabel is a 46-year-old worker from Southern Europe in an elite British institution, and one of these ‘atypical academics.’ The fact that, in a given day, Isabel goes up and down in the university social ladder makes her situation a sophisticated vehicle for the story-telling. Through Isabel’s various jobs and interaction with others, the little known reality of the academic precariat is exposed. Though focussed on the labour conditions of precarious academics, the film disrupts the traditional boundaries of class attached to different jobs demonstrating the need for solidarity amongst all ranks of employees. #PrecarityStory shows how a cleaner and a university teacher have more in common than is commonly assumed.

Bio

Lorena Cervera received a BA in Journalism from the University of Valencia (2008) and a Masters in Innovation and Quality in Television Production from Pompeu Fabra University (2009). In 2014, she was awarded with a scholarship by Ibermedia to complete a Diploma in Creative Documentary at the University of Valle, in Colombia. She has worked as cinematographer and editor of non-fiction films, including Dr. Moisès Broggi (TV3, 2010), I wasn’t always dressed like this (D-AEP, 2014), and Changing of the Guard (Telesur, 2018), and has taught documentary filmmaking workshops at the University of Essex. She makes independent documentaries that explore women’s issues through collaborative practices, including Pilas (2019) and #Precarity Story (still under production). Her films have been shown in film festivals, art galleries, conferences, and cinemas. Currently, she is doing a practice-based PhD in Film Studies at UCL and works as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster.

Notes
Intersections 2020 was organised by PhD candidates Kate Duffy and Bojana Janković, with support from Tony Fisher and Kate Pitt. Thank you to site and catering staff and student ambassadors for helping us run this event smoothly.

Welcome: Dr Tony Fisher (RCSSD) and the Conference Committee

Keynote – Practice Research: Artist and Activist.

Professor Anna Birch (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland)

Thursday 18^th January – 10:15-11:30 – Embassy Theatre

Respondent: Dr. Amanda Stuart Fisher (RCSSD)

Theatre, performance and drama share their own taxonomy, genealogy and vocabulary. As participants in this area of debate and knowledge production we are fortunate that the particular ecology we inhabit offers both dynamism and vitality. At the intersection of seemingly disparate research fields Practice Research can perhaps build bridges to make evident and visible the intersection between past events and our preoccupations in the present. What might be learnt about our lives now if we consider how three apparently disparate foci intersect e.g. the role of archival saving as performing erasure (Schneider, 2003, Taylor, 2003) and forge links with the #NO GREY AREA campaign and examples of direct action profiled in the 100-year anniversary events #VOTE100? In a recent book review by Jaqueline Rose on Women and Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard the notion of parades is evoked. Since processions, pageants and parades underscore much of my thinking and my ‘living monuments’ methodology (Birch 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018) Beard’s manifesto provides a context for my provocation:

‘Beard is describing the poison of patriarchy as it drips into the body politic of what parades under the banner of civilisation.’ http://bit.ly/2jLd6Vl (Accessed 28 November 2017)

www.fragmentsandmonuments.com

Anna coordinated the PhD programme at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland from 2010-2017 as Research Lecturer, Drama. In 2015, she was made a Professor of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

She was keynote and facilitator for AHRC Research Network Memory, Music and Movement, Cape Breton University, Canada (October 2017) and Recovering Women’s Past: New Epistemologies, New Ventures University of Edinburgh, IASH and Institut Francais Ecosse (2016). Anna presented ‘The Wollstonecraft Live Experience!’ at Mary Wollstonecraft: Life Work and Legacy Conference, University of Hull and Hull City of Culture (March 2017). ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Trail Blazer to Parliament’ in Women’s Voices and Parliament (eds) John Vice (Hansard, House of Lords) and Maggie Inchley will be published in early 2018 to celebrate VOTE100.

The Women’s History Network annual Community History Project prize (sponsored by The History Press) Highly Commended March of Women 2016. Her short film MARCH (2016) was screened at the House of Commons for Women’s History Month and UTOPIA festival, Somerset House, London, UK http://www.walkingartistsnetwork.org/walking-women-at-somerset-house/. She is co-editor with Professor Katharine Cockin (University of Essex) Performance-Research-History: Pageants and Pioneers from Hrotsvit to Women’s Suffrage Drama (pending).

Anna is an external examiner for the Theatre Arts, Education and Deaf Studies (TAEDS), BA (Hons) at University of Reading and the MA Costume, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK.

PANEL 1: Oversharing

Thursday 18^th January 2018 – 11:50AM-13:20PM – Embassy Theatre

Revealing the Invisible: The politics of sharing lived experiences of ‘addiction’ and ‘recovery’.Cathy Sloan

My research is bound up in theatre-making practices that, in turn, are bound up in practices of recovery and lived experiences of addiction. Many of these practices have, traditionally, involved anonymity and confidentiality, particularly in relation to the Eleventh Tradition of the Twelve-Step programme that states, ‘Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films’ (NA, 1976). Yet, there seems to be a growing trend more recently in public promotion of the 12 Steps, such as Russell Brand’s Recovery (2017) and posters advertising Alcoholics Anonymous in underground stations (seen at Swiss Cottage station, October 2017).

Simultaneously, the sharing of lived experiences that emerge through the creative process of my theatre-practice contain autobiographical details that are perhaps not for public consumption, or at least require explicit permission from collaborators and a critical evaluation as to the purpose of revealing these narratives. This becomes particularly pertinent when adopting a position of ‘alongsideness’ during practice, whereby control and power is shared with co-collaborators.

The doing and sharing of my research, therefore, involves a messy mediation of what can, cannot, should or should not be mentioned in its dissemination beyond the immediate group with whom it is initially created. This paper reflects upon a recent example of my practice to explore the politics involved in deciding how and what to reveal.

Cathy 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.

Ethical border zones: the tortured female refugee body as performer/ victim activist.Rebecca Hayes Laughton

Ethical border zones: the tortured female refugee body as performer/ victim / activist
“You will be asked for proof of your story: we know our “proof”
is our bodies: it will be hard for you to explain.” – dialogue from Advice written by Refugee Women’s Voices drama group, June 2016

Should refugee performers share stories of their degradation and physical abuse publically as a performance? Does the theatre space enable radical physical encounters that challenge and/or reimagine discriminatory refugee women identities? Or are such performances gratuitous and invasive, “reductive and potentially re-violating” (Salverson 2001)? This paper explores physical performance practices that foreground these stories and experiences, and interrogates if and how such practice provides visibility for and representation of refugee women on their own terms as they campaign for their human rights to be respected and for social change. Following feminist geographer Doreen Massey’s theories of space as an active, political concept where our social relations are a “power geometry” of “domination and subordination” the session will suggest ways we might begin to assess the effect of the tortured female body as a co-ordinate within a public performance space, and whether theatre can provide a holding form in which to host these negotiations around an embodied feminist aesthetic of political agency, visibility and power. Drawing on the ideas of Judith Butler, Athena Athanasiou and Imogen Tyler around precarity, dispossession and the abject this presentation paper features excerpts of personal testimony and performance case studies, and illicits the views of the intersections audience. We shall begin to evaluate whether shows including women victims of trauma and torture performing their stories are morally and ethically unacceptable, or a radical performance practice that resists oppressive and/or pitying narratives.

Drama Director at Women for Refugee Women (www.refugeewomen.co.uk) in London, running weekly drama sessions at the Southbank Centre. Drama facilitator at Rewrite, who use drama and art to welcome newly arrived teenagers to London (www.facebook.com/RewriteInfo/). Producer for Arts Council funded school theatre project Hidden exploring how teenagers in Britain welcome refugees, and touring show Borderline, a satire of the Calais refugee camp devised and performed by refugee and European performers.

Voicing Domestic Abuse Against Women through Digitized Theatre in India. Nivedita Gokhake

According to BBC NEWS ASIA, “About once every five minutes an incident of domestic violence is reported in India, under its legal definition of ‘cruelty by husband or his relatives”. As per the statistics by National Crime Records Bureau of India, In year 2013, 309546 crimes were reported against women. Unfortunately, the numbers are still on rise but this is a statistical overview of how ‘domestic abuse’ in India is very much an existing issue that definitely needs to be voiced. Can this voice be lent through digital theatre? Can theatre prove to be an effective medium of articulating domestic abuse?

Drama is an aesthetical manifestation of truth that is contrived through ‘experience’. As an expression, theatre is responsible for reproducing the archetype of this ‘truth’ that is experienced by an individual. This paper hence aims at studying the possibilities of utilizing the medium of digitized theatre to increase awareness about domestic abuse and develop a range of interactive – digital channels within the Indian communities for a wider reach of this issue. This study will also examine a practice based theatre model titled, ‘Tejomaya’ (to enlighten) that vocalizes the testimonies of victims of domestic abuse through conducting extensive theatre workshops.

These activities comprise of physical exercises that are extemporized and further processed digitally to reach to a synthesis of building a performance. The core motive of this model is to produce a performance by creating accounts of real situations and establishing a process of psychoanalysis through digitization. This paper hence analyses the utilization of digital theatre to enhance the articulation of social issues in a broader and truer sense by inculcating the idea of fighting this issue, as women, men and especially as humans.

PANEL 2: Embarrassing Bodies

Thursday 18^th January 2018 – 14:30-16:30PM – Embassy Theatre 

Embarrassing Utopias: Locating Hope in Homophobia.Joe Parslow

What does it mean to be committed to hope in an age of increasing homophobia? What do understandings and images (or imaginings) of utopia really have to offer in light of the quotidian lived experience of being unsafe on the streets for queer bodies?

My research commits itself, however embarrassingly, to utopia as a viable project and a valid form of social critique. José Muñoz, in his compelling exploration of queer utopias, notes that “social theory that invokes the concept of utopia has always been vulnerable to charges of naïveté, impracticality, or lack of rigour” (Muñoz, 2009: 10). However, drawing from writers such as Fiona Buckland, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, and Muñoz himself, this paper makes the case for utopia not only as an imagining of another world, but as an active critique of the present.

Starting from a critical understanding that reports of homophobic and transphobic crime is on the rise in the UK, this paper argues that, more than ever, utopia is an essential form of survival for queer bodies. Focusing on a drag performance which imagines utopia (and demands we imagine utopia), I argue that these imaginings offer not just an alternative worldview in the face of homophobia, but an active critique of the increasingly phobic straight present. Furthermore, in imagining utopia, these performances offer hope (critical hope) as a starting point, a place from which we can stand up straight (or queer) in the face of violence, and demand a better world.
 

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 scene in London and beyond.

Playing ‘Yindao’ in China.Chengyu Tan

Yindao’, in Chinese means vagina, an unsayable word, which has also suggested an unspeakable gendered experience of women in China. On the other side of the world, The Vagina Monologues(1996), written and initially performed by American playwright Eve Ensler has quickly expanded to a global campaign and performed internationally. Activists in China are also inspired by this play. Journey of The Vagina Monologues in China sets off from a small stage in Guangdong Museum of Arts in 2003. From then on, the play has been brought to different cities in China and has been adapted into several versions both by official theatres and non-governmental organizations. The most recent performance is a bilingual version staged in February 2017 in Shanghai. Looking closely at the production history of The Vagina Monologues in mainland China over the past fifteen years, I will focus on how the production history has formed as an important part of history of feminist movement in China, how it interrogated the progress that feminists and non-governmental women’s group has made in opposing gender-based violence, raising awareness of female body and sexual autonomy, and how feminist movement in China is opening up other area to enhance human rights overall. And most importantly, investigating who and what has been challenged by this women enlightenment.
Chengyu Tan is a PhD student at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests lie in the area of queer theory, performance and Chinese studies. Part time research student at Central.

From the Pretty Orifice of a Morphing Creature: pleasure and pain in Hoax Theatre’s absurdist eco comedy Stuck.Jillian Wallis

This paper critically analyses the creative process and performance of Stuck, devised by physical theatre feminists Hoax. It will frame the work as absurdism for our times and draw upon rehearsal documentation and interviews with Hoax actors and guest director Lucy Hopkins, recent thinking on moral decline by activist Naomi Klein (2017), and Martin Heidegger’s notion of the Call of Conscience (1927; 2010).

I will discuss the intrinsic value of shock to tickle an audience member’s own conscience by playing with bodily titillation, revulsion and compassion. How do playful artists whose work is rooted in a Philippe Gaulier ‘pleasure of the performer’ approach, arrive at and then utilize images, text or action that reverberates viscerally within performance? In Stuck, all three characters enjoy physical restrictions – enormous red lifebuoy shaped plastic breasts, unnecessary hiker’s walking sticks, a circular rubber inner tube instead of arms. These adornments have been chosen or unwittingly absorbed, implying a current feeling of obligation to take on and into our bodies. In the performance, a painfully believable, wet shining turd is strained from the anus of a fussy woman; another pretends she is a dog humping her mistress’ leg to a climax. The baseness, the barrenness of being human is here: all we have, and all we are.

I will argue that Stuck is concerned with similar themes of the crisis of self, the relationship between humanity and nature, anxiety and authenticity, as the early male absurdist playwrights such as Beckett and Ionesco but it’s knowingly gendered imagery and use of satire offers a particular kind of shock tactic. A feminist existential drama is here redrawing the lines and boundaries of what is permissible, let alone applaudable, on stage: a place where codes of practice are still mostly authored under a male gaze. As witness to Stuck’s efforts to find form, I will discuss how the Hoax process combined Gaulier’s pleasure of ‘le jeu’, with the pain of yearning for political change.

Jillian Wallis is theatre maker and director, based at the University of Greenwich where she is a Senior Lecturer in Drama. Her research interests focus on physical theatre practices and collaborative forms. Recent projects include The Pub Under the Stairs, featuring live performance and film investigating how we can create a contemporaneous ‘real’ and digital world that feels intact (ACE funded, 2016). Directed and toured Reverie, a mime production with a live musical score. So Pleased To Meet You was a performance she co created around fantasy and virtual interconnectivity (DRHA conference, 2014). Jillian has published articles in the journals Body, Space and Technology, and Scene.

Bodies as Sites of Struggle: Embodying Shock and Chaos in the Caring Teaching Practice.Christina Vasileiou

This paper will demonstrate and explore the “dark” aspect of support and care in educational settings, an aspect that is very often censored. By employing a performance perspective, I will focus on bodies and on how these may perform care in schools.

Education is traditionally and conventionally concerned with support, communication, and fulfillment, ideally for both sides of educators and students, operating within discourses that express optimistic and bright visions of development and overall thrive.

In this presentation, however, I will present a different but equally existing, and not delightful aspect of the teaching practice. By drawing on my personal experiences, testimonies and self reflections on my work as a teaching assistant and researcher in SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) and PRU (Pupil Referral Unit) settings, I will explore the operation of the teacher’s body in ways that involve pain, anger, and dealing with distress and physical violence. I will, therefore, unfold stories of frustration, humiliation and occasionally, chaos, shock, and panic.

I will go into areas of physical contact of pain and violence, and contact with human products like saliva, urine, and feces, in order to show how images, sounds, and sensations may sometimes linger and push the physical and mental states of teachers to the verge of despair. I will eventually, juxtapose these dark states of performing care with educational visions of light and happiness, and critically examine how these binaries may operate together, when big parts of these practices are self-censored and/or omitted from public discussions. I will finally, use these reflections in order to ponder on the truth and meaning of educational practice and myself as a teacher and practitioner, and also to consider how performance theory and practice may enhance teachers’ relationship to their caring role.

Christina Vasileiou is a PhD student in Drama at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her research is looking into the performance of care in educational settings and explores care as an embodied part of the teaching practice. Christina holds an MA in Applied Theatre with Distinction (2014) from Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She shares her time between doing research, teaching in primary education, both in mainstream and SEND sectors, and making theatre with children and communities. She has founded and runs an arts collective for London based mothers from Greece.

PANEL 3: Politically Incorrect

Thursday 18^th January 2018 – 14:30-16:30PM – Rehearsal Room 7 

Intersections between theatre practice, disability and phenomenology: Debating the lived experience of professional directors and disabled actors. Nina Michelle Worthington

Intersections between theatre practice, disability and phenomenology are complex yet have fast become relevant in considering the work of professional practitioners. The call to increase the participation of D/deaf and disabled actors in theatre is widening; long-standing public debate surrounding casting choices has been bolstered by external pressure from funding bodies. Arts Council England’s shift in strategy has made public the failure of all its funded theatres to adequately represent disabled people in their workforce. At ground-level directors and disabled actors must consider their response to this, yet the arena for discussing disability and theatre is fraught with contention. Theatre policy must be aligned with the law, insensitive directorial decisions are laid bare in the media, and even language around ‘disability’ is, as ever, ambiguous. For some directors and disabled actors increased opportunity to work together will demand vulnerability, exploring new territory. Impactful shifts in strategy require a shift in individuals; difference must acknowledged and accepted, casting choices expanded, access needs met, and social and historical intricacies understood within the culture of each theatre workplace. However, it seems that some directors and disabled actors navigate their experiences of theatre practice and disability in silence; diversity politics have rendered fears, concerns, and misunderstandings raised in practice with disabled actors unmentionable.

I am a second year PhD student at Newman University and Liverpool Hope researching the personal experience of theatre practice and disability among professional directors and actors in theatres funded by Arts Council England. This research builds upon a practice based masters dissertation from the University of Birmingham in directing, looking at working with Deaf and disabled actors, investigating the directing process and theatrical interpretation. My background is in media production and community theatre work and you can find me on twitter at @NinaMichelleW and via email at wort400@newman.ac.uk.

Silent soldier will laugh: performing the taboos in post conflict society.Maja Milatovic-Ovadia

On the 24th March 2016 Radovan Karadžić a war-time leader and a supreme commander of the Bosnian Serb Army was sentenced by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal to 40 years of imprisonment for the genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the region the verdict was received with opposing reactions emphasizing once again how extensive is the division within the society and highlighting the issues of institutionalised genocide denial.

Through close analyses of theatre project The Voice, A Day of an Unlucky Man, devised by ethnically segregated youth in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this paper aims to understand how comedy functions as a vehicle to address social taboos and support the complex process of reconciliation in the circumstances where one couldn’t tackle the issues of war crimes and segregation in a straightforward and direct manner. The study takes a cross-disciplinary approach to research, drawing from theory of reconciliation, applied theatre practice and comedy studies.

I am a freelance theatre director, drama lecturer and PhD researcher at Royal School of Speech and Drama. My research interest includes the use of humour and comedy within applied theatre practice in post war societies. I directed over 20 productions in Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia and UK. Previously I was Associate Director for New Writing – NADA Project at National Theatre in Belgrade and Balkan Art Season at Blue Elephant Theatre. From 2009 I work in Bosnia & Herzegovina using theatre to support process of reconciliation.

Keynote – The Obscenity of Public Life.

Dr. Nina Power (Roehampton)

Friday 19^th January – 10:00-11:15 – Embassy Theatre

Respondent: Dr. Rachel Cockburn (RCSSD)

This talk addresses the paradox of contemporary politics, whereby those with the most power are permitted to behave in the most obscene ways, whereas those without it must be policed in all ways (literally and metaphorically, both internally and externally). Drawing on Angela Nagle’s insight that the right and alt-right ‘won’ the battle for the counterculture, and took over its use of ‘subversive’ tactics such as shock and irony, this paper will argue instead for a culture of left daring that takes seriously the dominance of the obscene as well as new tactics of resistance.

Nina is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton and is the author of many articles on philosophy and politics.

PANEL 4: Dangerous Methods

Thursday 19^th January 2018 – 11:30 – 13:00PM – Embassy Theatre

Trans* Bodies, Queer Movements: Queer Trans* Methodological Approaches to Movement Practice.J Danielle

This paper is an excerpt and overview of my ongoing sustained independent project that will explore a queer trans* methodology for movement practice through a trans* reading of Sondra Fraleigh’s concept of the body as a corporeal artefact and a queer approach to trans* embodiment. Rigid, cisnormative forms of performance, especially clear in codified dance forms like ballet, make no space for bodies and identities that exist outside of normative optics, leaving trans* and queer-identified people unable to contribute their bodies and approaches to the larger cultural fabric of dance and movement. With more trans* people coming forward politically and socially every day, now, more than ever, we must begin to have a more complex conversation about what trans* bodies and identities mean for our notions of gender, body, and identity in performance. Queer and transgender perspectives, including non-binary, cross-gender, and gender non-conforming perspectives, demand a re-evaluation of the assumptions underlying performance practices as well as new forms that make space for the experiences of trans* bodies and identities. Unfortunately, conversations around trans* methodologies and performance practices are not happening enough in either practice-based environments or academic environments, and trans* voices and experiences continue to be silenced in favour of cisgender voices and experiences. It is my hope that, through calling attention to a conversation that we need to have but are not having, an investigation into how trans* bodies interact with these cisnormative ideals in movement and dance may begin to unfold at the level of both theory and practice. Trans* perspectives have the potential to benefit a wide variety of theoretical discourses and performance practices, but only as long as these conversations are marked and explored in our rehearsal rooms and in our academic institutions.

J Danielle is pursuing her MFA research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Prior to her MFA, she worked and trained as a performer and as a movement and theatre instructor in the United States. Her current masters research explores queer and trans* movement practices, queer and trans* methodologies, queer trans* embodiment, and the relationship between the body and culture.

Towards a (New) Dramaturgy of Knowledge.Clio Unger

This paper aims to examine one of the ‘no-go’ methodological areas in theatre and performance studies by analyzing the epistemological limits of the ‘case studies’. Critiquing the case study as a widely accepted representational device of knowledge creation, the paper rethinks current modes of producing and performing knowledge in our field.

Operating under the assumption that there is a discrepancy between the post-structural conception of performative knowledge and the still largely positivistic (and increasingly historicist) approach to producing stable knowledge in the humanities, this paper proposes a preliminary analysis of dramaturgies of producing knowledge in an academic context. By reading the case study within its logic of representation, the paper asks how can contemporary performance studies produce knowledge without adhering to a preconceived notion of knowledge as a subjective internalization of represented objectivity.

Ultimately, the paper works towards a re-thinking of dramaturgy as a mode through which a performative understanding of knowledge can be methodologically implemented in theatre and performance research.

This a co-written paper:

Clio Unger is a first-year PhD student at RCSSD, having transferred to London from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She holds an MA in dramaturgy from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, where she wrote her MA thesis on the experience and construction of intimacy in contemporary performance. Clio has been awarded IFTR’s New Scholars Prize in 2015, and her essay has been published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. Clio also works as a freelance dramaturg and is the editorial assistant for the Contemporary Theatre Review.

Amir Farjoun is a second-year PhD student at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He holds an MA from Tel-Aviv University. He has co-created and performed in various theatre and performance works including Saddam Hussein – A Mystery Play (2011, featured in Theater Der Welt Festival, Mannheim, 2014), The General and the Sea (Hazira, Jerusalem, 2015) and Debriefing Session II (by Public Movement, Guggenheim Museum, 2016). Amir also serves as the Curriculum’s Officer on the Board of the Doctoral Theatre Students Association at CUNY.

A 20min paper (between article and lecture-performance): diagramming censorship(s) across research-in-writing.Paula Caspão & Ingrid Cogne

We are currently going through the protocol-phase of “writing up” research in the frame of the art-based research project Six Formats1 – revisiting its mains concerns, spotting their fragilities and further possibilities. More accurately, we have been trying to articulate an article that would be able to integrate its own ‘presen(ific)ation’: an article that asserts its own writing as (also) a mode of (half) scripting its upcoming encounters and circulations – with and across its future audiences. We are assuming the redundancy of the formulation articulating an article to emphasize the importance of considering the particular ways in which an article produces particular (re)articulations (junctions, conjunctions, t-junctions): how it assembles-resembles-dissembles.

What does it take for a particular piece of research to be (re)articulated, (re)mediated – ready to be (re)mise en jeu? This question entails the knotty relation between discourse and action, i.e. the tension between the actions (movements, gestures, positions, architectural/temporal dramaturgies) and the discursive uses required for the ‘presen(ific)ation’ of a piece of research-in-writing to happen. Yet the discursive dimension alone brings in another set of tensions: between writing and saying/telling; between writing/saying/telling/reading and leaving unwritten, unsaid, untold, unread, misread…

Across these sets of discursive and physical trans-actions – as we were trying to figure out the kinds of (re)mises en jeu our article should be able to allow or disavow – several forms of censorship became manifest. We found it useful to cast that censorship in terms of (im)permeability: by spotting what can (or not) pass; what gets caught in passing; different ways of trespassing; of denying passage; by what/whom, by which means, with what goals/effects for what/whom. As we were reenacting scores of ‘DOs’ and ‘DO NOTs’ from a previous period, a series of ‘NO-GOs’ – but also of ‘TO-GOs’ – clearly emerged. Our proposal is to present(ificate) a diagram of those tensions-movements.

Paula Caspão is a researcher and transversal artist based in Paris. PhD in philosophy (epistemology / aesthetics), University of Paris-10, currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Theatre Studies (Lisbon University) / Contemporary History Institute (New University of Lisbon); Visiting Scholar at the Tisch School of the Arts / New York University.

Ingrid Cogne is an artist, facilitator, and researcher working across choreography, visual arts and academia. PhD in Practice, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, cotutelle with the Doctoral School of Human and Social Sciences, University of Lille. Currently postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she co-leads Six Formats with F. Thun-Hohenstein.

PANEL 5: Persona non grata

Thursday 18^th January 2018 – 14:30-16:30PM – Rehearsal Room 7 

Documenta 14: Subject or Agent of Censorship?Sozita Goudouna

Documenta 14, Europe’s leading exhibition of contemporary art that takes place every five years in the city of Kassel, selected Athens as a second venue, recalling the country’s historic role as the cradle of democracy, currently threatened by austerity and the strict policies of the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This year’s edition attempted to stress the definition of what may constitute an artwork and to affect change through art by selecting works that criticized hegemonies of any kind, fascistic regimes, patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, so as to protect any difference and the political Other: the refugee, the excluded, the subaltern et al. Documenta’s curatorial team announced their decision to cancel the planned performance “Auschwitz on the Beach” by the Italian social commentator and media activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, amid intense criticism and condemnation by Jewish organizations and cultural leaders in Germany, who saw it as an attempt to relativize the Holocaust. The piece attempted to associate the conditions of immigrants arriving on Italy’s shores to the suffering of Europe’s Jews during the Nazi period. ‘We respect those who feel offended by the title of Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s poem,” Paul B. Preciado, the curator of Documenta’s public program, said announcing the decision to cancel the performance. “We do not want to add to their sorrow and pain.’ Parallel to this there was a second controversy that concerned an obelisk by the Nigerian artist Olu Oguibe, that was denounced as “degenerate art” by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. “Degenerate art” was the term used by the Nazis in the 1930s to justify banning works that didn’t conform to the Nazis’ views about art: Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism, New Objectivity and Fauvism. Olu Oguibe’s obelisk evokes the tragedy of the Nigerian civil war and its pedestal included the quotation: “I was a stranger and you cared for me” in four languages.The paper will examine these two cases of political censorship and Documenta’s approach to the local contemporary art practice in Greece in conjunction with Paul Preciado’s decision to cancel a large section of the project “Combat Breathing” curated by Sozita Goudouna two day before its presentation on the 14th of July. The projects that were cancelled included a performance research project by Liz Magic Laser and the participation of local artists that had been working since January 2017 and a performance by Irini Miga and Phoebe Giannisi as well as screening by Kelly Nipper, Raqs Media Collective, Jesper Just, Valie Export, John Latham, Jenny Marketou and Nikos Navridis and installation “Breathing Booth” by the artist Peggy Kliafa. “Combat Breathing” took as a starting point the “shortness of breath” derived from the experience of political pressure and economic austerity in Greece during the last years, exploring its connection with performance art and embodied politics.

Dr. Sozita Goudouna is an art theorist who developed and curated a program for “The Parliament of Bodies” at Documenta 14. She taught at New York University as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at Performa New York, the arts organisation dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of 20th century art and to generating new directions for the 21st century. Performa’s curatorial partnerships consist of a consortium of over 150 New York City cultural partners across New York City (MoMA, New Museum, Whitney, Guggenheim, Watermill Centre, Times Sq Alliance etal) and more than 42 international partners that co-organize acclaimed projects and programs with an international roster of artists (700), architects, critics, curators, and writers from across the world. She was also the consultant for the Onassis Festival NY 2016 at the Onassis Foundation USA. She holds a PhD from the University of London on the History and Theory of Modern and Contemporary Art that is regarded as the first monographic survey on Beckett’s Breath (Onassis Scholarship 2003-7) and has studied Philosophy, Theatre and Directing in London (BA, MA, Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) & Kings College London 1996- 2000). Her book on the interfaces between modernist theory, respiration and art, “Beckett’s Breath: Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts” is forthcoming by Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism) released in the US by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Discourses in Experiential performance research.Ioana-Florentina Manciu

The following text is intended to be used for an artistic performance, part of a following Ph.D. research done by myself. My name is Ioana-Florentina Manciu. I am an international scholar coming from a background based on the art of theatre acting since I was 14 years old. Now I am 28 years old – a professional actress at the National Theatre ‘Marin Sorescu’ from Craiova, Romania. I also consider myself an student, artist and researcher, searching for some answers or better said some practical questions that could help me do my craft, every time, better. Did I just say craft? Doing a practical master in directing theatre at Târgu-Mureş, Romania and at the same time a doctoral school at The National University of Theatrical Art and Cinematography ‘ I.L. Caragiale’ , Bucharest, the concept of craft becomes relative.

I started doing theatre inside of a teenager francophon local ansamble of theatre called Amifran. This year Amifran is celebrating it’s 25th edition for the international theatre festival in the city of Arad, in the west side of Romania – my hometown. This is for Amifran. I am writing (or better said, typing ) using the English language alphabet on my Acer personal computer. My mother tongue is the Romanian language and has a slightly different alphabet structure on the keyboard of my PC.

How does censorship feel in your country? Do you police language? Of course we all do, always had and probably always will. I come from a Romanian police officers family where the norms of speech and behaviour have been a present element all the time.

This letter doesn’t mean anything. This letter is being said, publicly and vocally. This letter is being performed. Could this letter be art? No, it couldn’t. This letter is my attempt in taking part of the annual Intersections Conference held at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama from Thursday the 18th and Friday the 19th of January.

2. Chatarsis. The idea of purification through pity and fear
The following thought that came inside my mind was conflict. Isn’t that something ‘normal’? Isn’t it the same as Aristotle is saying in his Poetics? About the powerful reaction of pity and fear experience and the included ‘conflict’ that shapes the theatrical atmosphere. As a pattern of creation. The pattern of conflict. Fear is usually a chemical engender for the human body, and chemicals do influence tension at the muscular level. Isn’t it?Inside a very provocative and interesting research project, Cinetic Centre of Research is analysing two hormones that are being produced in different situations of ‘imaginative’ context. Oxytocin and cortisol.

One questioned raised is Where? As in where do I still come up against blockades? Analyse and create at the same time. From this point on, we could open a discution about time and make all kinds of plans, drawing, schemes about the perception of time.
We will not lead the discution on time, but we will be starting from the term ‘performance’ associated with art and then, relating it to theatre, drama, acting, space, time, awareness, memory, emotion, sentiment, thought and practice for the embodied matter.
Structured in 8 main unmentionable ideas. The Unmentionables :

1.Mimesis. The idea of a mirror , the imitation.

2.Catharsis. The idea of purification through pity and fear.

3.Unmentionable 3 – Beginning, Middle, End.

4.The twist and reconciliation

5.Unmentionable 5 – No – beginning, Beginning, Middle, End, No – end.

6.Rasa. The idea of eight senses.

7.Mudra. The idea of imitation

8.Before 0.

Work in progress.

The mic stops.

Ioana-Florentina Manciu is a romanian actress at The National Theatre of Craiova ‘ Marin Sorescu’ , Craiova. In the present time she is working for the premiere of ‘ The Author’ by Tim Crouch, directed by Bobi Pricop. A premiere that is to be held on the 3th and 4th of November. Follow her here: https://www.facebook.com/manciuioanaflorentina/

Exchanging Artistic Assumptions: Debating Ownership and Censorship in Manchester’s “Memories of Partition” Project.Asif Majid

In September 2017, Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre partnered with Manchester Museum to deliver “Memories of Partition,” a project commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India after British rule. The project saw 10 writers of South Asian heritage commissioned to develop monologues regarding the theme of partition. Each monologue was to be performed at the Museum, the Exchange, and nearby community venues.

As one of the writers commissioned, I wrote a piece titled “Phone Call.” It began as a curse-filled rant against the transnational structural inequalities and legacy of Partition that see white British passport-holders travel hassle-free to India and Pakistan, while those of Pakistani and Indian descent are over-scrutinized when visiting India and Pakistan, respectively. Through the editing process, the protagonist, a married US citizen of Pakistani descent living in the UK, was revealed as speaking over the phone to his secret male lover. The script thus became more suggestive of his and his lover’s sexual relationship.

Unbeknownst to me until shortly before the first performance, the Exchange decided against taking my piece to two of the four community venues. Their main concern was that the piece was not appropriate for Years 9, 10, and 11; one of the venues concerned was a nearby school. This venue was confirmed after project contracts were signed, with no initial stipulation made regarding age appropriate writing. The decision was taken without consulting me, and I was given no opportunity to adapt the script for the relevant venue, despite being asked for other edits.

This presentation explores the rationale deployed by staff at the Exchange, borrowing from the script and email correspondence. I also examine what it means for decisions about an artist’s work to be taken out of their hands and what assumptions cultural institutions make when engaging with young people.

Asif Majid is a scholar-artist-educator who researches, teaches, performs, and makes work at the intersection of performance and politics, particularly in terms of devising, improvisation, and applied theatre with marginalized communities. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a self-designed BA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Global Peace Building and Conflict Management) from UMBC, earned an MA with Distinction in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University, and is pursuing a practice-based PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance at The University of Manchester.

PANEL 6: Unauthorised Personnel

Friday 19^th January 2018 – 14:00-15:30PM – Embassy Theatre

Live Art, Dead Art: Ethics, Audiences, and (Dead) Animal Bodies in Taxidermy-Performance.Francis Wilson

In contemporary Western culture, most countries have laws surrounding human bodies after death: where they can be, what can be done with them, orders and processes required or forbidden. A more vague, but almost equally sensitive (and in ways more divisive) subject is that of dead animal bodies. While ‘shocking’ the audience becomes more difficult as culture changes, the ethical treatment of animals becomes a more contentious issue.

As a taxidermist and live artist, I work with animal bodies, deconstructing and ‘re’-constructing them in front of an audience. Working with dead animal bodies in a live context offers a different confrontation with animal death than the taxidermy seen in museums. In my practice, I have always taken certain approaches both personally and with universities and venues in the name of ethics: writing ethics statements, being transparent about where I source animal bodies, offering opportunities for open discussion with audience members. Though I’ve been personally approached and criticised in private conversations with audience members, I have never experienced outrage from an audience or institution. To conclude, however, that this is due to my approaches would be an inconclusive assumption at best.

Personal beliefs aside, these tactics taken in the name of ethics do little to address or directly approach some of the more basic questions of my practice: Is my work difficult or ethically questionable? Why, and/or for whom, is it difficult? Is the difficulty ethical, or purely visceral (disgust), or do they overlap? What role does cultural context have on the supposed difficulty? Our human relationship to animals is constantly in flux, complicated by speciesism, domestication, and ecological concerns. Some of these questions may be ultimately unanswerable; Steve Baker refers to many works incorporating animal bodies not as answers to these questions but as ‘questioning entities’ themselves. As a solo practitioner, there is a large degree to which I am guessing how to most tactfully deal with the animal body issue when creating work. In this presentation, I explore my own body of work and relationships and experiences with audiences, institutions, and the dead animal body.
Francis Marion Moseley Wilson is an American live artist currently based in Glasgow, UK as a practice-based researcher at the University of Glasgow. Her practice is concerned with using elements of taxidermy to create confrontations between audiences and animal bodies. She has performed internationally, in the US, UK, Germany, and Canada.

How do we practice the end of the world?Yaron Shyldkrot

For philosopher Timothy Morton (2013) the world has ended. We can even name the date when it happened. Granted, the planet has not exploded, but according to Morton, the concept of ‘world’ is no longer operational. Metaphysically, the world is so vast and we are too enmeshed in it, that the world – at least as a concept – is no longer thinkable and no longer imaginable. This is in part due to global warming and climate change that along with melting glaciers have ‘melted our ideas of world and worlding’ (Morton 2013, 103). And what is left after this ending? For Morton it is Intimacy, an opportunity for new alliances between humans and non-humans and a loud call for an engagement with our – often unmentionable and disregarded – ecological coexistence here on Earth (Morton 2012).

In this performative presentation I seek to respond to Morton’s call. Informed by my own work as a practitioner-researcher and building on the work of Morton and Salome Voegelin, I explore how performance, and specifically sound in performance, help us to better embrace or at least reflect on our coexistence with the non-human. I will play with robotic voices and environmental sounds in order to propose how sound can draw our attention to the inaudible and inaccessible, and demonstrate (in practice) how we might speak to the non-human and listen to the environment. By reflecting on the boundaries and interrelations in this ecological coexistence, I seek to conceptualise sound as a significant performative tool that can alter and affect how and what we perceive. I will consider how sound (in performance) invites us to open ourselves up to what remains inaudible and ignored, how it can reveal other slices from our environment, and how it might help to form the new alliances Morton called for.

Yaron Shyldkrot is a practitioner-researcher undergoing a Practice-as-Research PhD at the University of Surrey, exploring the composition of uncertainty and performance in the dark. He holds an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice from RCSSD and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) and the editorial board for The Journal of Arts Writing by Students (JAWS). As a performance maker, he works as a director and dramaturg and co-founded Fye and Foul, a theatre company exploring unique sonic experiences, darkness and extremes. http://www.yaronshy.com.

Reason and Resonance and Sea Monsters: The semantic limits of conventional radio dramaturgy.Farokh Soltani Shirazi

PANEL 7: Deleted Scenes

Friday 19^th January 2018 – 14:00-15:30PM – Boardroom

Minute of Silence.Karoline Moen

Experiences of trauma are often linked to silence; to being ‘beyond’ language. This presentation questions what silence in the aftermath of trauma means and discusses ideas linked to the ‘Dream of Silence’ (Loevlie) in order to problematize the notion of silence as ‘beyond’. Situated in the aftermath of the right-wing terrorist attack in Norway in 2011 the research looks at examples of silence both as a cultural and a personal response to trauma. By asking what we mean when we speak of silence, the research examines the relation between silence and silencing and attempts to problematize the apparent binary between speech and silence. Finally, the presentation will explore the breaking of the boundaries previously discussed and the liberating potential for ‘speaking silence’ through performance text.

Karoline Moen is an MPhil/PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama where she is undertaking a research project informed by her practice as a playwright. Karoline holds an MFA in Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media from RCSSD and her work has been staged in London, Norway and at the International Theatre Festival in Malta. She is part of the writing collective Forfall and her poetry has been published in the anthology Screams and Silences by Fincham Press (2016).

The aetiology of surveillance – the structure of trauma and the grammar of the internet. Lior Lerman

Shaping up some Deviant Other: How Labouring Animals Ate Up a Queer Black Kid’s Objective Aims.Ezra Tafari Rose

PANEL 8: Paper/Performance

Friday 19^th January 2018 – 14:00-15:30PM – Rehearsal Room 7

What are you doing in there?Kiki Selioni

Dr Kiki Selioni in her post-doc research Biophysical Acting investigated the way of structuring a methodology for acting on screen through online classes. The classes, which lasted three months, with a number of actors from different counties, tested the possibility of teaching in distance, especially acting on screen, but it also tested acting on stage.

The research tried to explore in practice what the differences and the similarities are between acting on screen and acting on stage and in what way acting teachers/coaches can overcome the difficulties that distance and camera create. Moreover, these classes resulted in a performance that creates both the sense of the theatre and the screen.

While the audience will be attending a theatrical event, the performance/lecture will be also exploring the ways in which actors’ kinaesthetic experience can be improved during they act on screen. The performance-lecture presents and refers to areas out of camera’s frame that the spectators cannot ‘see’ but they remain a territory that it is crucial for actors’ training.

Keynote Speech: Images of Practice. Prof Joe Kelleher (Roehampton University)

Respondent: Amanda Stuart-Fisher (RCSSD)

Thursday 14th January 2016, 10:15AM-11:30AM – Rehearsal Room 1-2

The lecture will focus on situations of presentation, of exposition and redo, of research and working through, where this or that practice is not only shown to be done, but comes – as it were – with a practitioner’s eyes already upon it. I’m thinking of perhaps peculiar examples, recent artworks by the likes of Ragnar Kjartansson or Gisele Vienne for instance, where other people’s practices are at once rendered in their specificity and – it would appear – appropriated for an exhibition of one’s ‘own’ interests and longing. I am thinking also of theorist Isabelle Stengers’s account of an ‘ecology of practices’, whereby individual practices – in all their specificity and incompatibility – act in the world alongside each other and contribute of hat we might understand as a ‘cosmopolitical’ world-making. I’m obliged too, though, to think of how the images we make of the practices that we – and others – do, might obscure as much as they reveal, not least of the shared or collective activities that inform the historicity of our endeavours. And, not least, I’m thinking of how we present ourselves as researchers – in institutional contexts especially – and the sorts of claims to knowledge our own practices can make when rendered as image, or as performance.

PANEL 1: Practice (documenting) Research

Thursday 14^th January 2016 – 11:50AM-1:20PM – Rehearsal Room 2

My camp is not your camp. Your camp is mine: Lip-synching as a practical method of inquiry. Simon Dodi 

This paper interrogates the methods of practical inquiry undertaken as research: lip-synching and re-gesturing past performers. I will argue that lip-synching, as a method of practice, has informed as well as challenged my research trajectory. By using the performance Keep Calm and Carry on Camping (2015) presented at the Collisions: a Festival of Performance Practice as Research (RCSSD), as a case study for where practice is situated in my research. In this performance, archive footage of past camp men performing their “camp” (Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson) was projected onto my performing body. As I lip-synched sections, and as these were repeated, the audience were able to see the process of re-enactment in the performance. In considering why certain assumptions were made prior to the practical inquiry, I shall look at how lip-synching functions in the drag performer Lypsinka, as well as the more contemporary performances of the Theo Adams Company and Dickie Beau. I shall then look at what lip-synching has achieved in this research so far. Through the methods of lip-synch, how can ‘the past’ as Rebecca Schneider in Performing Remains (2001) suggests, ‘disrupt the present’ (14). By using the performance of the camp man as a case study, this paper argues overall, how the practice of lip-synching as a method of inquiry has informed, challenged, and furthered my research.

Simon Dodi is a performer and performance maker. He is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where his research is in the subject of camp, focusing specifically on the performance and performative aspects of the male camp identity. www.simondodi.com

Performance as Archive: reflections of a practitioner-researcher / researcher-practitioner. Mary-Louise Crawley 

After several years ‘in practice’ as an independent choreographer, I recently returned to academic research and am currently exploring how much weight to give to the practice elements underpinning, informing, challenging and extending the written research elements of my PhD thesis. In my practice as an artist, I define myself as a practitioner-researcher; as a PhD student, am I then a researcher-practitioner? What hierarchies between practice and research exist in this apparently simple ‘symbiosis’?

Such interrogations sit quite neatly as a mise-en-abyme of wider questions of ‘creative archive research’ (Gale & Featherstone, 2010) that I am investigating as part of my PhD research topic: namely, dance in the museum. My research questions the ontology of the museum (the archive) and the place of dance (the ephemeral) within that; this problematic of the binary notion of performance as ephemeral and archive as permanent has of course been widely investigated and questioned (Phelan,1993; Schneider, 2001; Taylor 2003; Schneider 2011). It is Schneider’s 2011 emphasis on ‘the archive as another kind of performance’ which provides a discursive framework for my own practice-based research.

The concept of archive as living performance and performance as living archive – echoing Lepecki’s ‘body as archive’ (2010) – is most interesting to me. Indeed, I argue not only for ‘practice / performance as research’ as a methodology, but also for a concept of ‘practice / performance as archive’. As a case study to illustrate this, I will look at my own practice/research with performance ensemble Avid for Ovid, whose work aims to interrogate contemporary performance as ‘living’, moving archive for the ancient Roman dance form tragoedia saltata*. For this project, where fully embodied and ‘present’ performance acts as a filter for past texts and past forms, and where a moving body becomes quite literally a living archive for an ancient, ‘dead’ choreographic form, I ask whether it is indeed possible for the moving body to simultaneously filter the past and embody the present? Can performance really be an alternative archive? If it can, what else does it reveal -to both research and to practice?

*In 2013-4, I was a participating choreographer-practitioner in a University of Oxford TORCH research project entitled ‘Ancient Dance in Modern Dancers’, exploring contemporary re-interpretations of this ancient Roman dance form. Avid for Ovid developed as an independent offshoot from this research project.”

Educated at the University of Oxford (B.A. Hons, M.St.) and trained at the Ecole Marceau in Paris, Marie-Louise began her professional performance career with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil (2003-2009). Since 2010, she has been working in the UK as an independent choreographer and dance artist with companies as diverse as Birmingham Opera Company, Marc Brew, Gary Clarke, Ballet Cymru and Rosie Kay Dance Company. Recent new work has included pieces for a Tate / ARTIST ROOMS exhibit at mac Birmingham, as well as for performance ensemble Avid for Ovid at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Marie-Louise is a PhD student at C-DaRE (Coventry University) researching dance in the museum.

Performative Lecture: Affective Documentation in Perplexpedition. Robbie Z. Wilson 

How does the documentation of your practice fuel your research? And vice versa?

The fabric of my Practice Research is woven from multiple strands; some of which are inextricable from their documentation, yet each of which cannot ever be fully documented.

My project explores the potential for performance to facilitate playful interactions between people and their everyday environments. The performance modes I employ are: spontaneous intervention in public space, interactive podcast, and performative workshop.

I have named my nascent methodology Popular Participatory Peripatetic Performance, or 4P for short. I propose a performative lecture that focuses on the intervention strand: Perplexpedition, so called because it is perplexing and it is an expedition. The presentation will explore the challenges, opportunities, and insights afforded by the processes and products of the interventions’ documentation, as well as the profound effect that this has had on the Practice Research as a whole.

The creation of videos is structurally fundamental to Perplexpedition, offering far more than mere documentation. The video editing process, a practice in its own right, has allowed me to explore my role as performer-facilitator (which I refer to using the playful neologism ‘perfilitator’) and to deploy my own intrasubjectivity, as I comment on my own performance as well as those of performer-participants (or ‘perficipants’). The resulting artworks document the live event and tease out the affective experiences of perficipants whilst introducing another ludic dimension to the practice. This dimension emerges from the dialectic interplay between my affective engagement in the moment of interaction with perficipants and that of my later interaction with the raw footage. The processes and products of documentation together drive the project forward whilst simultaneously affording both detailed analysis and dissemination of the Practice Research to audiences within the academy as well as far beyond via online platforms.

Robbie has been performing since the age of three. He has wowed crowds in circus tents with his horse-prancing skills. He has shuddered on a pylon in Jeeves & Wooster and ridden a bike in Judge John Deed. He studied stand-up comedy with Olly Double at Kent and acting with Andrea Brooks at East 15. In 2014, he embarked on a sensible research project. Within weeks, he changed his mind and now endeavours to cobble together a Ph.D. from various attempts to weave the ludicrous into everyday life.

PANEL 2: Practice (playing with) Research

Thursday 14^th January 2016 – 11:50AM-1:20PM – Rehearsal Room 3

Making ‘The Copla Musical’: Developing a PaR Methodology. Alejandro Postigo

Practice and research are inseparable in my PhD study. My PaR explores the adaptation of the early twentieth-century Spanish folkloric song-form of Copla, by appropriating elements found in Anglo-American musical theatre, namely, book musicals, revues and jukebox shows. Copla ceased to develop during Franco’s regime in Spain (1939-1975), and my practice aims to rejuvenate Copla in an international context while critically reflecting on the intercultural processes that are implicit in this research.

My research questions how to share my experience of Copla with an international audience of diverse cultural backgrounds, and how to do justice to the multiple facets of Copla as a storytelling form, a folkloric genre and a subversive tool. Practice has availed my position as a researcher and as an artist, and it has allowed me to explore changing modes of readability from one culture to another.

In this paper, I will present a critical reflection of elements of my creative practice based on my research frameworks of historical revisionism, musical theatre making and the testing of intercultural theories such as Patrice Pavis’ Hourglass (1992) and Lo and Gilbert’s two-way flow (2002), that propose different models of intercultural exchange between cultures (Spanish and Anglo-speaking in this case).

My creative work evidences my research enquiries by placing its focus in the engagement with audiences, challenging pre-existing conceptions of musical theatre and Copla as historically known. In this presentation I will analyse how PaR has become my methodology, and my evolution from creating a traditional musical theatre piece into devising an interactive cabaret. I will show documentation of the various iterations of my practice, and discuss how I interrogate current definitions of interculturalism and the development of contemporary musical theatre in relation to cultural identity through the evolution of this research project.

Alejandro Postigo is a theatre artist and researcher with keen interest in musical theatre and cultural exchange. He is currently working towards a PhD in ‘Intercultural Adaptation of Copla’ having obtained an MA in Music Theatre at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Recently, he has choreographed the musical ‘Nutcracker’ showing at Pleasance Theatre and opera ‘The Merry Widow’, seen at Wilton’s Music Hall, and is also part of the creative team of ‘In The Heights’ currently showing at the Kings Cross Theatre. Alejandro has worked in productions such as ‘Journeys of love’ (Sadler’s Wells), ‘Winter’s Tale’ (Royal Opera House) and the TV sitcom ‘Episodes’ (BBC) and regularly collaborates with the Royal Balllet since 2012. His PaR show ‘The Copla Musical’ has been seen at Hoxton Hall, the Roundhouse, and the Collisions Festival, and it is scheduled to tour America in 2016 (www.thecoplamusical.com).

Alice and the Worms. A Performative Lecture. Alice Colquhoun

This lecture will examine ‘Alice and the Worms’ a show performed in Utrecht 2015 for the Rosi Braidotti summer school plenary, Post human/Human/ Inhuman. A one woman solo show, ‘Alice and the Worms’ interrogates the concept of war through a Deleuzian framework and draws inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

The performative lecture will also demonstrate the effectiveness of metaphor in performance, when approaching complex ethical debates. It will discuss how creative practice and in this case ‘Alice and the Worms’ is able to stimulate ‘enacted thinking’ a term from Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge. It will furthermore draw on the notion of performance as a site of agency. Its ability to traverse academic disciplines, and to develop concrete moments between performer and audience that re-model traditional barriers of academic communication. It will demonstrate the effectiveness of practice as research as a tool to re-inscribe ourselves into our environment. Discussing how the properties drawn from the worm can be seen as a catalyst in which to actively re-imagine more pluralistic, immanent modes of existence. It will furthermore consider performances role in re-vitalising philosophy and generating new ways of thinking and a stronger connectivity to a wider force of life (Braidotti, 2006).

Final reflection will be on the notion of performing theory and the effectiveness of ‘Alice and the Worms’ in enlivening 100 PhD students, studying post- human philosophy in Utrecht 2015. The worm will weave a path, scattered, reconfigured, digesting and regurgitating theoretical frames. The worm will attempt to explain that without practice we are in danger of becoming locked in theory, without intersections we may not harness the widest periphery, and without earthworms we may be drowning in debris.

Alice Colquhoun is a practice as research PhD candidate, studying at the University of Roehampton. Alice is a fully funded TECHNE student who is exploring New Materialist methodologies and performance. Alice is interested in using performance to merge disciplines and connect matter within a wider political ecology. Alice’s work looks at the role of performance to muddle and re-frame questions surrounding ethics, environment, technology and science, and the ways in which we deal with our knowledge of human history. Alice is furthermore interested in promoting larger entanglements of performance and theory in academic learning spaces.

Subverting Theory in Postdramatic Theatre. Silvia Dumitriou

The attempt to align deconstructive theory with the requirement of live presence in postdramatic theatre creates new paradoxical and aporetic interpretations of the traditional instruments of theatre: text is involved into the impossibility of its reception, re-presentation of character is desirable but relativized through a misunderstanding of the text logic, the theatrical situation is frustrated by accidents, the emotional element is misplaced or only merely displayed, action no longer intentional but durational. Theatre as a ‘space without unconscious’ (Neveux 2013), brings to the fore the blunt and disorderly image of the world whose theatricality is pervasive, if theatricality is understood as the term by excellence referring to a lack of origin. The mimetic principle that offered an overarching structure for signification and meaning is therefore supplanted and critiqued in the disillusioned, cynical and skeptic theatrical regime of postdramatic. This new and very diverse theatre practice can be identified as post dramatic first of all formally, through the emphasis on multiplicities and also on open form; nevertheless, this practice is correlated to an aesthetic strategy, the discovering of new ways to attempt to subvert the linear and advance the relevance of the relational. I will argue that the caesura that inaugurates postdramatic is the emphasis on the relational, which is consistent with the insistence on the political as a fundamental dimension.  I would like to argue that a recuperation of theatricality as an aesthetic principle governing the authenticity and the meaning of the staged events is prevented by a theatricalizing on the stage of quotidian action, presence, language. I would like to advance the idea that theatricality as an aesthetic principle is brought to the fore by acts of subversion of theory, whereas theatricality as non-originary descriptive approach is but a reflection of theories, especially the deconstructive one. The problems I attempt to refer to are: what are the consequences of overturning the mimetic model and how does the adoption of ideas of the Derridian ‘concepts’ of writing and difference into the aesthetic vocabulary affect the very possibility of conceiving the specificity of theatrical language?  I will advance the idea that postdramatic theatre thrives on restructuring available language and bring to attention the ambivalence of misunderstandings present and possible in the discursive space. “The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and fragmentary… No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary to piercing this wall” (Deleuze in Foucault 1980:206)

Silvia is a translator of theatre plays and theatre journalist. Her particular artistic and research interests are related to new theatre work, contemporary texts and theatrical structures. As a director she has created independent theatre projects and she has worked with awarded professional actors of the best institutional theatres in Bucharest Romania. Two of her stagings, “Partners in Crime” by Eric Emmanuel Schmitt and “Zoo Story” by Edward Albee, have participated in numerous theatre festivals in Romania in 2007-1012. As a playwright she has written “Merry Arcadia”, a commedia dell’arte piece for 21st century, and “Cruel Games” a farce about capitalism and schizophrenia. She has translated more than 10 contemporary plays from French and English into Romanian, among which the translation of Sarah Kane’s play”4.48. Psychosis” constituted the final MA Playwriting dissertation. Other translated authors include Jean Cocteau, Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, Horovitz or Bernard Marie Koltes. She has presented the paper “Theatricality” at Tapra Conference 2014, Glasgow.

PANEL 3: Practice (messing with) Research

Thursday 14^th January 2016 – 2:30PM-4:00PM – Rehearsal Room 2

Cloud Seeding: The Poetics of Clouds and the Creative Process. Philip Stanier and Penny Newell

Philip Stanier and Penny Newell are currently collaborating on a practice-as-research project which explores the relationship between Clouds and Utopian thought for the ‘Utopia 2016’ event, produced by Culture at Kings College London. The umbrella project ‘The Naming of Clouds’ consists of several different outcomes: A durational performance of stranded cloud walkers occupying a public courtyard; a performance exploring the possibilities of walking on clouds and the potential Utopian impacts of this on humanity; a pamphlet that presents the research dimension of the project in the form of a commissioned drawing, and that invites the public to contribute back into the project through their own drawings; an online presence; and a public talk on the formation of the project itself.

The collaboration merges Penny’s research into the cultural, artistic and scientific history of clouds and Philip’s professional performance practice. This paper is an exploration of the process of our collaboration, the meeting of our respective practices and conceptual frameworks, and the development of a shared language and understanding of a shared field of interest from different perspectives and approaches.

The paper takes the form of a record of discussions between Penny and Phil that occurred during a series of visits to The Science Museum, The National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Initially intended as a means of surveying the collections for information and works related to Clouds, these walks allowed Phil and Penny to discuss the project, their understanding of Clouds, and the developing and changing perception of Clouds in Art as seen through these collections. As such, the paper is both an account of an emerging collaborative practice as research project, the formation of a common language, a walking tour of London’s galleries and museums, and a History of Clouds in Art.

Penny Newell is researching her PhD thesis at KCL, exploring the cultural, artistic and scientific history of clouds. Penny has received support from Tipping Point, Dark Mountain, and ARC Arts Centre. Penny was the first ever Arts and Humanities representative for organising the Royal Meteorological Society Annual Student Conference.

Philip Stanier is head of the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Winchester, and has published on the subject of contemporary performance. Philip is also Artistic Director of the Strange Names Collective. Philip was a recipient of an Artsadmin bursary, was selected for the NRLA, and has toured nationally.

Homo Academicus: The Musical – challenging the inaudibility of academic knowledge. Farokh Soltani

The advent of practice-oriented research methods in the academic study of drama and performance has instigated an increase in the flexibility of institutionally-acceptable forms of presenting knowledge; the University of London’s criteria for a PhD thesis, for example, has changed from a rigid ’100,000 written words’ to include a variety of possible material, the only caveat being that ‘[the] work must be accompanied by an adequate and approved form of retainable documentation’ which examines the work and highlights its contribution to knowledge. Interestingly, however, out of numerous forms of ‘retainable documentation’, a written thesis is the sole form which is considered ‘adequate’ for this purpose. In this presentation, interrogate this judgement by asking the question: why is the recorded voice not considered an adequate form of preserving knowledge? By drawing from Michel Cerres and Jean-Luc Nancy, it is argued that the preference for the written form is underpinned by ocularcentric assumptions about what constitutes knowledge, which are in turn based on a reductionist understanding of the acts involved in scholarship; therefore, by making the ‘acceptability’ of knowledge dependent on the written form, institutional scholarship excludes itself from critical engagement with a wide range of ideas. There then follows a hypothetical critical exploration of audible forms of knowledge preservation.

Farokh Soltani spent the first quarter-century of life as a jack-of-all-trades in the Iranian culture industry, doing everything from writing sitcoms to sound design for films, theatre and one particularly annoying ad for mobile phones. He then moved to the UK to study Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where he still remains today, conducting a critical research into the practical conventions of radio drama. Other interests include baking, dramatic writing, and recreational phenomenology (not necessarily in that order).

Hear Me Roar: Queer Utopian Negativity and the Potential of Performance. Joe Parslow & Meth

This paper will explore the intricate relationship between practice and research from the perspective of a researcher who, whilst not explicitly a practitioner of that about which they are writing, is still intimately bound up in that practice. Working in collaboration with drag performance artist, Meth, I will talk through and in and around the multifarious instances of connection that emerge, can emerge, or have the potential to emerge in the moment of performance.

This paper will employ theoretical analysis alongside examples of performance (and performative analyses alongside examples of theory) to begin to understand how a utopic investment in drag performance might allow us to consider the ways in which queer communities have the potential to emerge. Drawing on theorists such as Dolan (2005), Edelman (2004), Muñoz (2009), and Berlant and Edelman (2014), this paper will construct a lens of queer utopian negativity as a critical mode of engaging with modes of being and belonging as well as performance practices.

Cruising on the line between hope and anger, this paper will explore the ways in which we might glance queerly at performance to consider what performance does or can do in the face of homophobic violence and the increased closure of LGBTQ spaces in contemporary London. Employing lip-synching, theoretical analyses, and the constructed lens of queer utopian negativity, as well as the critical interplay of performer-researcher and researcher-performer, this paper will strive to perform the various ways in which we, as researchers and performers, might resist and refuse the failings of the present.

Joe Parslow is a PhD Candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. His research focuses around drag performance, and the potential ways in which queer communities can and do emerge in contemporary London, particularly around performance. Alongside his research, Joe is the Co-Producer of a drag performance event called The Meth Lab. He also manages The Family Fierce, a collective of alternative queer performers working in the field of drag, burlesque, cabaret and performance art. Joe has taken on a leading role in the campaign to save The Black Cap in Camden (London), a legendary gay bar and drag performance venue which was closed down in April 2015.

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, Zagreb) and America (New York, 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. A master of lip synch performance, a host and compere with scathing wit and the co-producer of the internationally acclaimed Drag show, The Meth Lab, Meth has shared the stage with drag royalty such as Bianca Del Rio, Alaska 5000, Sharon Needles and Michelle Visage, and appeared on World of Wonders YouTube network with James St James and Hey Qween! TV. Meth is a member of the queer performance collective The Family Fierce and a star of the London Live’s Docu-Soap series Drag Queens of London.

PANEL 4: Practice (training with) Research

Thursday 14^th January 2016 – 2:30PM-4:00PM – Rehearsal Room 3

Experiment: Reflections on Nymph Errant. Sherrill Gow

This paper responds to the provocation ‘How does your practice become research?’ by exploring blurred boundaries between my professional practice as a theatre director working in drama schools and the use of this practice as a basis for my research. I ask if formulating research questions can focus a creative process within a pedagogical context. In November and December 2015, I directed postgraduate musical theatre students at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in an in-house version Nymph Errant (1933) with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. A brief Internet search offers the general perception that the central character’s quest is to ‘lose her virginity’, an outdated and problematic premise. This interpretation is however easily challenged; it is possible to critique musical theatre repertoire from a feminist perspective (Wolf 2011) and argue that musicals are open to multiple readings (Kirle 2005). I examine how these viewpoints may be activated in a rehearsal process within a pedagogical context. My conclusion is that identifying the potential and pitfalls of the material alongside the 12 participating students positively impacted the creative and learning processes; as one student reflected, ‘it gave us our own mission – a quest to find a Nymph Errant that we respected and connected with.’

Sherrill Gow is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her drama school productions include: Sweet Charity (Mountview); Red the Wolf Slayer, The Twee Musketeers, The Wish, Sleeping Cutie (RCSSD). She has created new works including: MIL-STD-1815 (George Wood Theatre/Au Brana Creative Residency); The Hit (Hotel Indigo, Tower Hill); On Our Street, Broadsheet Ballads (Story of London Festival). Sherrill was an Associate Director at the King’s Head Theatre from 2007-11, where she directed productions and managed the theatre’s trainee director scheme. She trained at The Boston Conservatory where she earned a BFA in Musical Theatre and subsequently completed an MA in Actor training and Coaching at RCSSD.

Practice as research into practice: closing the loop.Penny Andrews.

I am a social sciences researcher, artist, performer and athlete. My performance lecture will explore the connections between my research and my practice, and interrogate what those words really mean. As an artist, my practice encompasses text, performance, sound, projection and photography. My work explores issues around complex identities, unruly bodies, gender, social history, UK politics and the interfaces between art, sport and health.

The early years of my undergraduate degree did not require me to read vast quantities of journal articles, but suddenly gaining access to online databases took me back to the library-soaked days of the research projects I set myself in childhood. I fed my brain and that fed my artistic practice. Research (resource-based, empirical, and via the work itself) still informs my practice. The other side of this coin is that I like to do (academic) research that is not merely theoretical, but can have practical impact on those affected by the area of inquiry.

My artistic practice is informed by research, but it is also often a form of research in itself, as is my athletic practice. I am a para-athlete, 100m sprinter with cerebral palsy, a runner made and not born, and research on the body (Braidotti, Allen-Collinson) informs the changes I make to the way I move and think as a runner. The process is thinking as doing, doing as thinking. Carrying out research to construct a body that matches my athletic ambitions and executing visualised performances on the track creates a world in which I can live.

During my PhD in information science I will bring some of this to my methodology, using Archer’s work on meta-reflexivity, Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonism and Latour’s actor-network theory to explore the performative identities of researchers and librarians. I will be making text works via poetic transcription (Glesne/Richardson), sound pieces, performances (Markula) and zines to help me to make sense of the world and portray the truth of participants’ words beyond selective quotation.

Penny Andrews is an artist, athlete and researcher. Her work examines issues of complex identities, collectivism versus individualism, social history and social technologies.  Recent works include a radio ballad about the Labour party following the 2015 general election, The National Interest, and a short book and performance about running called Run On (created for ANTI festival in collaboration with illustrator Siobhán Britton). She is one of the artists chosen to be part of the Poly-Technic’s Polymath programme.

Frogging: A practitioner’s journey in research. Evi Stamatiou

I am a theatre maker who has trained and worked since 2001 both in text-based and devised performance contexts. During my career as an actor I noticed that I was lacking agency during the rehearsal process and performance both in text-based and devised performance contexts. When I started training and working as a director, I noticed that I was suppressing actors’ agency, but even when I tried not to suppress it I realised that often they weren’t able or willing to handle their agency. Bourdieu wrote that ‘I can say that all of my thinking started from this point: how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?’ (1990a:65) My question of how I could escape feeling suppressed by obeying the rules I was subjected to as an actor, became more complicated in my role as a director. Rules seemed to be fundamental for the theatre-making process. Maybe the right question would be ‘whose rules am I obeying’? So I started considering how actors can construct their own rules or ‘conception of the good’ and for this purpose I am undertaking this research project towards the construction of a conceptual framework for an actor training device that will enable student actors to find and explore their agency. This conceptual framework is based on six theatrical devices from Aristophanes’ play The Frogs: audience engagement (metatheatre), the chaotic chorus, the grotesque and carnivalesque body, the combination of slapstick and intellectual humour, the literary criticism in form of competition and the parabasis. During the period 2013-2015 I undertook five practical projects, in order to test the use of the six Aristophanic devices in action. My paper will present my practice-based methodology that enabled me to construct a research project that may offer substantial insights into my question that has derived from my past practice as a theatre-maker and actor trainer and can inform my future practice.

Evi Stamatiou is a Lecturer in Musical Theatre at the University of Portsmouth, PhD Candidate in RCSSD and HEA Teaching Fellow. She is an actor trainer and theatre practitioner with 10 years of international experience. She has worked and trained in Greece, UK, NY, Germany, Brazil, Poland and Estonia. She specializes in clowning, working on musical, political, post-modern, experimental, physical, devised performance and multimedia on stage. She is a member of Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, NY and Actors Equity, UK. She speaks fluent Greek, English, Italian and French. 

Keynote Speech: Dance Studies on the Move: Disciplinarity, Life Sciences and the University. Dr Kelina Gotman (Kings College London)

Respondent: Dr Stephen Farrier (RCSSD)

Friday 15th January 2016 10:00AM – 11:15AM – Rehearsal Room 1-2

The recently announced “Undisciplining Dance” symposium at the University of Auckland, and the recent multi-site “Fluid States” iteration of Performance Studies international (PSi) testify to a new vigorous movement in these fields to rethink disciplinarity and (transnational) geographic culture. But more work remains to be done to historicize these (post-) disciplinary imaginaries and to rethink the foundations of dance and performance from within a global, multidisciplinary context not separated from scientific methods of research significantly founded in the same “anecdotal” practices cultural theorist Sean Cubitt argues serve as the humanities and social sciences’ special purview – one he claims distinguishes these areas of inquiry from science today. This talk argues not only that dance and performance studies have long been embedded in a mobile, transnational scientific literature and transhistorical biopolitical imaginaries; but also that these imaginaries were forged with writing and research methods just as anecdotal, rhizomatic and cross-disciplinary as current-day performance studies and dance. The trajectory (or choreography) of these disciplinary cross-peregrinations thus compels us to rethink the imagined borders of our current research practices and myths, the cultural trenches scientific, social scientific, humanities and arts scholars and artists continue to build up and to imagine we are able occasionally radically to trespass. At its most militant, this talk argues for a reconsideration of the way dance, theatre and performance among other disciplines must continue to be construed across fields; and the way the history of fields and research practices themselves must always be taken globally and relationally.

PANEL 5: Practice (knowing) Research

Friday 15^th January 2016 – 11:30AM-1:00PM – Rehearsal Room 2

Practice as “Search” towards a different form of knowledge. Dr Anna Troisi

“Research” has always been a tricky word when associated to the practice towards an artistic purpose. The major aim of research has always been related to a form of investigation, analysis, inspection and assessment. The epistemological intrinsic aspect of the research brought us thinking that every approach to create knowledge and awareness should pass through a research methodology to deserve the right to be validated and to produce an appreciable output.

As digital artist and performer, my input material, my research pathway and my final results, collide in a mixture of scientific and artistic vibrant matter, but it is not always true that they are really so distinct. I use to code and I use my scientific background while sculpting my artistic outputs, but I never considered the practical side of my work as a standard research process but rather a “search”. I spend my academic research time looking trough physical, abstract or virtual spaces carefully to find the right interpretation for something that I already have in my mind. Instead of “researching” I look for paradigms that enable my performances to use the real world as a media. I search and my every day practice is searching towards a form of knowledge that cannot be described with scientific words such as “output” or “finding”.

Do we really need to investigate, inspect or assess in order to produce arts?

Additionally while being able to contextualise our artworks is of great help to enhance the philosophical potentiality of our work, will it be likewise useful for the audience to perceive a performance as a layered sliced form of expression where every detail is revealed? Is academia trying to force a different form of knowledge in a context that worked well and still works well for other forms of knowledge?

Dr. Anna Troisi is a digital performer, artist, musician, composer, programmer.She has a background in computer science and music. In 2009 she achieved a PHD in Nanotechnology.
 She worked ICCMR Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research, (University of Plymouth 2009- 2010). In 2013 she worked as research associate in multimedia programming at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. She is currently Lecturer in Digital Media Design at Bournemouth University and member of Emerge (Experimental Media Research Group). Recently she started a fruitful collaboration with Office of Experiment. Anna’s research interests include performance, design of new interfaces for performances, multi-sensory digital installations.

Practice (confounds) Research: Grappling with ‘Lost Causes’. Adelina Ong

In 1993, The Substation held the inaugural Substation Conference titled ‘Art vs. Art: Conflict and Convergence’. Singaporean art historian T K Sabapathy emphasised the need to constantly articulate the nature and importance of artistic experimentation in Singapore. He warned, ‘If we do not, no one else will. And silence exacts a heavy price’ (Sabapathy 1995: 20). The Substation Conferences were groundbreaking for Singapore’s arts scene, stimulating passionate debates between artists, arts professionals, practitioners, academics, critics, audiences and arts administrators working for government institutions. These debates explored controversial issues including the impact of monumental arts centres and museums where ‘commemorations, orthodoxies and authoritative significance are enacted’ on independently-managed places dedicated to ‘exploratory, divergent, challenging practices and provocations’ (19).

Today, the urban arts scene in Singapore is transitioning from independently-organised ‘guerilla-style’ events to large-scale, high-visibility, government-funded festivals and projects focused on the engagement of ‘at-risk’ youths. While urban arts practitioners are encouraged by this increased investment in urban arts, I suggest that it is timely to consider the possible impact of these large-scale events on the more exploratory, provocative, messy, ‘guerilla’ aspects of urban arts practices. Reflecting on conversations and walks with urban artists about lost causes, this provocation speculates what might be lost. It grapples with the contradiction of researching ‘lost causes’: ideas and visions that have been lost in translation, dialogues that have fallen silent and young people who have been written off. As an applied theatre practitioner who initiates collaborations with urban arts practitioners for applied theatre interventions with young people, this presentation also considers how my practice might be implicated in this tangle of lost practices and forgotten people.

Adelina’s research looks at how parkour, skateboarding, ‘breakin’ (breakdancing) and graffiti create compassionate mobility for young people. She has been active in Singapore’s theatre scene from 1997, as a performer and co-organising interdisciplinary street x art festivals such as Pulp (2003). As an applied theatre practitioner, she managed an interdisciplinary, free arts school for low-income children and youths. She currently serves as Assistant Convener for Central’s Theatre Applied Centre for Research in Performance and Social Practice.

Finding the Woo Woo: when Practice does Not Become Research. Royce Sparks 

This presentation offers a direct challenge to the notion of Practice as Research. It begins by addressing the problematic notion of the case study, the idea that the description of an experience can be accurate, and beyond that possibly translate to claims about other groups of people. It utilizes specific findings in cognitive psychology as its bridge, including work from Daniel Dennett, Elizabeth Loftus, Michael Shermer, Keith Stanovich. It first outlines the problematic and inherently untrustworthy attempt of describing one’s experience, subject to unreliable tenets of cognition such as the confirmation bias, selective bias, and Type I and II errors, as well as issues in reporting memory. It then argues that, despite what Carol Tarvis describes as the ‘neuro-hysteria’ that has gripped many of the domains of performance, particularly actor training, Practice as Research is fundamentally incompatible with using any scientific research to support its claims, lacking the analytical branch of inquiry essential to communication between scientific mediums. At best, PaR can hope to rise to the level of pseudoscientific claims or cherrypicking data, and many of the claims within it run the risk of either being false due to human errors in reporting, or will be overturned by the convergence of evidence from the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and other branches of the sciences.

Royce Sparks is an alumni of Central (MA Actor Training and Coaching, 2012) who specializes in independent research on the convergence between the sciences and performance, specifically actor training. He has a performance background that includes practice internationally with the Noh Theatre of Japan (Kita/Kongo styles), Odin Teatret, as well as exposure to some of the performance traditions of Botswana over the course of nearly a decade. He is a practitioner of the Meisner technique, being certified by Larry Silverberg, as well as with five modular years of training and performance at the Impulse Company with Scott Williams.

PANEL 6: Practice (voices) Research

Friday 15^th January 2016 – 11:30AM-1:00PM – Studio 1

The Practice: Re-authoring John Donne in a vocal somatic dialogue. Jane Boston

This performative lecture examines some of the experiential processes involved in the vocal embodiment of John Donne’s early seventeenth century short poem The Sun Rising.

It considers some of the physical, auditory and imaginative properties of the expressive voice when a process of re-authoring the text through a prism of the speaker’s being and understanding is undertaken. It considers both the effects on the speaker and the position occupied by the canonicalauthor-in-print- under these dialogical conditions. It asks what happens when the provocations from the text as message content, image and rhythm, meet with an individual speaker’s receptivity based upon their own experience, image formation and rhythmic recognition?

It raises questions about the pre-existence of the given text itself. Are there any properties that emerge in the voicing of its structure that might have been overlooked in a postmodern critique of essentialism? Is it possible to identify the signatures in the poetic text that usher in particular kinds of vocal partnerships with the speaker?

What might the ensuing inter-textual duologue offer to the listener’s experience of the text? How much of the ‘re-write’ is heard when the text is no longer Donne’s alone? Does an embodied dialogue between author and speaker generate a voiced text that is part of a ‘new’ inter-theoretical paradigm that emerges when the speaker and the text dissolve their ‘traditional’ binary positions?

I propose that the expressive voice is best considered as part of an immanent set of relational and hybrid processes comprised of the speakers’ and listener’s psycho-physiology, the content of the authorial message and the varied forms of ensuing sound waves from the individual. A close examination of the ensuing embodied synthesis offers further understanding about the effects of pre-existing language structures on both the interpretive position and the individual’s emergent voice.

Theoretical references are made to post-Kristeva feminist discourse analysis, Cavarero’s philosophical analysisin ‘For More than One Voice’, and linguistic theories about the production, transmission and reception of the material voice and text in Maria Grazia’s Guido’s The Acting Interpreter Embodied Stylistics in an Experientialist Perspective, amongst others.

Jane Boston is Principal Lecturer in Voice Studies and Head of the International Centre for Voice at RCSSD. She has extensive voice and actor training experience in Higher Education and the Conservatoire at undergraduate and postgraduate levels as well as the theatre profession. Her research interests are in the field of voice theory and practice with a special interest in voice and sonority, the poetics of the voice in the actor training curriculum, and the relationship between voice, the constructs of gender and the public platform. She is an actor, poet, guitarist and vocalist, and founder member of Lesbian Theatre Company, Siren.

The challenge to artistic collaborators – who then is the author?Alan Taylor

My research concerns shared artistic creation. In the analysis of my practice I have been faced with the challenge both of identifying the author of the resulting art, and of addressing the problem of my inability to summarise the meaning of the art created.

In these two ways, art resulting from a shared creative process is the same as any other art. Following Bakhtin, Vygotsky and Barthes, I see all art as created through a dialogic process. It is inherently complex and ambiguous as a result. Therefore the author or authors of the art may be unable to summarise its meaning and cannot be looked to as the source of the meaning of the art.

Once the creative process is shared, these challenges become particularly acute. I have encountered them in discussions with those I am working with and from audiences to whom I have described my projects.

I will seek to place these challenges in the context of the wider debates on authorship in the arts. I will refer to the view that the meaning of art is found in author’s intentions, and the challenge to this intentionalist approach by Wimsatt and Beardsley. I will follow this with a discussion of the argument of Barthes that meaning in art is created by the recipient rather than the author.

This examination of my practice in the light of important areas of theoretical debate has led me to the conclusion that it is necessary to separate the question of the author of the meaning of the art from the question of the authorship of the tasks required to create the art. The authors of the meanings are the audience members. The authors of the tasks are the various artists involved.

Alan Taylor is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, studying the process of collaboration between composers and musicians.

PANEL 7: Practice (dances with) Research

Friday 15^th January 2016 – 2:00PM-3:30PM – Rehearsal Room 2

Practice as Research: a new insight of composing dance improvisation. Jindeok Park

Since the 1960s, improvisation has been used in order to practice awareness in the studio, leading to composition for performance by dance artists. A dance and multidisciplinary artist, Kent De Spain (2003, p.167), points out the importance of being aware of the present moment while improvising. Indeed, exploring improvisation indicates the present moment of changeability, unexpectedness and aliveness. However, after experimenting with improvisation for more than fifty years, making improvised performances should acknowledge the differences between improvisation for practicing and improvisation for composition.

This paper presents how my practice is framed in Practice as Research. I am particularly, interested in using the archiving process to define the process of composing dance improvisation. I apply the archiving as a method to experiment with improvisation in relation to the process of making. The questions are emerged whether only the live composition is only involved in live improvised performance? What about the composing process during rehearsals or making of the piece? What is the process of making like for improvisation? Is there the possibility of expanding the use of archives to improvised performance? The embodied knowledge, which comes from my experiences of testing and observing, may be answered to these questions. Knowledge constitutes in a repetitive process of thinking, doing and reflecting. I keep questioning myself through the observing what kind of knowledge emerged and what knowledge found from my practice.

Jindeok Park is a dancer, choreographer and currently involved in Practice as Research in dance improvisation at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. After graduating from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul (South Korea), she participated in EDge Dance Company 2010 and completed MA at London Contemporary Dance School. She has danced in and choreographed numerous dance pieces, including ‘ID’, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008 and ‘a Downpour’, performed at Resolution 2012 (Robin Harward Theatre).

Attending (Theatre) as Practice-based Research. Dr George Home-Cook

Using Theatre and Aural Attention (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) as a point of reference, this paper introduces and sheds light on Home-Cook’s guiding methodology: namely, phenomenology and ‘attending (theatre) practice-based research’ (2015).

Practice-based research has overwhelmingly been conceived as a stage-side concern, tending to focus largely on performance, or the act of performing, whether conceived as performance-art, acting, or being a provocateur. Yet, and as this paper aims to foreground, the practice of attending (theatre), like acting, also provides us with knowledge in as well of performance.

Far from beginning his research with a series of well-chosen case studies, that might ‘prove’, a priori, a pre-given theory concerning theatre and aural attention, Home-Cook’s practice seeks to investigate what arises from and in the process of attending theatre. That is, although initially selecting performances on account of their suitability for an exploration of theatrical sound, a good deal of the questions, themes, or phenomena of interest, arose post hoc. Conversely, whilst Home-Cook’s case studies emphasise the everyday nature of his theatregoing, his mode of reception-as-perception is, equally, unequivocally extra-ordinary. ‘Bracketing’ sound and its assumptions, attending to himself listening to sound(s), re-attending the same performance whilst investigating the same questions, all this, is necessarily different from an everyday mode of theatrical attendance. Lastly, and as Home-Cook demonstrates in this paper, the practice of conducting a phenomenology of (theatrical) listening necessarily requires repetition.

By (re)examining a range of phenomena, themes and questions as they arise in a number of different theatrical and attentional contexts through a wide-variety of phenomenological examples, Theatre and Aural Attention aims to bring about an elucidation of the phenomenon of (aural) attention: through and in the practice of attending, knowledge ‘worlds up’. 

The Choreography of Research / Performing Practice: Visioning and embodying landscape | Dancing towards practice based action research.Dr Beatrice Jarvis

This paper explores the role of the sustained encounter within practice- based interdisciplinary research to construct unique resources to investigate how urban space is used and to develop personal geographies of the city that allow space to become place.

Scrutinizing samples and performance traces of her socio-ethno choreographic field research from Berlin, Bucharest, Gaza and Northern Ireland, Javris reflects upon how the landscape of the city in conflict performs as an active archive for embodied memory. Jarvis investigates how performance research within her practice based research model functions as social instrument to build further resources and new applications encouraging new cross-community dialogues to form.

The body in the city acts a vessel to carry, contain and interact, forming routes and navigations through the immediacies of its encounter. Working with a series of movement scores, psychogeographical exercises, mapping workshops with over 120 participants of all ages; Jarvis has created an archive and research framework which seeks through active experimentation to generate a series of artistic and academic responses to the ways in which the city function as studio and canvas for the performance of daily life.

This paper debates how far the performance process can enable participants to have a more actively responsible relationship to their terrain; exploring the role of memory and personal narrative as key to research process and landscape; expanding the potential of practice based research as social resource.

How far can site specific performance become a social medium for the study of the political and cultural shifts in urban terrain? The encounter with place within this research generates tactic knowledge: the sensitive nature of trans-disciplinary practice aims to explore the field of expanded choreography as a means of establishing socio-urban dialog and counter narrative to re-examine perspective of the individual body and collective social movement within urban terrain.

Beatrice Jarvis (PhD) is an urban space creative facilitator, choreographer and researcher, founder of the Urban Research Forum and The Living Collective. She holds a practice based PhD from The University of Ulster and the University of Kingston. As a dance artist, she works in Romania, Gaza, Berlin, Germany and Northern Ireland to generate large-scale and site specific choreographic works to explore the social power and potential of embodied movement practices. Her socio-choreographic research has been profiled within Pina Bausch Symposium, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, dOCUMENTA (13), The National School of Art Bucharest, Galway Dance Festival, Goldsmiths CUCR Tate, and the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2013. Most recently she was commissioned as site artist in residence of Groundwork. Her commissions include Jerwood Space, Steven Lawrence Center and EGFK Berlin.

PANEL 8: Practice (mixing) Research

Friday 15^th January 2016 – 2:00PM-3:30PM – Rehearsal Room 1

Clod Ensemble: Creative Collaboration: Practice meets Research. Dr Sophie Lally

Clod Ensemble is an arts organisation that works at the intersection between practise and research and regularly collaborates with researchers and academics.

This summer we were invited by The Place to lead a three day Choreodrome workshop called called Creative Collaboration: Practice meets Research aimed at early-career researchers and emerging choreographers. Over a series of workshops we worked through a number of questions around the challenges of collaboration. We investigated how relationships between people from different fields could be nurtured, how academic research could be seen as a creative practice and how the artist could be positioned within the academy.

Drawing on the experiences of Suzy Willson (Clod Ensemble), David Harradine (Fevered Sleep), choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh and Professor Roger Kneebone (Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow) we identified seven ways the artist and researcher might collaborate and drew out some important areas to consider when collaborating.

In this session Sophie Lally, Researcher in Residence with Clod Ensemble, will share some of the learning from the programme – considering ways to navigate the complex and often emotionally charged realities of collaboration especially when crossing disciplinary borders. Drawing on two strands of thinking prevalent in Clod Ensemble’s practice, she will look through the lens of Jacques Lecoq’s fundamental treatise that “everything moves” considering how the meeting of the scholar and practitioner can begin outside of spoken language with the aim of developing a common vernacular. She will also consider collaboration in the context of complexity theory as per Eve Mitleton-Kelly (LSE) as a way of challenging ideas surrounding hierarchy, exclusion and methodology in interdisciplinary work.

Theatre as research in clinical settings; adopting a mixed-method. Dr Persephone Sextou

Theatre for children in hospitals (TCH) is a comparatively new practice to other theatre practices in the community and urges our efforts to evaluation in need of creating new ways of looking at the living experience of hospital life through the art form. In search of an appropriate and efficient approach to the evaluation of the TCH practice, experimentation with mixed methods is required. The critical departure of the methodology that I present in this paper is in the need for finding combinations of more traditional research methods and tools (i.e. interview, questionnaire and journals) with an arts-based approach (i.e. performance) to investigate the impact of the performance on the participants through reflection. The two together, traditional and arts-based research methods, seek patterns of meaning that contribute to a better and fuller understanding of TCH. Drawing on the applied theatre methodological approaches of O’Connor & Anderson (2015) and Balfour et al. (2015), I clarify that the methodology I use is partly similar to ATAR (Applied Theatre as Research). It is not about using theatre in research as one-way process of generating data. It is aimed to be a reciprocal process between the researcher and children with their families in hospitals. I value performance as central to the study and I recognise children as both participants in performance, and judges who are fit to criticise our practice. Performance is vital to the methodology and it is difficult to separate it from the research. This is because of the significance of the participatory nature of TCH within research. This study is about evaluating theatre with those involved in performance in hospital as research. In the absence of ‘hard data’ to prove that theatre for children in clinical settings is an effective methodology, I adopt a mixed-method approach.

Dr Persephone Sextou is a Reader in Applied Theatre at Newman University Birmingham (UK), and the research director of the Community & Applied Drama Laboratory. She has secured a grant from BBC Children in Need (2016-19) to continue her research on the impact of specially-developed performance for children’s wellbeing while they are in hospital. She works in partnership with NHS Trust, and educational organisations in Europe and W. Africa. She is the author of peer-reviewed articles, chapters and monographs. She acts as member of Editorial Boards for the Arts & Health, the Applied Theatre Reader and, the Arts in Communities Journals.

Keeping Research Live. Dr Joseph Dunne

Samuel Beckett’s maxim to “fail better” reflects the truism that practice research demands that the researcher be responsive to what occurs before their eyes, a condition that demands them to continuously experiment with their methodology. Translating this process into writing, however, is too often accomplished by traducing the dynamism of embodied acts into a linear narrative, despite the fact that the documents produced during workshops or rehearsals often exist in fragmentary forms. Diana Taylor (2003) delineates between embodied and written forms of knowledge by using the categories of the archive and the repertoire, yet the line between them is highly porous: Writing can function as a generative record of future live acts in as much as documentation produced from a performance creates an afterlife for it. The function of performance documentation must be re-framed to reflect the live qualities of the archive. For this reason theatre and performance students ought to be taught how to design and implement a documentation strategy that does not seek to preserve their practice research process in perpetuity but instead produces a set of catalytic materials. The practical component of my doctoral thesis Regenerating the Live: The Archive as the Genesis of a Performance Practice examined how documentation can be integrated into live performance in an effort to stretch its lifespan beyond the event sphere. Using the conclusions I drew from the workshops I conducted in site-based contexts, I will explicate how documentation bridges the artificial gap between research and practice by encapsulating the experience of the ‘doing’ of research whilst inviting future readers to create new practice from it.

Dr Joseph Dunneis a research associate at Rose Bruford College. His specialisms include the performativity of archives, site-specific and site-responsive performance, immersive theatre, and historical re-enactments. Joseph is a founding member of the performance collective Tracing the Pathway (www.tracingthepathway.com) with whom he is undertaking a practice research project Fluid Ecologies, which to date has been conducted in the UK, Finland and Greenland.

Actor/spectator? … When one becomes two: an interchange of process and product. Elizabeth Howard

Red Kettle Theatre Company was a mainstream regional Irish theatre company that operated in Waterford from 1985 to 2014, and it is the subject of current doctoral research. Using performance studies as a methodology, this research explores the dramaturgy of the Red Kettle archive to identify the ethnography of regional Irish theatre and the social-critical performative aspects of the creative and administrative strands of the company. In its infancy, performance studies marked its territory as ‘in opposition’ to the mainstream theatre, and an enormous gap opened up between the two very different performance cultures (Schechner, 2000). However, Schechner believes that mainstream theatre is a fertile area that performance studies should explore. When mainstream theatre is investigated from a performance studies perspective, a point of intersection occurs between the two cultures, blurring the boundaries between the mainstream and the avant garde.  Furthermore, performance studies offers a mode of practice to the ‘conventional’ researcher, made manifest in the ‘as performance’ acts of exploration and writing. Through these constructive acts the researcher views the trajectory of Red Kettle as a ‘performance’ and occupies a symbiotic role of actor/spectator as she examines the performance of another through a performance of her own. This pushes the limits of what can be interpreted as practice-as-research while allowing the performance studies methodology to become the practice. Additionally, the actor/spectator role reverberates with the many figures and organisations that the research comments on and comes in contact with, creating a constant interchange of process and product. Examining the multiple actor/spectator intersections that the Red Kettle research flags, this paper explores the emotional and ideological consequences of these exchanges while pushing the form of both performance studies and mainstream theatre analysis.

After completing an MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths College, London and a BA in Drama and Counselling from the University of Chester, Elizabeth was awarded a PhD scholarship from Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland. Entitled Performing the Region, her research project uses the Red Kettle archive as a primary source and examines regional theatre in relation to cultural policy. Elizabeth is a theatre maker and teaches on the theatre studies programme at WIT. She has presented papers at seven conferences over the past two years. Her first publication will be with Palgrave Macmillan next year.

Guest Lecture. Dr Kiki Selioni

Friday 15^th January 2016 – 2:00PM-3:30PM – Studio 1

This presentation /performance will discuss the theoretical background of the English school of acting as it was formed as a technique by Lawrence Olivier. This school of thought argues that it stems from Aristotle’s Poetics. The term “biophysical” is indicative of an interaction between body and mind in a scientific way that has no psychological implication. The research is based on the idea that in order for someone to become an actor (or any stage performer), he has to undergo specific body training (including voice); the notion of “being talented” will be reconsidered. The presentation will also demonstrate on stage through acting scenes the main principles of a newly proposed new methodology for acting in order to satisfy the needs of the 21st century industry using as its tool Laban movement analysis.

PANEL 1: From training to product: values and the economy of the theatre industry

Thursday 15/01/15 – 11:50-13:20 – Rehearsal Room 2

Chair: Ian Morgan

1. The interdependence of public and private finance in the performing arts

Dr Stephen Hetherington

The performing arts in Britain operate in a mixed economy of private and public funding as an outcome of complex judgements of value by those in each of these spheres. Since the advent of arts subsidies as a policy of government they appear to have been increasingly interlinked with private finance. This interactive diversity has been referred to as an economic “ecology”, recognising the probability of interdependence between its elements.  This presentation describes on-going research into that postulated interdependence within the life-cycle of theatre productions (its present limitation), unravelling conjunctions, conflicting or consonant ideologies, and collaborative practises. It describes in outline a three-part research methodology used (i) to locate historically and theoretically the creation and presentation of modern theatre productions; (ii) to produce a comparison of quantitative “industry” data that define the scale of each sphere; and (iii) how outcomes of semi-structured interviews with producers and executives across the British theatre world are elucidating the rationales they employ. At its conclusion, the research is expected to explicate the chain of activity from the creation of productions to the distribution of finance and to define the logic of the various operational models. Research into these relations has not previously been undertaken but its results may lead to improvements in the effectiveness of subsidy in the performing arts and the mechanisms for its application.

2. The value of actor training – Meyerhold’s biomechanics.

Chloe Whitehead

This paper will discuss the value of Meyerhold’s Biomechanic training for the individual actor, the rehearsal process and the performance.  Using the Biomechanical principles it is possible to break down training into learnable blocks that are both concrete and transferable.

Four of these fundamental principles are:

Otkas – The pre- movement.  A movement in opposition from the consciously decided movement thus giving a clear beginning to the movement.

Posil – The movement but with purpose, filled with intention and the knowledge of the actor.

Stoyka – The clear end of the movement, the full stop.

Tormos – The control of the movement, the brakes or the reins held by the actor during the movement.

Biomechanics actor training is taught within some Higher Educational Institutes and acting schools, however, the continuation of this training into rehearsals and into performance as a through line is rarely achieved.  Students or actors often have some elements of Biomechanics as one part of their arsenal from which they may draw to create and contribute to a performance rather than as a coherent approach. It is, therefore, rarely possible to assess the value of Biomechanics training in contemporary performance due to this lack of consistency from the rehearsal room to production.  It is the possibility of constructing a coherent pathway from a training in Biomechanics through to performance that is the focus of my research.

3. Looking Sexy, Performing Blindness: Gestic Crip Criticism and the Representation of Jenny Diver in the Threepenny Opera

Amelia Cavallo

This presentation explores my experience as a blind actor playing Jenny Diver in a production of The Threepenny Opera in order tounpack some of the normative expectations surrounding the performance of sexuality and blindness as a disabled woman. Using various methods within crip/queer theory as well as expanding upon Elin Diamond’s work on Gestic Feminist Criticism, I will highlight the value of performing disability identity on stage. I will also discuss the ever present yet malleable line between individual identity and normative expectation when creating a readable performance of sexuality, blindness and femininity. I will question what parts of character were “individual”, meaning based in embodied experience, and which parts were “given” by sighted directors and choreographers based on scopic understandings of how to be a “sexy woman”. In so doing, I hope to highlight the impact of ocularcentric representation on the sexualized disabled body as a simultaneously empowering and excluding experience.

The impact of normative societal constructs on dramatic works are often apparent from the spectatorial view of a performance. We can see what behaviours are valued and how stereotypes and expectations of identity play out on the actor’s body. As a study, this has been and continues to be thoroughly explored with regards to race, gender, sexuality and to a certain degree, class. However, it is still fairly radical to regard disability as a performed identity that is subject to normative assumptions, though scholars in crip theory are beginning to unravel this concept in both theatrical studies and wider sociological research.

In performances such as this production of Threepenny Opera, making signifiers of disability (such as my mobility cane) a conscious and integral part of how a character is represented creates space for such signs to shift between empowering access tool and a representation of self. Identity in this moment becomes clearly and visibly intersectional in that concepts of sexuality, femininity and disability intersect both within and outside of normative constructs. Moreover, when an actor is asked to manipulate and interconnect those signifiers with previously unexperienced visual signifiers of being a woman or being “sexy”, a divide occurs between the actor’s body and the character, between internal experience and societal expectation. In this individual experience, I argue that this divide was apparent for both myself as the actor and the audience watching.

In my research, I propose “gestic crip criticism” as an expansion of Diamond’s research on Brechtian, theatrical and feminist theory in order to unpack wider concepts around the performance of disability identity. I argue that watching a visibly disabled body on stage means that the actor’s body is seen alongside and in conjunction with the character. Moreover, when a disabled actor performs aspects of identity that are based in normative constructs, the actor becomes hyper aware of this divide during performance. This creates a kind of verfremdungseffekt through the actors body which allows questions of value/impact around normative, scopic understandings of representation to appear.

PANEL 2: Discourses of value, and the impact of discourses.

Thursday 15/01/15 – 11:50-13:20 – Rehearsal Room 1

Chair: Dr Experience Bryon (TBC)

1. What is the value of clown training?

Jon Davison

In this paper I will ask what clown training produces. This question will be addressed in two ways. Firstly, what does the dominant contemporary clown discourse have to say about the value of clown training? How do those who produce and reproduce this discourse (trainers, practitioners and students alike) articulate the privileged position given to failure and the flop, held to be the foundations for clowning teaching and practice? How do they attempt to identify and describe how the flop is the ‘most valued thing’ in clowning? By ‘dominant’ discourse, I am referring mainly to the lineage which ostensibly begins with Jacques Lecoq’s experiments in clowning in the early 1960s, passing through Philippe Gaulier’s work and which has infiltrated a vast number of clown trainers currently working.

Secondly, how do the organisation and delivery of clown workshops based on the flop do their work of producing clowning held by participants to be ‘of value’? What are the key means (dramaturgical, pedagogical and managerial) brought to bear in clown training in order to achieve this.

Finally, I will ask which values seem to lie behind the dominant approach? Are these values not inevitably destined to produce the clowning held to be ‘valuable’? And how do these values operate in binary opposition to the now disparaged values of so-called ‘traditional’ clowning, whose clowning, by definition is held to be ‘of no value’?

2. TBC

3. Visions of radio: interrogating the impact of radio drama theory

Farokh Soltani

What have the radio theorists ever done for us?

Consider this: film aesthetics and film theory have been in constant dialogue since the inception of the medium, from Eisenstein and Kuleshov’s application of dialectics to montages, to the time when angry Cahiers de Cinema critics decided to take up cameras and start a New Wave, and even to the present day, where screenwriting handbooks draw from Aristotle, Joseph Campbell and Freud. Has radio theory had the same impact on the way we write and produce radio drama?

In this paper, I explore this question by examining case studies of radio drama theory and assessing them in relation to the technological and aesthetic context of their times, to demonstrate that the response to the question tabled above is a resounding ‘no’: the trajectories of the development of the radio drama format and that of its critique do not converge. Some theorists uncritically accept the general morphology of the format as a given and instead concentrate on interpreting the medium within the boundaries of such conventions, while others who challenge the principles demand an essential change in the nature of radio aesthetics which pushes it toward abstraction at the expense of narrative drama.

But what lies behind this state of affairs? I suggest that both theoretical approaches and practice conventions of radio drama demonstrate an unacknowledged ocularcentric bias which has hindered the debate on radio drama. The ocularcentrism prevalent in radio theory prevents a thorough critical examination of the foundations of radio practice conventions, while preconceptions about the hierarchy of senses shape the way practitioners create radio drama. Without questioning the ocularcentric assumptions of radio drama, the impact of radio theory is bound to remain minimal.

PANEL 3: Reclaiming values: things, self and aesthetics.

Thursday 15/01/15 – 14:30-16:00 – Rehearsal Room 2

Chair: Dr Tony Fisher (TBC)

1.TBC

2. Dancing on documentation’: exploring the transformative impact of the past on present improvisations

Jindeok Park

This paper explores how the ‘documenting process’ is involved in the concept of ‘time’ as a compositional method for dance improvisation. Improvisation for dancers tends to emphasize the importance of what is happening in the present moment because they cannot predict what the movement will be in the next moment or the next time. It means that the improviser does not know the future but is strongly present during the improvisation. On the other hand, where is the past located in dance improvisation? My research explores the past as a valuable concept in dance improvisation because the present is inherently linked to the past. I apply Gabriella Giannachi’s notion of ‘presence’ which is that “the sense of presence is read as occurring in the engagement with the trace, so producing complex relationships with the past events they may appear to inscribe into the present”(Giannachi et al., 2012: 195).I also aim to offer how it is framed in my own composition enquiry for dance improvisation as practice-based research. In particular, my enquiry is exploring the ‘documenting process ’in terms of how the pastas an archive of historical movements can be transformed and reshaped in the present improvised movement as ‘new’, live composition. However, the ‘new’ in this context does not mean that they have never done the movement before or that they have never experienced it before in the past; it may be that this past movement is transformed and reproduced to create ‘new’ movement.

3. Mask construction with Cardboard Citizens’ ACT NOW and St Mungo’s Broadway Recovery College

Will Pinchin

“Masks can be seen as amplifications of the different inner drives rooted deeply within our body and psyche, which impact the way we relate to ourselves and our environment.” 

—Thomas Prattki (Pedagogical Director, The London International School of Performing Arts)

This paper critically examines the use of mask construction as a means of accessing self-knowledge. It begins by reviewing the practitioners who use mask-making as a major element of their methodology. It then critically assesses two workshop series, delivered with Cardboard Citizens’ “ACT NOW” and St Mungo’s Broadway “Recovery College”, both respected London based programs that offer services for individuals who have experienced homelessness.  Working in collaboration with Theatre Temoin, exploring 22 original hand crafted masks for archetypal themes and imagery, we approached personal narratives and conflict in a safe and constructive manner.  This paper articulates a multi-modal Practice as Research methodology, merging a Jungian critical framework with the embodied knowledge of a group of devising actors trained in the pedagogy of the renown mask teacher Jacques Lecoq. It explores the potential and pitfalls of accessing personal conflict and narrative through the use of mask construction.

PANEL 4: Transgression through representation: what’s it worth?

Thursday 15/01/15 – 14:30-16:00 – Rehearsal Room 1

Chair: Dr Jessica Hartley (TBC)

1.A glimpse of stocking: Historically situating Camp performance as a commentary on impact and value.

Simon Dodi

When the Cole Porter song Anything Goes (1934) gets reprised at the end of various award-winning incarnations of the musical, a Camp extravaganza impacts the stage as a chorus of tap dancing sailors joins the leading lady for the finale to the show. For this paper I situate a value of Camp performance coming from resisting normative notions of value and impact. In the example of the musical number above, holding onto the moment by the means of tap dancing sailors makes Camp value, through the impact of a light-hearted musical number for a finale. However the song itself is also a historically situated piece of Camp performance. Most recent versions of Porters song omit the original lyrics, as they specifically reference scandal and gossip of high society set amongst the economic depression era. These original song lyrics provide a social commentary through their catchy lyrics and witty remarks. The musical number in the show holds time in a delay as the tap number takes place, and the original song itself drags on the past as its lyrics are situated in the specific time it was written. By reading Camp as a Queer discourse, the performance creates Camp through a process of holding onto the past as well as delaying the moment in time.

This paper shall address how Camp performance is being theatrically and knowingly out of synch. And how by understanding Camp performance as this can offer a way to be critical, by knowingly placing value and impact elsewhere. But most seriously to ask why, ‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. But now, God knows. Anything Goes!’

2. Violence in Transformation

Charlotte W. Bence

In a recent New Statesman article, Shiraz Maher argues that there are different ways to classify the reasons that foreigners flow into Syria for jihad. One reason presented is: “the conflict represents a chance to have the fight they [radicals] had been waiting for.” He also emphasizes how Isis has embraced social media as a recruiting tool.

This paper will examine how in the cinematic representation of violence certain functions of violence transform into other functions of violence. At times, the revolutionary function of violence may seem destined to realize its criminal potential. On the other hand, in certain films violence may serve a cleansing purpose. For example, many of Abel Ferrara’s films have been analyzed as religiously redemptive.

In Abel Ferrara’s 1992 film, Bad Lieutenant, two criminals are given a second chance after committing a heinous crime. This paper will interrogate the function of violence, which has a revolutionary potential, even though the spectator sees these same intentions as decidedly criminal.

Using this film as a point of analysis, and in particular a few selected violent sequences, are we able to make sense of the transformative function of violence, a process that eschews the traditional relationship of the law to punish wrongdoing. Further how can we examine redemption and liberation through violence?

Finally the paper will briefly address the contemporary socio-political climate. How can we use the cinematic representation of the transformative functions of violence in order to make sense of an increasingly complex exodus of young people into Syria?

3. Theatricalism and Theatricality

Silvia Dumitriu

The theatricalist paradigm as a new grounding principle seems to inform the most important contemporary theories regarding the production of the discourse. The adoption in postdramatic of the conceptual framework of  cultural critique which undermines  the modernist theories of subject and ideality, advances theatricality as dissonance and the production of discourse as a  fundamentally a play without end or origin. The boundaries between text and performance collapse as theatricality as the specificity of stage language is once more kept at a distance and manipulated as a dangerous supplement that has to be destroyed, tamed or mystified. In the context of the postdramatic, this taming of the supplemental nature of theatre is performed mainly through the reliance on  and appeal to the political interpretation. This divergence attempts to elude the notion of danger that subsides theatre according to Artaud ; divergence/rebellion is being tolerated only in the form of a particular type of spectacle, that avoids dangerous implications deriving from  making audience witness the unbearable. Could we talk about theatrical impact (the impact of theatricality) as opposed to the theatricalist impact, which is associated with the political dimension of the postdramatic? By looking at two theatre scandals, Artaud and Sarah Kane, I will attempt to undermine the common assimilation of the scandal with abnormality and danger, proving that  theatricality bears a complex relation with the  transgressive gesture, which is inconsistent with the politics of speech. The presentation  suggests that the ambivalent concept/ discourse on theatricality in the mimetic paradigm is continued into postdramatic by an unreserved appeal to theatricalism;  the pervasive misunderstanding of theatre as theatricalist and spectacle should be replaced with one accommodating the specifically dual nature of theatre, and this should be attempted through a rethinking of the problem of representation. Articulating theatricality and the vestiges of mimesis in contemporary theatre involves interrogations regarding the exposure of the actor, the cultural constructions behind a role, the role of ideology in shaping the  personal, the reality of representation, the articulation of the intimate experience of the spectator, the problem of the “real” and the “surface”.

PANEL 5: Archive, stage and private values: textile, dress and costume

(Presented by teaching team on the Costume with Textiles BA at the University of Huddersfield)

Friday 16/01/15 – 11:30-13:00 – Rehearsal Room 2

Chair: Jon Davison / Caroline Townsend (TBC)

1. Precious?

Toni Bate and Liz Garland

This article will investigate the concept of the theatrical costume store as a living archive, the use of historical pieces as costume on the stage and the implications this has on the conservation and display of period clothing. 

Through conversation with costume industry professionals, photography and examination of original garments found in theatre collections, the changing relationship between costume and clothing will be explored and analysed in terms of preservation, performance, research and education.

Issues concerning the use of ‘vintage’ and ‘period’ clothing for a performance will be raised as well as discussion around the importance of these garments in a social history context; the difference in perceived value between lower class and upper class wear and the journey these garments have so far taken. The ethics of using a surviving pieces of period clothing as costume will be investigated as well as the purpose of such pieces; to be hidden away, preserved in a box with tissue paper, occasionally viewed by specialists or seen by a wider audience serving its original purpose- that of an item of clothing to be worn. 

The reader will be motivated by a series of thought provoking questions to consider the value of a piece of original period clothing through its life in a store where it lives as an archived object, on the stage where it becomes part of the character’s narrative and what it brings to the performance for the audience, the actor and the costume team.

2. The Wear Project

Nadia Malik

When we meet a character in a performance, the implicit understanding is that they have existed until the point where we join their journey and will continue existing after we leave them. Their clothing tells a hi/story to the audience before we hear them speak and before any action takes place. As a Costume Designer and Lecturer, my awareness of costuming as an anthropological practice has led me to explore these principles using myself as the subject of scrutiny. For one year I am logging every clothing combination I go through along with memories, prices, locations and dates etc. in order to explore the sub/conscious clothing decisions I make and the stories, embedded in my clothes, that I am surrounded by every day. What does my wardrobe mean to me inwardly and reveal to my audience outwardly, and how does this ‘me-search’ extend my artistic practice?

The Wear Project will be a visual archive, a teaching tool, and a foundation for further academic research/writing through the questions it raises about storytelling, memory, dress and audience: a personal interrogation generating a critical framework for understanding the dramaturgical significance of costume. I welcome any interest, suggestions, questions, provocations, conversations or counter-projects that could lead my research, costume design or performance related teaching in general into unexplored areas. The Wear Project is available for anyone to view or use on flickr at http://bit.ly/1kAYv74 .

3. Life of the cloth: stories in the making

Clair Sweeney

“(Storytelling) does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report.  It sinks into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again” writes Benjamin (1999: 91).

The act of making cloth within a costume can be seen as a primary form of storytelling.

The cloth within a finished costume coveys a narrative which is threefold: the first is expressed in the language of the cloth itself, it is through the act of marking, staining, and stitching that the cloth speaks, it surprises. The second story that is told is that of the creator who gives life to the cloth and speaks of the material enquiry into the process of making; the learning through making, the mistakes, risks and accidents that lead to the final piece of cloth and third story is that of the activated and animated cloth in terms of life it has on the performer.

This paper will focus upon the first two, which are often neglected or forgotten. In the present work, the language of the cloth and the language of the making are explored by crossing the disciplinary boundaries of Textiles and Costume to achieve a novel perspective.

The theoretical discussion is enriched by the review of case studies in the form of creative process journals developed by final year students on the Costume with Textiles BA(Hons) course at the University of Huddersfield. These journals represent a data collection method that involves the students positioning their practice within the context of a specific performing art; then observing, recording and reflecting on the process of designing and making their costumes.

PANEL 6: Who values the establishment?

Friday 16/01/15 – 11:30-13:00 – Rehearsal Room 1

Chair: Selina Busby / Dr Katharine Low / Adelina Ong (TBC)

1. “Smiling the whole way through”: How audiences experience theatrical value

Kirsty Sedgman

Within the cultural sphere, the governmental urge to prove economic outcomes has never come through more powerfully. However, there is a growing sense that by considering artistic value purely in terms of financial or social ‘impact’, something important is lost.

My empirical research project explored audiences’ responses to National Theatre Wales (NTW). Through pre- and post-show questionnaires, audience interviews and observation research, I found interesting differences in how audience members articulated the value of NTW. This presentation will particularly explore NTW’s remit as the national theatre of Wales by discussing two contrasting productions: For Mountain, Sand & Sea (a walking tour of Barmouth which used local stories as inspiration) and The Persians (an ancient Greek play which took place on a British military range in the Brecon Beacons). Here an interesting contrast was identified. While FMSAS’ audiences were more likely to talk about wanting to see local issues performed in understandable ways, The Persians’ audiences thought of themselves as ‘citizens of the world’. NTW’s remit for these people was therefore not so much a national one but an international one: to put the people of Wales in touch with wider ‘universal’ themes.

This presentation will pose a number of questions. How do audiences employ different rhetorical moves in order to take up particular orientations? How strongly are respondents committed to orientations, and what kinds of tensions are experienced where these differ or compete? Rather than seeing articulations of responses as fixed structures, this approach has allowed me to consider the maneuvers by which judgments are arrived at. This presentation will conclude by explaining the impact of my research methodology: that this approach allows cultural value to be better understood not as an end-point (‘benefit’, ‘impact’, ‘outcome’) but as a process: something that is constantly negotiated and in flux.

2. Who values dance made by disabled artists? Empirical and academic research in Dance and Law.

Kate Marsh and Mathilde Pavis

The presenters of this paper are PhD students in Dance and Law investigating in their respective disciplines the place and value of choreographic works made my disabled dance artists and their role as leaders in the dance community. Our dance specialist, based at Coventry University, aims to capture the voices of disabled leaders in dance, evaluating their experiences and exploring further leadership opportunities for dance artists with disabilities. Working from these empirical and practical inputs, our law specialist based at Exeter University assesses the efficiency of the law in supporting dance works outside the mainstream with a specific focus on the copyright framework. The latter being ultimately tied to a narrative dominated by the rhetoric of economic value in creation, it is prone to offer its own theoretical definition and matrix of values that often clash with practitioners’ views. Our research has revealed that the dynamics of our dance/law research collaboration did not take the course one might have expected. It shifted from having lawyers teach dance artists how to commercialise, or make valuable, their work by utilising the copyright system, to become a knowledge exchange where dance artists in turn educated law experts as to the ‘real’ value of contemporary performing art practices, beyond economic concerns.

As part of a large-scale collaborative project called Invisible Difference, Dance, Disability and Law, we have also considered the potential of our cross disciplinary collaboration to offer a framework for our research. The paper will draw attention to the fact that interdisciplinary collaboration became a real vector of value in our research from a methodological perspective, despite the challenges it presented. The paper will attest to the fact that the findings that offer the greatest impact on our respective field stem from truly collaborative research methods. By sharing their experience, the presenters aim to continue to inform on-going collaboration between dance and legal frameworks.

3.  Why should a theatre engage with its local communities?

Naomi Alexander

The production and consumption of publicly subsidised arts is highly socially stratified in the UK today, as evidenced through data from sociological (Bennett 2009) and cultural policy (Bunting 2008) research. Following Eleonora Belfiore (2013, 2014) I frame the allocation of public subsidy to cultural activities that predominantly have cultural value for the middle classes and those who enjoy high social and educational status as a social justice issue. Within this social justice framing, I move on to explore the question of why a theatre should engage with its local communities. Using Nancy Frasers’ (2000) theories of recognition and redistribution I recount Nadine Holdsworth’s (2005) retrospective analysis of the impact that Joan Littlewood’s ‘Figure of 8’ practice of engagement with local communities had on the way work was produced and valued at the Theatre Royal Stratford East during Philip Hedley’s tenure as Artistic Director. In the absence of detailed policy from ACE regarding the intersection between a theatre and its local communities I suggest that there is a need for further research and the development of policy and practice in this area.

PANEL 7: INTER-impact: or how some things affect others.

Friday 16/01/15 – 14:00-15:30 – Room Y

Chair: Wendy Gadian

1. An investigation into current acting and music performance higher education courses in the UK.

Helen Price

This paper is part of a wider study which investigates how acting techniques can improve music performance. The research entails exploring a wide range of current syllabi and assessment criteria of music and acting courses from Higher Education establishments in order to ascertain how various institutions examine performance.  The study involves conducting and recording interviews with musicians and lecturers; producing and collecting data from questionnaires; filming flautists rehearsing and performing their normal routines; filming musicians in acting workshops; filming performances with the new approach to rehearsing music, and gathering data from audiences via questionnaires. These practice elements to the research have yet to be conducted and the planning for which is ongoing. A large amount of research has focused on current performance training in the fields of music and acting.

One of the subjects currently explored in music performance training and research is performance anxiety. A possible impact on this field would be similar to the notion of ‘concentration’ which R. Chaffin has analysed in relation to music performance. Concentration effected musician’s performance and those who were highly focused and alert experienced a more improved performance. If the use of acting techniques was found to significantly improve performance for musicians, then this could have a profound effect on the future training for musicians. My own experience led to this research when I took on characters for Reinecke’s Undine Sonata, my flute performance improved dramatically. When I prepared for this I focused on the character work and wrote notes containing my character’s inner monologue. Reinecke’s programme notes included details about the character stating, “At the wedding of Hulbrand and Berthalda, Undine sadly appears and gives Hulbrand a kiss that kills him” (Larry Krantz Flute Pages, 1996-2014).

The research to date has revealed that there is a very limited number of similar collaborations which connect instrumental music performance to acting. Therefore a probable impact of my research may be that it will inspire more researchers and academics to consider inter-disciplinary collaboration in these two fields. The desired impact would be if academics from a variety of institutions having read the paper or attended the conference are made aware of the need for a new course and the possibilities it could bring to the field of music performance. 

2. The Fun Palace: A collaborative research in theatre and architecture.

Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez

In the framework of multidisciplinary research, this article deals with the creative process of a specific proposal, in which both architecture and theatre  are involved in a balanced way.

The Fun Palace was an unbuilt project, developed by the architect Cedric Price and the theatre director Joan Littlewood in London. It is one of the most complex and rich projects in the history of architecture, mainly because of the fact that the spaces of the building would change depending on the activities that people would be developing in them.

Theatre is conceived as the motor of social change, it transcends the limits of the space through architecture, creating an urban, political and sociological machine. The main goal of this project is the development of a public building with an urban scale, inspired by the events from citizens’ lives.

The value of this proposal in terms of research is the approach from two different, and apparently, distant disciplines to a unique issue, and how in the process, they use other knowledges such as cybernetics or game theory to get to a competitive response to a sociological problem.

The objective of the article is to analyze the impact that the different disciplines involved had over each other, in order to extract the most important facts of the collaboration between Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood. 

3. New insights into the notion of interculturalism and hybridity in musical theatre

Alejandro Postigo Gomez

This paper aims to reflect on the nature of hybrid forms of musical theatre based on the contributions of intercultural discourse to shed light on problems of cultural identification in musical theatre. The creation of a hybrid form of musical theatre through collaborative processes seems to mirror the way that the popular genre generally developed, through appropriations of new forms and functions from other local and foreign cultures. I will discuss new dynamics of collaboration and creativity, and the ways forward for intercultural musical theatre as a distinct form within the dominant West End-Broadway genus.

Interculturalism is a means to find further innovative ways for musical theatre to develop within an international framework by giving voice to cultures that can complement and expand the creative possibilities within the dominant musical theatre industry. Daryl Chin views interculturalism as a way of ‘bringing suppressed material into the artistic arena, by admitting into a general discourse other cultures which had previously been ignored, suppressed or unknown’ (1991: 95) and this paper will identify these discourses of dramaturgy and performance style found in the context of the dominant paradigms of musical theatre produced in America and Britain.

PANEL 8: Who defines value? Participants, directors and the power to ascribe value

Friday 16/01/15 – 14:00-15:30 – Rehearsal Room 2

Chair: Amanda Stuart-Fisher

1.The value of power distribution in actor training

Evdoxia Stamatiou

In this paper I will discuss the Value of my Practice-based Research in Actor Training.

At the SCUDD conference in 2009 there has been addressed the issue of tutors’ training methods and processes deriving from their “own experience in the field” rather than linking to those practices or methods specific theatre practitioners or theorists. John Gillet writes that such an approach beholds students from understanding, while it creates a culture of dependency and the creation of gurus and disciples. The gain for the tutor remaining a guru would be a tighter bond with the students/actors. I argue that choosing to reveal the training mechanism to the student/actor and distributing power through decision-making may create equally a bond between trainer and actors. This bond will not be based on authority but rather on community.

In this paper I will read the above deprivation of knowledge through Brecht’s notion of power. Brecht writes that “there is not much knowledge that procures power, but much knowledge is only procured through power”. In order to explore the impact of power distribution in actor training I will examine the impact distribution of power had in rehearsal to the particular knowledge gained during working with 18 Level 5 HE Performing Arts students. I will examine as case study the specific point of Aristophanes’ parabasis in TheFrogs. The aim of my practice as research was to create a learning environment that would facilitate equal power distribution. In order to do so I made specific choices; Anne Bogart’s- Tina Landau’s Viewpoints and Composition practice, clowning and Aristophanes’ The Frogs.

The result of the above PaR project was a shift in power dynamics amongst the group of actors and trainer from a Republican Democracy model where power as perceived through decision-making was representative to an Ancient Athenian Democracy one where decision-making was communitarian.

2. Challenging the rules of engagement; a person-centred approach to art based research methods appropriate for the investigation of Alzheimer’s disease in its mid to late stages.

Hannah Gravestock

This paper describes my work as a researcher/volunteer at a Day Care Centre run and funded by the Alzheimer’s Society, and the value of a client-centred approach to, and assessment of, research and research methods in dementia care. The initial aim of my research had been to develop art workshops in order to explore and case study the embodied experiences and methods of communication of those with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). My research method was to be based on ethnographic case studies of a small group of clients at the Centre. These studies would include recording the clients verbal responses to creating art work, designing an intervention in the form of workshops based on this data and current art and theatre practices, and verbal responses subsequent to the intervention. This data would be examined further using discussions about both sets of art work with the clients primary care givers and caring staff at the Day Centre.

However as many clients at the Day Centre are in the mid to late stages of the disease it became clear that using established art mediums, workshop structures and one to one feedback sessions was not going to work. I also became increasingly aware that a relevant and practical art based approach to my research was not going to be found in academic literature. Instead I began listening to and watching the interactions between the Day Centre clients and their carers. As I studied their routines and practices I realised that I had over-valued my choice of research method as a means to reveal greater insight into the disease and had greatly undervalued the role and response of the person with dementia and their carers.

As a result, although my methodological approach is still phenomenological and my methods have remained ethnographic, they are, for now, based on non-structured observations rather than intervention. This research data, and its value in relation to better understanding experiences of AD, is informed and assessed using dialogues with regular staff members at the Day Centre.

Through the reflective narrative of this paper I identify the different problems I have encountered in using art as research methods in the study of the late to mid stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. I discuss my approach to problem solving and how I have been able to move my research forward by resisting the application of practices external to the Day Centre as the foundation for my case study. I conclude this work by proposing that the value my research comes from placing the person with AD and their carers at the centre of its development and as key people in assessing its desired impact and overall value.

3. ‘All I care about is the numbers’: shaping and challenging the agenda through an applied theatre research project focussed on an ethic of care

Anne Smith

Creative English is an applied theatre programme that develops confidence in communicating in English for adult refugees and migrants in the UK.  It does this through a playful, improvisation-based approach with familiar characters who engage in a range of everyday scenarios.  Through emotional engagement with the plot and a lot of laughter, each session develops functional English, understanding of culture and participants’ rights.  The model evolved from practice-based research in collaboration with participants, for a PhD in using applied theatre to facilitate a sense of belonging.  In 2013, FaithAction won £1.1 million from the Department of Communities and Local Government to roll-out this programme across 22 areas nationally via faith and community organisations within its national network. 

Using Creative English as a case study, this paper argues for the importance of recognising the value of participant-led research which informs what agencies are funded to deliver.  It highlights the value of examining small, intimate moments in a workshop space, which attend closely to the needs of the individual, and the wider impact they may in turn have on addressing community cohesion.  Where the research itself has been shaped by the ethic of care, this value becomes unimportant in contract terms and yet the fact this quality is embedded within the model is responsible for its success.  This paper supports its argument by examining some of the tensions which exist between contract delivery and research in terms of how value and impact are assessed and how this may conflict with innovation and sharing of good practice.

4. Concrete Blood- creative fluidity, meaningful impact and participant wellbeing: the ethics of generating publishable research data through participatory performance.

Lady Kitt and Dr Lorraine Cowley

Participation: This is a participatory performance lecture led by a live artist and a social scientist. Delegates will be asked to become involved in the action in a variety of subtle ways (all whilst remaining seated) during the lecture.

Actions:

Linking art and science in a series of playful interactions, speakers use theatrical drawing, thought games, questions and toothpaste to transform themselves and delegates into a series of art works, a collection of scientific data and an experiment in identifying the value of their own involvement.

Content: Speakers share developing techniques and experiences from their current “a-n” funded research project which focuses on the ethics of producing “hard” science data through performance.

Through our work we aim to simultaneously:

Engage participants in outstanding, thought provoking and entertaining artistic experiences and

Generate useful science research data with real life applications

This desire generates endless questions about value. For us the most immediate of these are:

∙ Does involvement fetishize the layperson or are we creating real platforms for meaningful engagement?

∙ Who should determine the value / cost of these projects- both as artistic experiences and as a credible works of science research?- ourselves, participants, funders, curators, users of products and services that the projects set out to improve?

∙ What will involvement “cost” participants (emotionally, physically, socially), how is involvement credited / celebrated and how can these issues be sensitively managed?

These questions have led us to experiment with new methods for monitoring and evaluating both impacts and (non-financial) costs of projects; attempting to create more realistic ways of delivering value in an ethical manner. In the lecture delegates will be presented with and involved in this evolving process.

PANEL 9: The value of disobedience.

Friday 16/01/15 – 14:00-15:30 – Rehearsal Room 1

Chair: Simon Dodi (TBC)

1. When the Lights Are Shining On Them: The Value of Performance in Club Settings

Joe Parslow

What is the value of performance which takes place outside of theatres and performance venues? What effect does this mode of performance for those who witness and participate in it? Looking at the performance of drag, this paper proposes to examine performance in club settings to consider what this performance does or can do in these spaces for queer collectivity and academic research.

This paper will focus on two performances that took place at The Black Cap, a bar and club in Camden (London) which holds a historically significant role in drag performance since the 1970s featuring well-known drag performers such as Mrs. Shufflewick, Regina Fong and Lilly Savage. In recent years The Black Cap has been home to a huge number of new nights promoted, ran and hosted by drag queens who work across the London drag scene and beyond. The specific form or style of drag that I will articulate/explore sits in a contemporary (re)emerging context in which younger drag performers are producing aesthetics and performance practices which work to challenge the limits of what drag can be traditionally understood to be. The performers that I will examine work beyond gender illusion or female impersonation and, rather than trying to “pass” as female, produce an aesthetic which is visually engaging, challenging and disruptive.

Focusing on work by contemporary drag performers Maxi More and Bourgeoisie at The Black Cap in the last 6 months, this paper intends to examine the impact of these performances as events within a club night and the effect of these performances for the performer and audience. Furthermore, it will consider the temporal, physical and economic cost, or expenditure and return (both economic and cultural) that these performances offer for the performer, audience, club space, and the field of academic research.

2. What is the Value of Being a Public Nuisance?

Adelina Ong

In Seeing Like a City, professor of criminology, Mariana Valverde, notes that ‘the logic of nuisance governance’ coexists with existing modes of governance and are often enacted in a ‘non zero sum manner…in unpredictable and shifting combinations’ (Valverde 2011: 281). This logic of nuisance governance refers to the negotiations that people make in order to live together and this predates formal legislation or regulations.

Graffiti artists who appropriate ‘public spaces’ for their work are often regarded ‘vandals’ who are a public nuisance. On the other hand, regulatory signs that do not declare the identity of the author or specify the authority capable of enforcing these regulations are permitted and displayed at will. Sociologists Joe Hermer and Alan Hunt argue that these regulatory signs should be considered as a form of ‘official graffiti’ where signs assume the ‘appearance of official status’ namely by appropriating its symbols ‘ the prohibition circle with its diagonal red slash across the circle’ (Hermer & Hunt 1996: 456).

In Singapore, regulatory signs restricting various acts that might be construed as ‘public nuisance’ abound. These regulatory signs ‘mark, scar and deface public spaces’ even whilst conveying the impression of legitimacy through iconic symbols of ‘official’ commands (Ibid.). Some graffiti artists in Singapore have responded to these regulatory signs in ways that interrogate the authority of such signs.

This presentation will reflect on the value of graffiti in Singapore, and the impact that this relationship has on ‘official graffiti’.

3. You can’t tell me what to do: what we learn from Medea.

Sarah McCormack, Francesca Miller, Molly Cheesley

In August 2014 Big Shoes Theatre Company took their production of Medea to the Edinburgh Fringe: a structurally and narratively faithful adaptation of Euripides’ text performed by an all-female group aged 15-17.  Constructing the character and narrative of Euripides’ Medea as a model for interpreting their own experience, the director and key participants of the production will examine the problematized status of experiential education as realised within the secondary school practical arts curriculum – and consider the wider societal impact of this. 

The impact of the character of Medea derives from her rejection within her own context of the societal articulation of the value of woman.  Medea’s actions are ultimately beyond the measure of constitutional judgement and confer upon her a status directly at odds with rational or moral assessment.  The embedded perversity within the text of Medea can be read as a celebration of irrationality and disobedience in both the individual act and societal outcome.

The Big Shoes theatre venture rejects the moral/ideological conflation of abstract and market value within current educational practice.  It reconstructs the process as direct physical and intellectual engagement with a range of bodies of knowledge, filtered through the discipline of the theatrical performance to chime with the individuality of the participants.  And its impact in every area relevant to education: wider knowledge, personal growth, societal awareness – is infinitely greater than that of the regulated classroom event.

As Medea’s rejection of the hegemonic construction of womanhood provides a compelling realisation of the physical reality, so the Big Shoes engagement with Medea and the Edinburgh Fringe rejects the current hegemonic understanding of the educational process.  It demonstrates that the impact of projects peripheral – even anathemic – to accepted policy and practice provide experiences that make the greatest impact on students and therefore ultimately yield the most significant value.

Intersections: Colloquium of Performance Research

Jan. 16-17, 2014

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

DAY ONE

Welcome: Tony Fisher (RCSSD) and the Colloquium Committee

Keynote: David Wiles (Exeter)—‐ Classical Acting

Respondent—‐Simon Shepherd (RCSSD)

Panel 1

Intersecting Aspects of Embodiment

Mark Flisher (Leeds Met/Plymouth) – Coming to terms with my ‘Self(s)’: a methodology focused on the intersections of bodily representations, shame, and anxiety

Christina Kapadocha (RCSSD) – ‘Intersections’ between embodied ‘logos’ and embodied perception in a somatic approach to acting

Amelia Cavallo (RCSSD) – The “trouble” with access: Audio Description’s interactions with aesthetics and representation

Intersecting Materialities

Helen Murphy (RCSSD) – Vague Pleasures

Tanja Beer (Melbourne/RCSSD) – Rubbish Theory: Exploring intersections in performance and ecological design practice

Fiona Graham (Auckland) – Navigating Intersections: The intervention of the dramaturge in performance development

Panel 2

Intersecting Disciplines and Performances

Paul Barker (RCSSD) – Paradoxical Paradigms

Marcelo Bere (RCSSD) – Musical Moments for Clown and Pianist – The Misfit Relationship and the collaborative work

Alban Coombs (Royal College of Music) – Embracing Difference: Collaborations between Clown and Pianist

Intersecting Human and Non-Human

Shuan May (Kent) – Bananas, Spools, and Everyday Intelligibility

Jungmin Song (Roehampton) – Intersecting (with) paper and Hamlet: (tissues)

Steve Tromans (Middlesex) – Intersecting Time, Intersecting Place: The event of performance as a technique of existence

Intersecting Cultures

Amy Holson-Schwartz (RCSSD) – Why Can the English/Irish/Americans/Austrians/Greeks…Interculturalism in My Fair Lady

Alejandro Postigo (RCSSD) – The Copla Musical: An intercultural approach to Spanish folklore

Claudio Beghelli (RCSSD) – Towards an ‘intercultural’ performativity of taste

Open Plenary

DAY TWO

Keynote: Karoline Gritzner (Aberystwyth) – The Moving Shapes of Desire: Between Performance and Philosophy

Respondent – Gilli Bush-Bailey (RCSSD)

Panel 3

Intersecting Theatricality

Jon Davidson (RCSSD) – The Staging of Spontaneity

Jo Scott (RCSSD) – Inter-act / Inter-sect: Meeting Points in Live Intermedial Practice

Silvia Dumitriu (RCSSD) – Theatricality and Mimesis

Intersecting Collaborations

Karen Wood (Coventry), Mathilde Pavis/Hannah Donaldson (Exeter) – Shifting boundaries, shifting aesthetics; intersecting dance, disability and law

Ellie Nixon (Exeter) – The Threepenny Opera: Experiencing Intersections

Alan Taylor (RCSSD) – Can there be collaboration in the composition of music? (And what is collaboration anyway?)

Intersecting Aesthetics

Daniel Felstead (RCSSD) – Biocapitalism, Auto-Fellating Vampires, and Composing Material Reality

Lisa Woynarski (RCSSD) – Where We Live: Aesthetics of Home in Ecological Performance

Penny A. Newell (King’s) – Tearing and Forming” Interdisciplinary Thinking and the Transfer of Thought

Panel 4

Intersecting the Self and Other

Will Pinchin (RCSSD) – Mask pedagogy: monotheistic or polytheistic

Rebecca Reeves (RCSSD) – In praise of acting: staging Gertrude Stein, an inside outside approach to constructing and deconstructing character

Jaclyn Robinson (RCSSD) – In Place of the Personal: Shakespeare with Ex-Servicemen in an Applied Theatre Setting

Intersecting Theatre and Philosophy

Kiki Selioni (RCSSD) – Theatre Praxis: Aristotle-Laban versus Plato (?)

Selena Burns (NYU) – Performing “Human”: Philosophy meets Drama in a Primary School Classroom

Paul Geary (Bristol) – The Interesting Intersection

Intersecting Dialectics

Peter Billingham (Winchester) – THE MOBIUS EFFECT: Towards a re-imagining of dialectics within cultural materialism

Charlotte Bence (RCSSD) – Does the gangster have to die?

Katrina Brown (Falmouth) – body intersect surface: a choreographic investigation

Closing Plenary