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.

Transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary exchanges between embodied cognition and performance practice: working across disciplines in a climate of divisive knowledge cultures

Abstract: Although Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice could be said to have in common that they live in the fields of hermeneutics and epistemology concurrently, and with this are interested in perception, knowledge, experience and agency without privileging any of them or presuming a linear or status relationship among them --there still remains a divisive disciplinary gulf. This paper provides a critical history of the science/humanities divide, exposing prejudices and practices that often impede productive interdisciplinary relationships between Cognitive Science and Performance, and offers suggestions forward towards a more productive middle field allowing for the possibility of new knowledges.

Pretty funny: Manifesting a normatively sexy female comic body

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.

Witnessing change: understanding change in participatory theatre practice with vulnerable youth in a Kids Company-supported primary school

Abstract: This article details key findings from a longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with Kids Company, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The focus of this article is the role of the ‘teacher as witness’ to the impact of a participatory theatre project with vulnerable young people. This research argues that the opportunities afforded by challenging pre-emptive constructs of vulnerable youth held by a teacher, can enable changes that take place within a workshop, which can often remain temporary and confined to the space and time of a project, to transition back into the wider school environment. Drawing upon the concept of witnessing discussed by Felman, and Laub [1992. Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Abingdon: Routledge], Rymaszewska [2006. Reaching the Vulnerable Child: Therapy with Traumatized Children. London: Jessica Kingsley], Gerhardt [2004. Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain. East Sussex: Routledge] a...

Seeing the word, hearing the image: the artistic possibilities of audio description in theatrical performance

Abstract: This paper will explore the effect that creative, non-traditional uses of audio description (AD) have on the audience during a performance, and how they trouble normative understandings of aesthetics and representation. This will be done by analysing two pieces created by Extant Theatre, the UK's only professional theatre company of visually impaired people. Both pieces use highly visual forms of performance in order to highlight the necessity of descriptive access for both practitioners and spectators experiencing these pieces, as well as the effect that description can have on the comprehension of an image. I will dissect these performances by juxtaposing my experience as a practitioner in these pieces with some of the methodological structures inherent within disability studies and identity politics, such as Rosemary Garland-Thomson's research on staring. AD, in its standard form, is an access tool for blind and visually impaired spectators that is almost always placed on top of an already completed pe...

Understanding spaces of potentiality in applied theatre

Abstract: This article moves on from the ‘turn to affect’ in applied theatre to explore further how concepts related to affect theory might offer ways in which practice might respond to the contemporary context of a ‘post-normal’ and ‘post-truth’ world. Acknowledging the influence of transdisciplinary discourses on gender, race, disability, space, place, performance philosophy and neuro-psycho-biology, it explores how applied theatre-making might be conceptualised as a ‘space of potentiality’. The terms ‘space’ and ‘potentiality’ are surveyed as relational, contingent, and indeterminate, allowing for an understanding of practice that embraces fluidity, and difference, and resists pre-defined assumptions. Specifically, it draws on my practice of collaborative theatre-making with people in recovery from addiction to re-frame the issue of change within a more fluid appreciation of affect as a process of bodily inter-relation. It, therefore, discusses theatre-making as an affective ecology that generates an ‘al...