Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

About: Royal Central School of Speech and Drama is a education organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Political theatre & Queer. The organization has 57 authors who have published 94 publications receiving 332 citations. The organization is also known as: CSSD & The Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art.

Ecological sentinels: Indigenous heroes or colonial cliché?

Abstract: The depiction of ecological heroes has been prevalent in much ecological performance work, particularly presenting Indigenous peoples as responsible ecological sentinels warning of the harmful impa...

‘Rehearsing the unrehearsed’: reflections on the concept of presence in dramatherapy and performance training

Abstract: The phenomenon of therapeutic presence is notoriously difficult to articulate and may benefit from dialogue with the discipline of performance studies. This paper discusses how qualities of therapeutic presence can be contextualised as performative in nature. Qualities of presence in both the therapist and the performer are discussed, with specific reference to Eugenio Barba and the cultivation of presence in training both the actor and the therapist. The author then reflects on the piece ‘The Artist is Present’ by Marina Abramovic for its capacity to explore presence and intimacy within a performance piece.

Drama teachers: global encounters

Abstract: ‘Drama teachers: global encounters’ is a series of curated interviews with drama teachers to be presented in forthcoming issues. The aim is to generate a global snapshot of key issues effecting dra...

Hopeful Acts in Troubled Times: Thinking as interruption and the poetics of nonconforming criticism

Abstract: In his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’ (1926), Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique.Negotiating conflicts that shape a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment. What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance.In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ (2015, 13) under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake (ibid.)

Chapter 2: The Context for Our Place, Our Stage

Abstract: This chapter shares a history of the emergence of the South African nation, including an analysis of apartheid before discussing three areas of South African life: health, crime and safety, and South African theatre. The focus of this analysis moves to a consideration of Nyanga, the township in which the OPOS project was based. Here, Nyanga’s experiences under apartheid and during democracy are described and the chapter examines how the Etafeni Trust was established to address the challenges facing the community. Finally, the OPOS project’s relationship with Etafeni and its positioning within Etafeni’s Fit for Life, Fit for Work programme is described. Such an understanding is paramount to appreciate how and why resisting the status quo by expressing one’s own meaning and understanding on one’s own terms of a situation can be considered a radical act.