Celebrating Recent Staff Book Publications
Congratulations to Central’s staff and researchers on their recent publications.
In May 2020, we were pleased to celebrate the numerous contributions made by members of Central’s academic community towards academic publications, including those from Professor Paul Barker, Professor Ross Brown, Vanessa Ewan, Dr Stephen Farrier, Dr Tony Fisher, Dr Amanda Stuart Fisher, and Ayse Tashkiran. Further books have followed in the latter part of 2020, many the result of collaborations with co-editors, co-authors and contributors to whom we also extend our congratulations.
Dr Nicola Abraham, Central’s Lecturer in Applied Theatre Practices, has co-edited The Applied Theatre Reader, 2nd edition with Tim Prentki.
The Applied Theatre Reader is the first book to bring together new case studies of practice by leading practitioners and academics in the field and beyond, with classic source texts from writers such as Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Mikhail Bakhtin, Augusto Boal and Chantal Mouffe.
This new edition brings the field fully up to date with the breadth of applied theatre practice in the twenty-first century, adding essays on playback theatre, digital technology, work with indigenous practitioners, inter-generational practice, school projects and contributors from South America, Australia and New Zealand.
This collection of critical thought and practice is essential to those studying or participating in the performing arts as a means for positive change.
Professor of European Theatre at Central, Professor Peter M. Boenisch is the author of The Schaubühne Berlin Under Thomas Ostermeier: Reinventing Realism.
On the 20th anniversary of artistic director Thomas Ostermeier’s time at Berlin’s Schaubühne Theatre, this important study reflects on the contribution the theatre has made to contemporary theatre, not just in Germany, but around the world.
Combining scholarly reflection with interview material, this essential collection investigates how theatre has been reinvented by the Schaubühne under Ostermeier’s tenure, bringing together international theatre scholars such as Erika Fischer-Lichte, Marvin Carlson, Jitka Goriaux Pelechova, Benjamin Fowler, Ramona Mosse and Sabine Huschka. This study also considers productions by some of Ostermeier’s past and present collaborators, such as Katie Mitchell, Falk Richter and Sasha Waltz.
Together with Phil Jones, Lynn Cedar, Deborah Haythorne, Daniel Mercieca and Emma Ramsden, Central’s Lecturer in Drama and Movement Therapy Dr Alyson Coleman has authored Child Agency and Voice in Therapy and New Ways of Working in the Arts Therapies.
Child Agency and Voice in Therapy offers innovatory ways of thinking about, and working with, children in therapy. The book considers different practices such as respecting the rights of the child in therapy, features approaches that access children’s views of their therapy, draws on arts therapies and research in ways that enable insight and learning, and considers how the contexts of the therapy, such as a school or counselling centre, relate to the ways children experience themselves and their therapy in relation to rights, agency and voice.
Child Agency and Voice in Therapy will be beneficial for all child therapists and is a good resource for courses concerning childhood welfare, therapy, education, wellbeing and mental health.
Dr Tom Cornford, Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Central, has co-edited Michael Chekhov in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways with Cass Felming. Principal Lecturer in Voice Daron Oram and Senior Lecturer in Acting and Movement Sinéad Rushe also contribute to the volume.
The culmination of an innovative practice research project, Michael Chekhov in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways draws on historical writings and archival materials to investigate how Chekhov’s technique can be used across the disciplines of contemporary performance and applied practice.
The book collectively offers a thorough and fascinating investigation into new uses of Michael Chekhov’s technique, providing practical strategies and principles alongside theoretical discussion.
Dr Tom Cornford is also the author of Theatre Studios: A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making
Theatre Studios explores the history of the studio model in England, first established by Konstantin Stanislavsky, Jacques Copeau and others in the early twentieth century, and later developed in the UK primarily by Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine, Michael Chekhov and Joan Littlewood, whose studios are the focus of this study.
Students and makers of theatre alike will find in this book a provocative and illuminating analysis of the politics of performance-making and a history of the theatre as a site for developing counterhegemonic, radically democratic, anti-individualist forms of cultural production.
Director of Research Professor Maria Delgado has, with Bryce Lease and Dan Rebellato, co-edited Contemporary European Playwrights.
Contemporary European Playwrights presents and discusses a range of key writers that have radically reshaped European theatre by finding new ways to express the changing nature of the continent’s society and culture, and whose work is still in dialogue with Europe today.
Written for students and scholars of European theatre and playwriting, this book will leave the reader with an understanding of the shifting relationships between the subsidized and commercial, the alternative and the mainstream stage, and political stakes of playmaking in European theatre since 1989.
Professor Maria Delgado and Dan Rebellato have also released the revised 2nd edition of their co-edited Contemporary European Theatre Directors.
This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years.
Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.
Dr Sarah Grochala, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for the MA/MFA Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media, is the author of The Theatre of Rupert Goold: Radical Approaches to Adaptation and New Writing.
Since the late 1990s, Rupert Goold has garnered a reputation as one of the UK’s most exciting and provocative theatre directors. His exhilarating, risk-taking productions of both classic texts and new plays have travelled from regional stages to the National Theatre, the West End, Broadway and beyond. Through his artistic directorship of Northampton’s Royal & Derngate, the touring theatre company Headlong and London’s Almeida Theatre, he has radically transformed, not only the companies themselves, but the landscape of British theatre. This is the first book to survey and analyse the full range of Goold’s work to date and is a vital resource for students, scholars and fans of his work.
Senior Lecturer in Community Performance and Applied Theatre Dr Katharine Low is the author of Applied Theatre and Sexual Health Communication: Apertures of Possibility
This book analyses the partnership between applied theatre and sexual health communication in a theatre-making project in Nyanga, a township in South Africa. By examining the bridges and schisms between the two fields as they come together in the project, an alternative way of approaching sexual health communication is advocated. This alternative considers what it is that applied theatre does, and could become, in this context. Moments of value which lie around the margins of the practice emerge as opportunities that can be overlooked. These somewhat ephemeral, intangible moments, which appear on the edges, are described as ‘apertures of possibility’ and occur when one takes a step back and realises something unnoticed in the moment.
This book offers an invitation to pause and notice the seemingly insignificant moments that often occurs tangentially to the practice. The book also calls for more outcry about sexual health and sexual violence, arguing for theatre-making as a route to multitudes of voices, nuanced understandings, and diverse spaces in which discussions of sexuality and sexual health are shared, felt, and experienced.
Dr Naomi Paxton, Central’s Knowledge Exchange Fellow, has written Stage rights!: The Actresses’ Franchise League, activism and politics 1908-58.
Stage rights! explores the work and legacy of the first feminist political theatre group of the twentieth century, the Actresses’ Franchise League. Formed in 1908 to support the suffrage movement through theatre, the League and its membership opened up new roles for women on stage and off, challenged stereotypes of suffragists and actresses, created new work inspired by the movement and was an integral part of the performative propaganda of the campaign.
Introducing new archival material to both suffrage and theatre histories, this book is the first to focus in detail on the Actresses’ Franchise League, its membership and its work. The volume is formulated as a historiographically innovative critical biography of the organisation over the fifty years of its activities, and invites a total reassessment of the League within the accepted narratives of the development of political theatre in the UK.
Central’s Lecturer in Writing for Broadcast Media and Performance Dr Farokh Soltani is the author of Radio / Body: Phenomenology and Dramaturgies of Radio.
This study provides an in-depth exploration of the dramaturgical practices of radio drama and their underlying philosophical assumptions. By presenting an analytical model drawn from phenomenology, it challenges the current understanding of the medium, instead focusing on the bodily and aural aspects of radio drama, while offering a critique of the conventions of dramaturgical practice for neglecting these affective sonic aspects.
Tracing these conventions through the history of the development of radio drama, it proposes that a more bodily, resonant mode of radio dramaturgy is best placed to meet the demands of the current era of digital production and distribution. The book also examines a number of approaches to creating a more embodied experience for the listener.
Dr Amanda Stuart Fisher, Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance and Course Leader for the BA Writing for Performance course, is the author of Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking Verbatim Dramaturgies.
Responding to the resurgence of verbatim theatre that emerged in Britain, Australia, the United States and other parts of the world in the early 1990s, this book offers one of the first sustained, critical engagements with contemporary verbatim, documentary and testimonial dramaturgies. Offering a new reading of the history of the documentary and verbatim theatre form, the book re-locates verbatim and testimonial theatre away from discourses of the real and representations of reality and instead argues that these dramaturgical approaches are better understood as engagements with forms of truth-telling and witnessing.
Examining a range of verbatim and testimonial plays from different parts of the world, the book develops new ways of understanding the performance of testimony and considers how dramaturgical theatre can bear witness to real events and individual and communal injustice through the re-enactment of personal testimony.
Through its interrogation of different dramaturgical engagements with acts of witnessing, the book identifies certain forms of testimonial theatre move beyond psychoanalytical accounts of trauma and re-imagine testimony and witnessing as part of a decolonised project that looks beyond event based trauma, addressing instead of the experience of suffering wrought by racism and other forms of social injustice.
On 31 December 2020 Dr Tony Fisher and Professor Christopher Balme’s co-edited volume Theatre Institutions in Crisis: European perspectives, was released by Routledge. Dr Fisher is Central’s Reader in Theatre and Philosophy and Director of Research (Research Degrees), and Professor Balme was Central’s first ever Leverhulme Visiting Professor. The volume was conceived as part of Balme’s time at Central, and also includes a chapter entitled Struggles of singularised communities in German theatre: The ‘culture war’ around the Berlin Volksbühne which was contributed by Professor Peter M. Boenisch.
All publications are all available to purchase online, from booksellers, or direct from their respective publishers. They are also available to borrow from Central’s Library.