Editorial

This is the editorial for the special issue of the Journal of Applied Arts and Health Issue 11.1 and 11.2 on puppetry and healt

The UNIMA Research Commission

An article about the UNIMA Research Commissio

Child Agency of Working in the Arts Therapies: 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 and recognising and listening to children as ‘active agents’ and ‘experts’; *features approaches that: access children’s views of their therapy; engage with them as researchers or co-researchers; and that use play and arts-based methods; *draws on arts therapies research in ways that enable insight and learning for all those engaged with children’s therapy and wellbeing; *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

Biljana Srbljanovic and Ivana Sajko: Voice in the Place of Silence

In this chapter, the author advances an argument that the local context(s) can be seen to have shaped a very specific type of dramaturgy that is well exemplified by the respective authorial idioms of playwrights Biljana Srbljanovic and Ivana Sajko. She proposes that this work demands to be seen in new ways, rather than by reference to existing taxonomies and discourses. Srbljanovic and Sajko’s post-Brechtain authorial voice abolishes the traditional hierarchies while deploying a more relational form of self-inscription. They make themselves audible within the stage directions to engender a metadialogue with the text and engage the reader/audience in a relationship. Voice has been as integral to the feminist discourses as ecriture feminine, although Briony Lipton and Elizabeth Mackinlay note that the advent of neoliberalism has complicated this agenda and opened up the potential of silence. The chapter opens up avenues for further research at the intersection of voice studies, feminism, trauma, politics, and the Balkans

English Play Development under Neoliberalism 2000-2019

Work in Progress: English Play Development under Neoliberalism, 2000-2019 explores how play development practices in state-subsidised English theatres functioned between 2000-2019, under conditions of neoliberal governance. By attending to both institutional and individual strategies and structures of play development, I analyse their economic rationality and co-constitution with the neoliberal statecraft of New Labour (1997-2010), the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition (2010-2015), and the current Conservative government (2015-) in advance of the general election in December 2019. Drawing on Marx’s Capital Volume One (1990 [1867]), this thesis engages a materialist mode of analysis, exposing ideological structures that contribute to making theatre what Ric Knowles calls a ‘culturally affirmative’ product (2009: 56). Taking up the cultural materialisms of Williams (1977) and Dollimore and Sinfield (1985), and the bureaucratic analyses of Weber (1978 [1922]) and Graeber (2016 [2015]), I show how New Labour’s neoliberal higher education and arts policies shaped English playwriting guides and dramaturgy in English theatres. The writings of Gramsci (1999 [1926]), Hall (1988), Brown (2015) and Foucault (2008 [1978-9]) further support an analysis of how play development in English theatres was shaped as a post-Fordist enterprise that encouraged artists to enact forms of neoliberal subjectivity. Furthermore, via the Marxist-feminist standpoint theories of Haraway (1988) and Hartsock (1983), I argue that the coalition furnished play development with a neoliberal ‘new diversity’ (Hargrave 2015: 109). Finally, using the ‘commodity chain analysis’ of Cook (2004) and Coles and Crang (2011), I contend that ‘performances of development’ represent new ways in which artists are attempting to resist neoliberal rationality. The thesis concludes that, over this period, neoliberal capitalist hegemony has fundamentally shaped English play development. By generating a mode of production that conflates the usually distinct categories of development and performance, however, artists have begun to challenge the existent play development paradigms and their ideological underpinnings

Editorial

This is the editorial for Studies in Theatre and Performance Vol. 40, No. 2

Decentering Listening: Toward an Anti-Discriminatory Approach to Accent and Dialect Training for the Actor

This article reports on the findings of practice-based research into the development of anti-discriminatory accents and dialects training for actors with diverse intersecting identities. The author reviews an earlier strand of research into speech training within a UK conservatory that identified a bias toward Received Pronunciation reinforced by colonized listening practices. This article explores the impact of those listening practices on accent and dialect training. The author responds to the challenges inherent in providing training that both develops high-level skills and meets industry needs, while aiming to center the experiences of somatically othered students. The author develops their previous decolonizing model into a decentering framework for an approach to training actors that draws on critical pedagogy and asks students to cross the border from the conservatory into the community. This approach to accent and dialect training builds on verbatim and documentary theatre-making techniques, resulting in a practice that values empathy, listening, embodied practice, and autonomy, and the approach allows actors to perform “multiple authenticities,” while offering the potential for political insurgency within the performing arts industries

Dragging the Mainstream: RuPaul's Drag Race and Moving Drag Practices Between the USA and the UK'

In the wake of the ever-growing popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race (Logo TV, 2009), an American television series in which drag performers compete for the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar, drag is increasingly considered in homogenised forms across national and international boundaries. Alongside this programme, the increase of the presence of drag performers on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has meant that access to drag and drag performance is increasingly available outside of venues in which the performances occur, whilst the presence of make-up tutorials on YouTube allows those interested to practice the aesthetics of drag from the safety of their bedrooms without stepping heel on stage. Furthermore, it is often argued by established drag performers in the UK that younger performers only learn their drag via Drag Race, not through local drag traditions or more individuated exchanges between performers. Beyond a simple binary of British and American (or “drag race”) drag, this chapter explores the ways in which drag performance is a form that is usually learnt, rehearsed and developed on stage in front of an audience. In order to explore this, this chapter will consider a particular London-based drag competition, Not Another Drag Competition, as a semi-formal mode of learning drag. The competition takes place in Her Upstairs, a venue in Camden, London, known for producing drag, cabaret and burlesque performance events. It proceeds over a period of 10 weeks, with each week being framed around a particular challenge that allows performers to explore tropes of drag performance including lip syncing, live vocals and celebrity impersonation. This competition is one of a number of competitions across London and beyond, and is knowingly derivative of Drag Race, whilst maintaining a set of localised references and practices specific not only to the geographic area, but also often to the venue itself. Discourses on the contemporary British drag scene either paint Drag Race as the saviour or nadir of drag; it has either revitalised a stagnant field of entertainment, or turned all drag into an “American” form of that ignores UK practices and histories. Taking the time to consider with more care the agency of younger and/or newer performers, this chapter explores how this mainstream manifestation of drag, and the contemporary drag competitions it has facilitated, might work to produce alternative forms of drag training which still place performance and performing as the first term. Working from performance as a place of both doing and learning drag, this chapter argues that the mainstream and the local emerge at the level of the performers’ bodies in problematic and productive ways