Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

Abstract: Applied theatre practice as research might be perceived as a curious conflation. Not greatly foregrounded in the literature on applied theatre or performance practice as research, this article engages with the particularities of such a pairing. Beginning with identifying why a consideration is timely, ‘the practice as research’ and ‘social’ turns are invoked and analysed as relevant contexts to consider applied theatre practice as research. Two projects are offered, providing specific examples for discussion. Revealed by increased scrutiny, some broader epistemological questions emerge concerning power, hierarchy of knowledge and research ‘authoring’. A metaphor of polyphonic conversations is offered as an amplification of the applied theatre practical research methodological terrain. Encouraging the basis of many sets of voices contributing to research and potentially negotiating concerns about power hierarchies and knowledge production, the metaphor provokes a fluidity of epistemology, including...

Abstract: This article examines the tendencies of LGBT intergenerational theater projects. By engaging with ideas of queer time, temporal drag, and the pervasive heteronormative imagery of heritability and inheritance, this article explores the possibility that LGBT intergenerational projects may generate some of the problems they aim to challenge. Through the lens of queer time, the article describes the normativity generated in LGBT intergenerational theater projects as a form of restrictive interpellation. The article explores the temporal complexities at play in such theater productions as The Front Room, a specific LGBT intergenerational theater project performed in the United Kingdom in 2011. The article concludes by noting some ways in which intergenerational theater projects might seek to work through the embodiment of the historical quotidian as a mode of resistance to normativity’s recirculation.

Abstract: Artistic research has in recent years concerned itself with the nature of practice and how this may be framed as research. These debates may have blinded us to a more fundamental concern: territorial claims to the research space made by other forces. Competition for access to material and human resources, funds, space, and infrastructural support, among others, drive debates about the academic status of performance within higher education. The main objective of this article is to demonstrate how the ideological imbalances underpinning the concepts of artistic knowledge and research in Higher Education have contributed to this territorialization. In a milieu of overmanagement, these imbalances often go unquestioned largely because of the university’s ever-decreasing role in interrogating the agenda set by others who stand to benefit from it.

Abstract: This article confirms and deepens an understanding of the negative impact of teaching culturally embedded speech standards to actors who are “othered” by a dominant “somatic norm” within th...

Abstract: This article proposes that the heteronormatively sexy female comic body can derive or enhance its comic proposal via the incongruity of its designated unfunniness. Performances by practitioners Ursula Martinez, Olivia Cote, Tig Notaro, and Olivia Lee are analysed in order to illuminate and confound potentially heteronormative conceptions of humour and the comic body. The potentiality of a ‘sexy scatology’ is revealed.