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.

Theatre at the Impasse: Political Theology and Blitz Theatre Group's Late Night

Abstract: This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to resolve its conflicts I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt I read the performance, instead, as an elegy to Nancy’s inoperative community, at the centre of which are the figure of lovers, bound to, yet unable to take possession of, one another Staging impasse, Late Night allegorises the fragile human community, exposed in its fundamental precarity

Ways of making: Artistic practice which works co-collaboratively, ethically and which celebrates and extends the conversation of what it means to live well with HIV.

Abstract: This letter is the start of a dialogue about ways of making theatre cocollaboratively with women living with HIV. It offers a series of ideas of what I believe constitutes engaging and ethical practice specifically in the field of working co-collaboratively with women living well with HIV, and what is important to do, as well as what the basic non-negotiables are in establishing such a practice.

The Intuit: An Investigation into the Definitions, Applications, and Possibilities offered by Intuitive Applied Theatre Practice with Vulnerable Youth

Abstract: This article offers insights into what might constitute intuition in applied theatre practices with vulnerable youth in London. The study will explore the approaches of five theatre companies working with children and vulnerable youth. A lead practitioner from each company has been interviewed, and the interpretation of the data they have provided has offered new insights into the role of intuition as an approach to ensuring applied theatre is responsive to young people living precarious lives. The research identifies two aspects of intuitive practice, one that resides with the actions and thoughts of the practitioner, and the other with the acceptance of intuitive creative offers by participants. The study has also revealed the potential heightening of intuitive responses for practitioners who share history, culture, location or identities with their participants. Altogether the findings from the research offer useful potential considerations of key qualities for an intuitive practitioner, or the Intuit, working specifically with young people in contexts of uncertainty.

Performance Criticism: Live Writing as Phenomenological Poiēsis

Abstract: Diana Damian Martin proposes in this chapter that performance criticism operates as a kind of “phenomenological poesis”—an emergence that is itself a form of creative production. Damian Martin is navigating here the channels the interlink action, perception and thought, and she draws on Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the very nature of appearance to aid in that navigation. Here, as elsewhere, the argument concerns ways of knowing that are always emergent, particularly as Damian Martin’s chief focus is on “live writing”—criticism which responds to the performative event as it unfolds, and as such not only forms part of the performance it is “perceiving”, but, in Damian Martin’s words, “marks its own eventness”.