A Celebration of Collisions 2020 Online: Shifting Perceptions
In Autumn 2020, Central was pleased to host the annual Collisions Festival, Collisions 2020 Online: Shifting Perceptions in a new format, and to bring together – online – a wider academic and public audience to celebrate and showcase the School’s thriving doctoral research community.
Collisions is an annual festival of practice research in performance which brings together research degree students and creative fellows to engage with what it means to be researching with, through, in and by practice, and to share this engagement with the wider public.
As a result of Covid-19, this year’s Collisions was presented for the first time as an online festival featuring a retrospective of digitally documented presentations from past festivals, as well as showcasing how current practice-research students are making digital practice.
The online festival prompted questions about how we shift our perceptions of practice-research over time, across changing contexts and new formats. The featured work and conversations explored the challenges in adapting practice to virtual platforms whilst reflecting productively on past or current practice to develop research for an uncertain future. Ultimately, Collisions 2020 encouraged dialogue and reflection through featuring past and present projects, interviews, Q&As, and chat rooms. And in these uncertain times, it offered a rare and valuable opportunity for connection.
Collisions 2020 Online: Shifting Perceptions was co-curated by current PhD candidates Josephine Leask and Laura Kressly and was produced by PhD candidate Rebecca Hayes Laughton. The academic mentor for the project was Dr Kate Elswit. Of the Festival, the team said:
“Organising and presenting a performance festival remotely and online was challenging. It raised questions about the important distinctions between live and filmed work, the dynamics of audience reactions and participation and the fractured discussion space mediated by technology. The platform, Zoom, created to serve a far more corporate and hierarchical communication model, revealed the ways our technologies are not neutral but in fact shape our personal interactions. In the more (we hope) dialogical performance research and arts practice space, we learned new tools and strategies as quickly as we could to adapt. Ultimately, we felt that the online festival community that we built was valuable as a meeting place, in spite of all its flaws.
The situation presented the opportunity to reflect and look back at Collisions past, and we were able to create the beginnings of a rich digital archive of practice research from Central over the past ten years. We look forward to developing this further alongside a Live Collisions 2021! Thanks to all who have contributed.” - Rebecca Hayes Laughton
“It was so uplifting that in the gloom of a pandemic and given the limitations of hosting a creative festival on zoom we were able to interact with an enthusiastic group of practice- researchers and share their eclectic practices. So too was pausing to reflect on and celebrate the work of past Collisions which now forms the beginning of a precious archive.
We learnt a lot from the process and delivery of the festival. What we lost from the absence of live bodies we gained from the extraordinary range of online presences. The opportunity to exchange ideas and knowledge on practice-research that Collisions provides never seemed more important and we appreciated the insightful contributions of all participants.” - Josephine Leask
“Though COVID-19 presented a unique set of challenges to the Collisions 2020 team, we sought to showcase and disseminate practice-research in various forms amongst the theatre and academic communities. Though a digital-only festival came with constraints, we were pleased with the opportunities that it gave us, particularly in its potential to reach a global audience.” - Laura Kressly
“It was inspiring to see how the Collisions team met the challenge of curating this annual festival that is so vital to Central’s PhD community, in the midst of a pandemic. The resulting event did a beautiful job of showcasing some of the many ways that practice and the conversations around it progress on, even as they shift.” - Dr Kate Elswit
As a doctoral student at Central, students are fully immersed in our research culture, which is one of enquiry, innovation and experimentation. They are engaged in exploring new and pioneering ideas and practices under the supervision of research active staff, many of whom are the leading scholars and practitioners in their fields. To find out more about what we offer and what it means to be part of our community of postgraduate researchers at Central, as well as how to apply, please visit the Research section of our website or contact us directly.
Presenters and Performers at Collisions 2020 included:
Simon Dodi – PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama whose practice-based research examines male camp identity in British popular performance, and focuses on the work of Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson.
David Finnigan and Ben Yeoh (Co-Presenters of the “Thinking Bigly Sustainability Show”)- David Finnigan is a writer, theatre-maker and pharmacy assistant from Canberra; a member of science-theatre ensemble Boho (Australia) and an Associate of Coney and the Sipat Lawin Ensemble (Philippines) and a Churchill Fellow and Australia Council Early Career Fellow. Ben Yeoh is a theatre maker and sustainable investment fund manager; the current Chair of theatre company Coney, Chair of a Responsible Investment Advisory Committee advising a leading sustainable UK Investment trust and the former Chair of Talawa Theatre Company.
Dr Tony Fisher - Reader in Theatre and Philosophy and Associate Director of Research (Research Degrees) at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Chang Gao - PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art; sculptor, public art researcher, and Establisher and director of the International Laboratory of Social Innovation at the Central Academy of Fine Art of China.
Laura Kressly - Freelance theatre critic and dramaturg; PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama researching embedded theatre criticism.
Josephine Leask - Dance critic, editor and lecturer; PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama researching the contribution of New Dance Magazine (1977 – 1988) to the creation of alternative and feminist intersectional dance writing practices.
Maja Milatovic-Ovadia - Freelance theatre director; PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama working in a range of contexts including multimedia performances, collaborative and community based theatre practice in post-conflict settings based on the use of humour and comedy.
Dr Adelina Ong - Lecturer at Central in Applied Theatre Practices; completed her PhD at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2018. Her thesis, Compassionate Mobilities, proposes a theory for negotiated living inspired by parkour, art du déplacement, breakin’ (breakdancing) and graffiti.
Dr Naomi Paxton - performer, writer, broadcaster, and researcher; Knowledge Exchange Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and Associate Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Alejandro Postigo - Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre at the London College of Music; PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama whose practice-based research explores the Intercultural Adaptation of Spanish Copla songs in international theatre settings.
Eden Rickson - Undergraduate Student and Students Union Environments Officer at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, as well as a climate justice activist who uses the power of the arts when protesting.
Anna Woolf - PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama whose research examines socially engaged and participatory art, health and applied theatre in relation to teenagers suffering from the very complex autoimmune disease Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis.
Other work presented asynchronously as part of the festival:
Nadine Deller – Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD candidate undertaking a Collaborative Doctoral Award between The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and the National Theatre whose research aims to shed light on the position and work of Black women playwrights in the National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive; Host of That Black Theatre Podcast.
Kate Duffy-Syedi - PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and co-Artistic Director of Phosphorus Theatre.
But everything has an ending: an anthology of digital responses to covid-19, as told by those who have had their lives disrupted before. Kate’s practice research and wider work engages with refugees and asylum seekers, particularly those who came to the UK as unaccompanied minors.
Rebecca Hayes Laughton - PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, as well as a Drama facilitator. Presented videos from the Women for Refugee Women Drama Group who have continued weekly Friday sessions throughout the pandemic but with limited access to WIFI and phones / laptops. Being connected is hard and sometimes impossible. You can read about how Lockdown has affected the women on the RCSSD Theatre Matters Blog.
Joe Parslow - Lecturer and PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama whose research focuses around drag and queer performance practice and the potential ways in which queer communities can and do emerge in contemporary London, particularly around performance.