Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Crisis theatre and the living newspaper
Crisis Theatre and The Living Newspapers traces a history of
the living newspaper as a theatre of crisis from Soviet Russia (1910s),
through the Federal Theatre Project of the Great Depression in America (1930s), to Augusto Boal’s teatro jornal in Brazil (1970s), and its resonance with documentary forms deployed in the final years of
apartheid in South Africa (1990s), up until the present day in the UK
(2020s). Across this Element, the authors are interested in what
a transnational and transhistorical examination of the living newspaper through the lens of crisis reveals about the ways in which theatre can intervene in our collective social, economic and political life. By holding these diverse examples together, the authors assert the Living Newspaper as a form of Crisis Theatr
'Drama as Therapy' research seminar
The RCSSD’s CDthAN (Central Dramatherapy Alumni Network) hosted a seminar celebration of over 1000 citations of the book - 'Drama as Therapy' (Routledge 1996, 2007) by Professor Phil Jones. This research based seminar consisted of eight groups of therapist-researchers from Australia, Cameroon, Canada, Israel, Palestine, the UK and the USA presenting their work and being involved in dialogic interviews with other therapist-researchers and MA/Doctoral students from different parts of the world, including those from the RCSSD’s MA in Drama and Movement Therapy. The focus concerns their published research in relation to their citation of ‘Drama as Therapy’, focusing on the book’s theory and research concerning the ‘core processes’ of dramatherapy.
What are the Core Processes?
‘The core processes aim to ‘define the key processes which operate within dramatherapy and show how they can be used in different ways according to the needs of the client group or context…’ (Jones 1996: p99).
‘Jones describes nine core processes derived from theatre...(these are) particularly appropriate because dramatherapists agree that it is involvement in the process of drama...that creates the potential for change in dramatherapy’ (Langley 2006: p 22).
‘First articulated by Jones (1991) the drama therapy core processes are common factors across drama therapy approaches that represent universal in-session process variables and are theorized to be therapeutic and bring about client change’ (Frydman et al. 2022: p1).
There are eight presentations/interviews by therapist-researchers
Presentations and interviews featuring:
1. Leigh Bulmer, Dr Christine Novy, Amy Thomas and Susan Ward about 'Introducing Movement and Prop as Additional Metaphors in Narrative Therapy' (2005) Journal of Systemic Therapies 24: (2) 60-74. Interview by Akinyi Oluoch.
2. Dr Reem Shamshoum about 'Extracts from ‘Dancing in Nazareth' (2016) from ‘Beyond the Boundary: is there something called real knowledge?’ ALARA Monograph. Interview by Dr Ditty Dokter and Dr Sandra El Gemayel.
3. Rinat Feniger-Schaal about 'Using Drama Therapy to Enhance Maternal Insightfulness and Reduce Children’s Behavior Problems' (20210 Frontiers in Psychology (11): Art. 586630. Interview by Anat Geiger and Professor Phil Jones.
4. Genevieve Smyth about 'Solution-focused brief dramatherapy group work: working with children in mainstream education in Sri-Lanka' (2010) from Arts Therapies in Schools: Research and Practice (ed. Karkou, V.), Jessica Kingsley. Interview by Lujain Faqerah and Dr Emma Ramsden.
5. Lucy Lu and Dr Felice Youen about 'Journey women: Art therapy in a decolonizing framework of practice' (2012) The Arts in Psychotherapy 39: (3) 192-200. Interview by Madeline Montgomery and Professor Phil Jones.
6. Professor Paul Animbom about 'Therapeutic theatre: an experience from a mental health clinic in Yaoundé-Cameroon' (2017) Arts & Health 9:(3) 269-278. Interview by Lanjo Neindefoh and Dawisu Ndzewiyi.
7. Dr Joanna Jaaniste about 'Dramatherapy with Elders and People with Dementia' (2022) Routledge. Interview by Dr Alyson Coleman, Tammy Ivensha, Sam Ruston, Jordan Rapacchi and Dr Chanaphan Thammarut.
8. Dr Angelle Cook, Dr Jason Frydman and Dr Chyela Rowe about 'Understanding school-based drama therapy through the core processes: An analysis of intervention vignettes' (2021) The Arts in Psychotherapy 73: (2) 101766 and 'The drama therapy core processes: A Delphi study establishing a North American perspective’ (2022) The Arts in Psychotherapy 80: (1) 101939. Interview by Dr Alyson Coleman and June VanWeelden.
9. Seminar Recording October 16 2024
Note on Ethics: The seminar interview process was approved by the RCSSD Research Ethics and Integrity Sub-committee (2024) and interviewees signed a consent form. This included consent for the inclusion of the interviews in this respository. All research referred to within the interviews is: from published articles and chapters; within the public domain and was subject to ethical approval within the contexts of the researchers
Towards a new humanity: Belonging, embodiment, and Quantum Black creative geographies
"In her paper, Quantum Black creative geographies: embodiment, coherence and transcendence in a time of climate crisis, Professor Noxolo explores the qualities of quantum mechanics. She reflects on how the application of its principles to Black Geographies unearths complex entanglements and uncertainty across cultures and geographies while also enabling a reimagining of time. Noxolo’s drawing together of quantum coherence with Black creative geographies is thought-provoking to me as a dance scholar and artist who thinks about creative Black geographies from embodied performance epistemologies. In particular, I am interested in how Africanist dance is a vehicle for creating and interrogating Black worldmaking. Here, in my brief response to Noxolo’s paper, I offer two provocations that resonate closely with my work. First, I add quantum coherence to my extended notion of Kamau E. Brathwaite’s (1993) Tidalectics to think about how my conceptualization shifts through the subatomic. Secondly, I consider how the process of quantum mechanics impacts transcendental lines of flight and fugitivity perceived through a dancer’s embodiment. To conclude, I reflect on the significance of connecting with our bodies as an additional consideration of quantum mechanics in the context of liberatory strategies for Black life and humanity within our already climate-altered world.
Applied theatre: research-based theatre, or theatre-based research? exploring the possibilities of finding social, spatial, and cognitive justice in informal housing settlements in India, or tales from the banyan tree
This article draws on a twenty-year relationship of short-term interventions with Dalit communities living in informal settlements, sub-cities and urban villages in Mumbai, that have sought to create public theatre events based on research by and with communities that celebrate, problematise and interrogate sustainable urban living. In looking back over the developments and changes to our working methods in Mumbai, I explore how the projects priorities the roles of the community as both researchers and artists. I consider where a specific applied theatre project, which focuses on site specific storytelling with Dalit communities in Worli Koliwada and Dharavi, functions on a continuum of interactive, participatory, and emancipatory practice, research and performance. Applied Theatre practices should not and cannot remain static, they need to be constantly reformed and as practitioners and researchers we need to constantly re-examine the ways in which we work. This chapter poses two central questions: firstly, can this long-term partnership between practitioners, researchers and artists from the UK and India working with community members genuinely be a space for co-creating knowledge and theatre? And secondly, if so, is this Theatre-based Research or Research Based Theatre? I interrogate Applied Theatre’s potential to create a space of cognitive justice, which must be the next step for applied theatre, along-side its more widely accepted aims of searching for social and spatial justice and which places the community as both artists and researchers. The Dalit social reality is one of oppression, based on three axes: social, economic and gender. The chapter explores how working as co-researchers and the public performance of their stories has been a form of ‘active citizenship’ for these participants and is a key part of their strategy in their demand for policy changes. In looking forward I ask how working in international partnerships with community members can promote cognitive justice and go beyond a merely participatory practice. I consider why it is vital for the field that applied theatre practice includes partners from both the global south and north working together to co-create knowledge, new methods of practice to ensure an applied theatre knowledge democracy. In doing so I will discuss if and how this work might be considered to be Theatre-based Research
Clean Break Theatre Company
Clean Break is a women-only theatre company that grew out of a prisoner-led drama workshop that took place between 1977-1979 in HMP Askham Grange. In addition to its considerable impact on criminalised women and public understandings of the socio-political impact of their experiences, Clean Break has had a significant but under-acknowledged impact on contemporary British theatre. We examine three areas of Clean Break’s theatre making history and organisational practices: its origin stories; its education and engagement work; and how the company’s practices have, across four decades, ‘then’ and ‘now’, adapted to directly intervene in carceral society. By highlighting Clean Break’s distinct, activist theatre making processes and practices, the book makes explicit the genealogical connections of the company’s past work and its impacts on contemporary feminist theatre practices
The Scale of Research Has Already Changed
Contribution to "Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field", with Sissi Liu, Derek Miller, Erin B Mee, Kate Elswit, and Sarah Bay-Cheng
Muscle works: physical culture and the performance of masculinity
Men’s fitness as a performance—from nineteenth-century theatrical exhibitions to health and wellness practices today
This book recounts the story of fitness culture from its beginnings as spectacles of strongmen, weightlifters, acrobats, and wrestlers to its legitimization in the twentieth-century in the form of competitive sports and health and wellness practices. Broderick D. V. Chow shows how these modes of display contribute to the construction and deconstruction of definitions of masculinity.
Attending to its theatrical origins, Chow argues for a more nuanced understanding of fitness culture, one informed by the legacies of self-described Strongest Man in the World Eugen Sandow and the history of fakery in strongman performance; the philosophy of weightlifter George Hackenschmidt and the performances of martial artist Bruce Lee; and the intersections of fatigue, resistance training, and whiteness. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity moves beyond the gym and across the archive, working out techniques, poses, and performances to consider how, as gendered subjects, we inhabit and make worlds through our bodies
Staging difficult pasts: transnational memory, theatres and museums
This collection of original essays brings together museum, theatre, and performance case studies with a focus on their distinctive and overlapping modes of producing memory for transnational audiences.
Whether this is through narrative, object, embodied encounter or a combination of the three, this volume considers distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies. This book is underpinned by three areas of research enquiry: How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators staging historical narratives of difficult pasts? How might comparisons between theatre and museum practices offer new insights into the role objects play in generating and representing difficult pasts? What points of overlap, comparison, and contrast among these constructions of history and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism, and communism might offer an expanded understanding of difficult pasts in these transnational cultural contexts?
This collection is designed for any scholar of its central disciplines, as well as for those interested in cultural geography, memory studies, and postcolonial theory
Their Majesty Drag Performance and Queer Communities in London
This book explores drag performance in London since 2009 via the pubs, bars and clubs that make LGBTQ+ communities thrive.
It studies the complex relationship between drag performance, LGBTQ+ venues and queer communities. In exploring drag performance, the book develops a greater understanding of the connection between drag performance and queer communities, in particular exploring how drag might facilitate queer communities and offer queer modes of survival and resistance for queer people. Through this, the book describes a contemporary moment in which drag performance is increasingly popular and increasingly important at a time when homophobic and transphobic violence is prevalent, and LGBTQ+ venues are often under threat of closure. Understanding the increased/increasing mainstream popularity of drag, the book examines drag performance that is connected to and resists mainstream attention in order to account for its complexity in London (and beyond).
This book takes the author’s engagement with and love for drag and exerts a critical, political and queer pull in order to develop new terrains of queer studies and queer performance studies
Auditory hallucinations in non-psychotic disorders – an analytical psychological perspective
Although hallucinations are a feature of psychosis, they can present in non-psychotic disorders and may occur in non-pathological states. Jung argues that unconscious complexes underpin hallucinations and further observes that some of the symptoms of ‘hysteric' patients – including hallucinations – were also common amongst patients with schizophrenia. However, the outward presentation of symptoms was markedly different for each patient group. Jung mobilises his complex theory to explain this difference. We argue that Jung’s understanding of hallucinations applies to contemporary healthcare; it frames how hallucinations may manifest in multiple conditions, not just psychosis. This brief report discusses Jung’s theories and their continued veracity in contemporary contexts