Funmi Adewole Kruczkowska is a lecturer, storyteller and writer. She moved into theatrical performance on relocating to England, touring for several years as a performer with dance, physical/visual theatre companies and African dance drama productions. Her performance credits include tours with Horse and Bamboo Mask and Puppetry Company, Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble, and the Chomondeleys.
Funmi holds a B.A in Modern European Languages from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, an MA in Post-colonial Studies from Goldsmiths College and a Professional Graduate Certificate in Education from Canterbury Christchurch University. She teaches performing arts and English part-time at Kingston University and Kensington and Chelsea College.
Oladipo Agboluaje is a writer, whose plays include: Early Morning (Futuretense/Oval House) Mother Courage and her Children (adaptation, Eclipse Theatre, national tour) The Estate (Tiata Fahodzi), God is a DJ, Knock Against My Heart (Theatre Centre), For One Night Only (PBAB), British-ish (New Wolsey Youth Theatre), Captain Britain (New Wolsey/Talawa)The Christ of Coldharbour Lane (Soho Theatre), The Hounding of David Oluwale (adaptation, Eclipse Theatre, national tour), Iya-Ile – The First Wife (Tiata Fahodzi, Soho Theatre), The Garbage King (adaptation, Unicorn Theatre).
Vicky Angelaki is lecturer in English and drama at Birmingham City University. Her research focuses on contemporary British theatre, aesthetics and politics and phenomenology. She has published articles and book chapters in these areas and has presented papers in many international conferences. Her book The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.
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Donatella Barbieri is senior Research Fellow in Design for Performance, jointly Victoria and Albert Museum and London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is also a designer of performance, has curated exhibitions and exhibited in group shows, has authored and presented papers, convened research groups and chaired research symposia. She has also devised ways of developing performance that is design led, and in particular, costume led as part of the writing of the MA Costume Design for Performance at London College of Fashion.
http://www.fashion.arts.ac.uk/donatella-barbieri.htm
Nelson Barre is a recent graduate of Villanova University where he received his Master’s in Theatre. His final thesis focused on Martin McDonagh and the deconstruction of language through violence. Nelson continues to study and write about In-Yer-Face drama and contemporary performance and theory. He is the co-founder of his own theatre company in Philadelphia for whom he dramaturgs and designs sets. He was also recently named the Literary Manager and Resident Dramaturg for Plays and Players Theatre in Philadelphia.
Simon Bayly is a principal lecturer in drama, theatre and performance at Roehampton University and artistic director of the London-based performance collective PUR. His first book, A Pathognomy of Performance, published by Palgrave in March 2011, weaves together a series of conversations between the work of major philosophers and an eclectic range of phenomena, from the celebrity on stage to the theatricality of the laugh, grimace and sneeze, exploring how ‘the passion for the real’ that continues to grip contemporary thought finds itself expressed in everyday acts of failure, accident and collapse. He is currently developing projects exploring the aesthetics of organization in grass-roots social movements.
Katie Beswick is currently a research associate in applied theatre at the University of Leeds. She is currently undertaking a PhD which investigates the representation of Council Estates in performance. At present she is looking at the ways in which Henri Lefebvre’s model of social space might be applied to performance practices surrounding the place of the Council Estate. She moved to Leeds from London in January 2009, where she had been working for a number of years in a variety of contexts – including as a performer, writer, community arts practitioner and housing officer. Prior to this she graduated from Exeter University with a BA in Drama 2005 and completed her training at the Central School of Speech & Drama with an MA in Acting for Screen. As a practitioner she is actively engaged in applied and outreach work, which includes delivering workshops in drama, theatre and movement to young people in a variety of widening participation contexts. She has worked in South Africa on a month long placement with Dramatic Need, a charity that delivers arts workshops to children in underprivileged communities. She also works as a performer: this has included as an actor and founder member of Built Up Theatre Company; as an associate artist with The Space arts centre; and in a variety of live and filmed productions.
Alecky Blythe set up the company Recorded Delivery in 2003 to make verbatim theatre. Her work in theatre includes Come Out Eli (Arcola and BAC, Time Out Award for the Best Performance on the Fringe), All The Right People Come Here (New Wimbledon Theatre), Strawberry Fields (Pentabus), Cruising (Bush), I Only Came Here for Six Months (KVS Brussels, British Council), The Girlfriend Experience (Royal Court, The Theatre Royal Plymouth, Young Vic) and Do We Look Like Refugees? (Assembly Rooms and Rustaveli Theatre Tbilisi, Fringe First, The Stage Best Ensemble Award and Fringe Review Outstanding Theatre Award.). For television, A Man in a Box (IWC/ Channel 4). She is currently under commission at the New Vic in Stoke and her new play London Road, directed by Rufus Norris, opened at the National Theatre in Spring 2011.
Simon Bowes is lead artist of the new performance company Kings of England. Their first show, Where We Live & What We Live For, was performed by Simon and his father at SPILL National Platform, BAC Burst Festival, Atelier Real, Lisbon and Forest Fringe. A third, In Eldersfield was commissioned for SPILL 2011. The company’s works concern, for the most part, the passing of time. Simon also lectures in Theatre, Television and Performance at Glyndwr.
Experience Bryon is a graduate of NYC High School of Performing Arts and Monash University, Australia, and has had a ten year professional career in performance as a singer, dancer and actor in opera, film, TV, theatre, and musical theatre. She started teaching at Central in 2006 as a lecturer in performance and directing and now leads the MA Performance Practices and Research. Prior to this, Experience was Director of Performing Arts at KBCC, City University of New York and has taught at the Australian Academy of Music and Auckland University. She was Artistic Director of the Front Room in Australia and has directed and choreographed for opera throughout Australia, New Zealand and the US. She is a practicing, classical singer, choreographer and director and served in recent years as Artistic Director of Experience Vocal Dance Company. She has published numerous articles in the the areas of voice, movement and acting and her upcoming book, Integrative Performance: Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer, will be published next year by Routledge.
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Luis Manuel Campos left his native Spain and moved to New York City in 1996, where he trained as an actor at the H.B. Studio and the Stella Adler Institute. He moved to London in 2004 to work with SubVerse Theatre, a company set to investigate new writing and political theatre. Luis has performed in Spain, US and the UK, and has taught in New York, Madrid, Bilbao and London. He was one of the founding members of Pyrenean Latitude Theatre, a Brooklyn-based theatre company. As a director, Luis has directed and devised productions in New York City, where he explored the possibilities of cabaret and political vaudeville. In 2006, he was awarded an MA in Actor Training and Coaching at Central School of Speech & Drama and started his PhD research there in September 2009. His research centres round questions of subjectivity in relation to contemporary theatrical performance within the remit of epistemology, in particular how the idea of the epistemic subject is engaged with at the point of contemporary theatre practice. It also tries to investigate the possibilities of applying a mapping system to the epistemic subject in performance.
Broderick Chow is a lecturer and researcher at the Institute for Performing Arts Development, University of East London with interests in popular performance in relation to political change and mobilisation, and performance as ideological critique. His recently completed practice-as-research PhD thesis, ‘How to do things with jokes: relocating the political dimension of performance comedy’ is the first PhD to be awarded by the Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London. His practice includes solo performance, public intervention, installation and stand-up comedy, with five years on the UK comedy circuit. Current research projects include investigating comic and satirical influences in the rhetoric of American politicians, parkour in relation to the physical architecture of global finance, and the economy of labour and work in musical theatre.
María José Contreras Lorenzini is an actor and theatre director with a PhD in Semiotics (University of Bolonia) and is assistant professor at Escuela de Teatro Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has a vast experience as theatre director and researcher in Italy and Chile. Some of the plays she has directed are: La Dimora della Donne Brutte (Italia, 2004), Aspirante Martire (Italia, 2005), Tre donne in valigia (Italia, 2006), Remite Santos Dumont (Chile, 2008), La Orilla (Chile, 2009), Ponte_tu (Chile, 2010). She is nowadays developing a three-year research in “Teatro Testimonial” sponsored by the Chilean National Commission of Advanced Research. She teaches “Movement” in the undergraduate Theatre School and “Semiotics of the Body” in the Master in Arts, both at Universidad Católica de Chile.
María José Contreras Lorenzini
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Proyecto FONDECYT IniciaciónN. 11090155
Sarah Jane Dickenson is a senior lecturer, playwright and National Teaching Fellow in the drama department at the University of Hull. Her research interests focus on the structure of written drama and applied drama.
Cassandra Duell graduated with a BA (Hons) in Drama and Classics from Surrey University before completing the postgraduate actor training course at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. After working as an actor in the UK, she returned to Australia to teach Theatre Studies at secondary school level in Sydney before overseeing the drama classes at the Northern Rivers Conservatorium of the Arts. She is currently working towards a PhD at the Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney with the thesis entitled: Vision and Vernacular: implications of national origin for the contemporary Australian theatre director.
Clare Duffy is in the final year of her practice-as-research doctorate, researching ways of applying queer theory about time and place to playwriting. During this part-time research process she continues to write with Unlimited Theatre, which she co-founded in 1997 www.unlimited.org.uk. As a Platform 18 new directors award winner, Clare directed and wrote ‘Money…the game show’ at the Arches and Traverse Theatres in March this year. She is currently working as a playwright with Stellar Quines, (Edinburgh), Imago Theatre (Montreal), Magnetic North (Edinburgh), The Other Way Works (Birmingham). She has also written drama for Radio Four. Clare’s first full-length play, Crossings was produced and published in 2005 by Sgript Cymru. It won a Pearson award and a residency at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
Zachary Dunbar is a lecturer in music theatre at Central School of Speech & Drama. He trained as a concert pianist, composer and répétiteur in the US and the UK, and pursued an international career as a recitalist and concerto soloist. A freelance practice was formed recently out of a convergence with theatre and Zachary has explored notions of musicality across soundscape drama, dance, radio podcast and mainstream musical theatre. A PhD at Royal Holloway on the Greek tragic chorus was followed by visiting lectureships at the University of Sussex and Central. He has written and composed several musicals which have all had performances in the UK. Commissioned plays (writer/director) include Edinburgh Fringe First-nominated Out of Character and recently Quaternary. With his company Zeb Fontaine he has created contemporary re-imaginings of Greek Tragedy with critically successful fringe performances in Camden People’s Theatre, Pleasance, Bloomsbury, Brighton Underbelly, and Denmark. Most recently, Zachary was MD and performer for the new Charlotte Jones play, The Diva in Me; Brighton Festival, Pavilion Theatre (Argus Angel Award).
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Alex Eisenberg is now one of the core artists with Kings of England and is a member of Present Attempt, a collective who formed during their MA programmes at CSSD. He is a regular collaborator with Open Dialogues and wrote for spilloverspill in 2009.
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Stephen Farrier is a senior lecturer and course leader in drama, applied theatre and education at Central School of Speech & Drama. He studied Humanities (Drama) at Leicester University and Modern Drama Studies at the University of North London and received his PhD in 2002 with a thesis focussing on theorising a queer reading praxis. Stephen began his career working in the community at Camden People’s Theatre as a project director, whilst teaching on a sessional basis at a number of colleges and universities. His academic work focuses on the politics of theatre and performance and its relation to representation and identity. The production work he does with students is based around issues of identity, theatrical form and representation. Research and practice work are centered around post war/contemporary theatre and focus on gender, gender and theatre, queer theory, and the postdramatic. Stephen has written and presented to conferences on sexuality and television soap opera, gender variance, queer, Sarah Kane and the new brutalists, studio performance and praxis, as well as queer takes on the formation of acting. His current work explores form and its relation to the political.
Tony Fisher teaches writing for film and stage at Central School of Speech & Drama, with a particular emphasis on narrative construction, use and application of dramatic structure and story theory. In 2009 he became the programme convenor for Central’s Research Degrees. He has taught on the BA (Hons) Drama, Applied Theatre and Education course at Central as a visiting lecturer, and has a continued interest in social and political theatre and performance.
He began in fine art before studying filmmaking at the National Film and Television School and subsequently worked as a writer/director in the UK film industry. He is also a graduate of Essex University’s Department of Philosophy where he did his PhD on Martin Heidegger, looking specifically at problems of phenomenology, narrativity and historicity in Being and Time. Tony is co-editor with Patricia Lyons of the interdisciplinary and inter-institutional performance-based research website, The Rhizome (funded by Central’s Centre for Excellence in Training for Theatre).
Alison Forsyth is a lecturer in theatre studies in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University. She is the author of Gadamer, History and the Classics (2002) and co-editor of Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (2009). Amongst other projects, she is currently writing a book titled Arthur Miller's Holocaust Plays: The Trauma of Articulation
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Jane George is currently a senior lecturer and course leader for the BA Drama & Performance at the University of Worcester. Prior to this she was the director of Coral Arts, an organization that specialized in cross-artform, site-specific performance and installation projects. Jane completed her PhD, En/countering Globalisation: Contemporary Performance and the Politics of Place in 2009. One strand of this research was presented in a paper (Place, space and globalization in the work of Blast Theory and Lone Twin) at the University of Winchester Counter-Narratives conference in 2005. During her PhD research, Jane worked in collaboration with Reckless Sleepers on a number of projects as a participant observer and outside-eye. Alongside her teaching and research at the University of Worcester, Jane continues to operate as freelance writer, director and dramaturg, with a particular interest in the possibilities and interactions of place, performance and text.
Steve Gilroy is a published and award winning writer and director who produces work on both national and international stages. Steve’s work has attracted critical acclaim and awards including a Fringe First, The Stage Best Ensemble Award and The Spirit of the Fringe Award at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe for his verbatim play Motherland. His most recent documentary theatre projects as writer/director include Facts on the Ground, a play based on interviews conducted with Palestinian Olive Farmers and another work in development which focuses on the journeys of athletes training to compete in the 2012 Olympics. As a director Steve’s primary focus is on working closely with writers in the development of new plays. In his role as associate director at Live Theatre, Steve has worked alongside a number of emerging playwrights, most recently working with the Royal Shakespeare Company directing a new play by Ali Muriel. Prior to taking up his current joint post as senior lecturer at Northumbria University and associate director at Live Theatre (Newcastle upon Tyne), Steve spent four years as a director with the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme, working with some of our most prominent contemporary playwrights.
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Rachel Hann is a lecturer in performance in the Department of Performing Arts at Edge Hill University. Rachel’s principal research interests are aligned with contemporary art practice, virtual archaeology and performance, theatre historiography, along with discourses on scenography and performing design. For a more detailed account of her research please visit: www.utopiantheatres.co.uk. Rachel has also served on the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) executive committee and, as of 2010, is a co-convenor of TaPRA’s Scenography working group.
Antje Hildebrandt is a London-based choreographer and performer. Her work, which takes the form of conventional theatre pieces as well as site-specific works and installations, has been presented in various platforms and festivals in the UK and Europe. She has a MA in Dance Theatre: The Body in Performance from Laban and a first honours degree in Dance and Arts Management from De Montfort University. Currently undertaking a PhD in the dance department at the University of Wolverhampton, she is researching into concepts of the audience as author and the use of language and text in live performance. As well as working individually she often collaborates with other artists (most recently performance writer Rachel Lois Clapham) and she has worked and performed with Serbian Artistic Collective Doplgenger, Willi Dorner, Lea Anderson, Franko B and Tino Sehgal. Antje is a member of Trio, a collective of four artists who are interested in collaborative performance practice.
http://antjehildebrandt.blogspot.com/
http://triocollective.wordpress.com/
Anne Hogan is a former member of the Boston Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet. She is the editor of Balanchine Then and Now (2008) and reviews regularly on dance related topics for the Times Higher Education. She is currently Associate Dean of Humanities, Arts, Languages and Education at London Metropolitan University, and from August 2011 will be Director of Education at the Royal Academy of Dance. She has taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris, and was formerly the Head of Dance Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, Head of Postgraduate Studies and Research at London Contemporary Dance School, and Academic Leader of Performing Arts and Film Studies at London Met. She was a co-founder of The Facility: Centre for Performance as Research at London Met, and organises Connecting Conversation events in collaboration with the Rowan Arts Project, featuring dance artists such as Tamara Rojo, Alicia Alonso, and Loipa Araujo.
Adrian Howells is a performance artist with an interest in creating work that promotes intimacy and genuine exchange with an audience, often in a one-to-one, autobiographical or confessional context, in a range of non-traditional performance spaces. Between 2006 and 2009, Adrian was the recipient of an AHRC Creative Fellowship in the Department of Theatre, Film and TV Studies at Glasgow University, where his practice-led research was engaged with looking at issues of intimacy and risk in the one-to-one confessional performance practice. He is currently Artist-in-Residence at The Arches in Glasgow. Adrian has been a performance artist for over twenty years and has worked with the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, as well as presenting work at the Drill Hall and BAC in London. In 2009 he won a Total Theatre Award for his one-on-one performance Foot Washing for the Sole at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which has since toured nationally and internationally.
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Tim Jeeves lives in Liverpool and has been making performance work since 2003. He has shown work internationally and nationally, and in a variety of contexts both within and without art institutions. His previous work has been concerned with issues around disability, documentation (particularly an investigation into non-traditional ways of documenting the live event) and an exploration of different forms of interaction. He is currently undertaking an investigation into gift economies and their relationship to systems of arts production in neo-liberal capitalism; an ongoing series of projects developed with the support of Arts Council England, the Bluecoat in Liverpool, the Green Room in Manchester and University of the Arts London. He is a co-founder and coordinator of the Grunts for the Arts network.
Silvija Jesrovic is associate professor in the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick and a playwright. She is the author of Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology (University of Toronto Press, 2006). Recently, she co-edited, with Yana Meerzon, the monograph Performance, Exile, ‘America’ (Palgrave Mcmillan 2009). Her articles appeared in numerous journals including Research in Drama Education, Substance, Modern Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, Balagan, and others. Currently, she has been completing her book Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile (forthcoming in 2012). Silvija’s latest play Not My Story opened in Toronto in 2004.
Kelly Jones is a senior lecturer and programme leader of drama at the University of Lincoln. She has published several articles that explore supernatural representations of the author on stage and screen, including representations of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century to the present day in ‘Between Nature and Eternity: (Present)ing Absence in Theatrical Representations of Shakespeare as the Ghost in Hamlet’, (Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, 8.3 December 2007). She has also published work on the representation of authorship on the Shakespearean stage wherein she explores the theatricality embodied by figures such as John Gower and Machiavelli in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on the early modern stage. She is currently researching and writing a monograph on the history of staging the supernatural in the English theatre from Everyman to The Woman in White.
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Maria Kapsali is in the process of completing a PhD in Performance Practice, at the University of Exeter. Her research examines the use of yoga in actor training and theatre making, and re-considers the use of the discipline in theatre from a historical as well as an artistic viewpoint. She comes from a physical theatre background (MA in Physical Theatre) with a particular interest in different kinds of somatic disciplines and their application in performance. Her work has been disseminated through one peer reviewed publication as well as various international conferences.
Eve Katsouraki is a senior lecturer in theatre studies at the University of East London. Her main research interests concern the intersections between theories of aesthetics, political philosophy, and most particularly Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, with performance theory. Her doctorate research at the University of Edinburgh and current publications explore issues of early modernist theory in performance in relation to politics and philosophy. Her practice is interdisciplinary and includes writing and directing postdramatic theatre, filmmaking and multimedia performance, with a particular emphasis on performance installation art and interactive practices. She is currently working towards a monograph on the aesthetics and politics of early modernist performance.
Other research projects include investigating the notion of the sublime in contemporary performance theory, radical performance and theories of subjectivity, the politics of subversion and experimental performance, and the manifesto as acts of radical performance.
Jem Kelly is senior lecturer in Performing Arts at the University of Chichester. His practice-led research focuses on remediation, affective sound and phenomenology in performance. Jem’s PhD, Staging Recollections and Memoria Technica, interrogates representational and affective possibilities for telematic and playback technologies of memory-themed, multimedia theatre. Jem is currently collaborating with AHRC Research Fellow, Julian Maynard-Smith (Station House Opera), to set-up a telematic network that will link-up performance spaces in UK HE theatre departments. In addition to theatre creation and direction, Jem also composes music for theatre, television advertising and writes songs/performs with The Lotus Eaters.
Jem.kelly@chi.ac.uk
Lynne Kendrick is a lecturer in drama at Central School of Speech & Drama (CSSD) and teaches on BA DATE and MA Theatre Studies (Performance in the City). She is also a founder and director of Camden People’s Theatre, a north London venue that produces contemporary theatre and has a history of exploring emergent applied theatre practices including verbatim theatre, intergenerational, intercultural and interdisciplinary practices. Lynne was a fellow of CSSD’s Centre for Excellence in Training for Theatre exploring emergent graduate training and production opportunities and she managed the School’s graduate company residency scheme ‘Central Companies’. Lynne recently published in TDPT on actor training and she is co-editor, with Dr. David Roesner of Theatre Noise: the sound of performance due for publication in 2011.
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Donard MacKenzie is currently in the final year of his PhD program in Theatre and Drama Education at University of Britsh Columbia, Canada. His work in the academy is an extension of almost twenty years as a practicing independent theatre artist as playwright, director and actor based in Vancouver. Currently, he is working on a full length play inspired by the making of the bio-pic film Freud: The Secret Passion (Huston, 1962) in which he focuses on the key figures of the film; Sigmund Freud, Montgomery Clift, John Huston and the uncredited original screenwriter Jean Paul Sartre. He is a graduate of UBC’s MFA Creative Writing/Theatre program where he was awarded the Malcolm Lowry Scholarship. He has produced/acted or directed several projects from classical texts to contemporary social justice dramas. His work has been nominated for outstanding production awards (Jessies) in Vancouver, and has been Pick of The Fringe in various years in Edmonton and Winnipeg. Please see www.originstheatreprojects.ca for more information.
Julian Maynard Smith has produced solo and group performance work since 1978. In 1980 he founded Station House Opera and is its artistic director. Since then the company has produced 35 productions at major venues world-wide. Commissions include marking the centenary of the Brooklyn Bridge (1983), the Bicentenary of the French Revolution (1989) and the Allied bombing of Dresden (1996). In 2004 the company began a series of telematic productions linking performance sites around the world.
Recent productions include Dominoes (2009), a CREATE Olympic commission linking the five boroughs of the 2012 Games, and Mind Out (2009), on tour in Britain and Europe.
He was Kettle’s Yard Fellow at Cambridge University in 1993 and has taught in art, architecture and theatre schools in Holland and Britain. He currently holds an AHRC Research Fellowship in the Dramaturgy of Telematic Theatre at Central School of Speech & Drama, London.
www.stationhouseopera.com
Nando Messias has recently gained his doctorate’s degree at the Central School of Speech & Drama. The main focus of his research has been the intersections between the social and the performance elements of the sissy body, abuse and space. He is originally from Brazil, where he graduated in Dramatic Arts in 2000. Nando also holds an MA in Performance from the Central School of Speech & Drama, where he has worked as a visiting lecturer. Since moving to Britain, he has worked extensively in the East London cabaret scene. He is a founder member of the Eat Your Heart Out Collective and has been working as a performer and as a movement director for the Theo Adams Company, with whom he has performed in Tokyo, at the ICA in London and in Austria. In 2009, Nando appeared alongside Vaginal Davis in Bruce La Bruce’s theatrical production of The Bad Breast in Berlin.
Tim Moss is the course leader for the MA Writing for Performance in the Drama Division at the University of Huddersfield. Before becoming a lecturer in H.E. in 2001, he worked as a performer, director and writer, both in his own companies and as a freelance practitioner. He has worked with IOU Productions since 1993 and now sits on their board of directors. His own practice centres on writing for live performance. His most recent publication is a chapter in Devising in Process (Mermikides and Smart, eds, London, Palgrave Macmillan 2010), which illuminates the aims, strategies and approaches of Faulty Optic Theatre of Animation through an examination of the process of making their show Dead Wedding. He is co-authoring a performance-writing book that addresses new creative and formal strategies for writing live performance texts.
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Ian Palmer is currently visiting professor of military psychiatry at King’s College, Institute of Psychiatry, London. He spent 25 years in the British army, half as regimental medical officer mainly to infantry regiments (including 4 years as the SAS doctor). He was the first psychiatrist to British UN Forces in Bosnia 1993/4 and Rwanda 1994 and was also the first (only) tri-service professor of military psychiatry 1996-2003. For 4 years he worked as the head of the UK Medical Assessment Programme (MAP) providing mental health assessments for UK veterans (consultations without limit of time). During this time he saw 350 cases (which amounts to about 1000 hours of face to face consultations). He is an adviser to Veterans’ Aid, the pre-eminent charity for homeless veterans in UK and has also been a service user with post-traumatic mental illness.
John Pinder is now a core artist with Kings of England. John is a member of Present Attempt, a collective who formed during their MA programmes at CSSD. John is an Associate Artist with the Royal and Derngate, Northampton.
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Duška Radosavljevi is a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent. She has previously worked at the RSC and as the company dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble. In addition, she has contributed several hundred theatre and dance reviews to The Stage Newspaper and continues to sit on The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence panel at the Edinburgh Festival. Her academic publications involve articles on dramaturgy and adaptation.
Dan Rebellato is professor of contemporary theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he teaches on the theatre, philosophy and creative writing degree programmes. He has published Theatre & Globalization, 1956 and All That, Contemporary European Theatre Directors, and numerous articles on contemporary theatre, playwriting, theatre and philosophy. He is also a playwright and his plays and performance texts for stage and radio include Chekhov in Hell, Static, My Life Is a Series of People Saying Goodbye, Mile End, Beachy Head, Cavalry, Outright Terror Bold and Brilliant, and Theatremorphosis.
James Reynolds is a lecturer in drama at Kingston University. His PhD research at Queen Mary, University of London, investigated performance practices in Robert Lepage’s devised theatre. Published work includes a chapter on Howard Barker’s direction of his own plays in Theatre of Catastrophe (Oberon, 2006); articles on Lepage’s work, ‘Acting with Puppets and Objects’, in Performance Research (2007), and ‘Hard Work: Robert Lepage’s Lipsynch and the Pleasures of Responsibility’, in Platform (2008); and an article on the cinematic adaptation of graphic novels, ‘Kill Me Sentiment’, in The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (2009).
Juliet Rufford works on the inter-sections between theatre, architecture and scenography. She is co-convenor of the FIRT/IFTR Theatre Architecture Working Group and a contributor to the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Space and Design (PQ’11 Media Tower). She has published articles, essays and one extended interview on site-specificity, theatre architecture, scenography, fine art installation, performance and the politics of space for journals including Contemporary Theatre Review, the Journal of Architectural Education and Literary London: Studies in the Interdisciplinary Representation of London. She is the author of the short book Theatre & Architecture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and is currently completing a full-length monograph on the theatre projects of Haworth Tompkins Architects.
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Roberto Sánchez-Camus is from Chile/USA. His work focuses on participation, community, urbanism, politics through a variety of time-based media. He has developed assemblages of creative individuals in Coalition of Creative Artists in 2000, Blank Collective in 2003 and currently Lotos Collective of London (founded in 2006). Through Lotos he directs and devises site-responsive projects in the UK and abroad while maintaining a solo live artist practice along side this. Past creative residencies include Hoxton Hall Rebirth, London 2011; Rifrazioni Festival, Italy 2010; Zoukak Cultural Centre Beirut, Lebanon 2009; Youth Visions, Ghana, West Africa 2008; O’Theatrone, Naples, Italy 2007. He was awarded a BFA in Visual Arts from School of Visual Arts in New York and an MA Scenography from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Roberto is currently awaiting to defend his doctorate dissertation in Applied Live Art completed under the supervision of Fiona Templeton at Brunel University.
www.camusliveart.net
Jesse Schwenk is senior lecturer in Drama at the University of Glamorgan. His PhD thesis is entitled Role, relation, matrix: the idea of the author in live performance. It is based on critical reflections on his own creative performance practice, and posits a new approach to theorising the idea of the author in relation to the theatre performance event as a contribution to the critical language of western theatre theory and theatre practice.
David Shearing is Research Associate in Scenography (University of Leeds) and a performance artist. He works across art forms and has exhibited at various festivals in the UK and internationally. David specialises in the use and integration of high and low technologies within performance. His most recent work includes; the practice-as-research project VOID/ROOM a multi-speaker immersive sound installation presented at stage@leeds (2010) and at the international conference Digital Resources in Arts and Humanities (2010 Brunel University). He has worked as video artist for extended vocalist Yvon Bonenfant’s Beacons (2009) first shown and developed at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre (EMPAC), New York. Beacons was restaged at Central School of Speech & Drama in 2010 and will tour nationally across the UK Autumn 2011.
David studied a BA in Performing Arts at University of Winchester, MA Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design and his current PhD research is into Audience Immersion in Scenography at University of Leeds.
www.davidshearing.com
Simon Shepherd is Deputy Principal (academic) at Central School of Speech & Drama and Director of Programmes, with responsibility for all learning and teaching, research, outreach and technical support. Previously he was Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths, University of London, and before that Professor of Drama at the University of Nottingham. His current research project is concerned with the craft of directing (for a Reader for Palgrave) and his interest in bodies and theatre is now being extended into an exploration of the relationship between (staged) body and national identity. His most recent publications include: 2010 associate editor with Simon Donger, and ORLAN, ORLAN: A Hybrid Body of Artworks London: Routledge; 2010 ‘The Matter of ORLAN’ in ORLAN: A Hybrid Body of Artworks London: Routledge; 2010 with Mick Wallis, Studying Plays (third edition) London: Bloomsbury
Mark Smith holds a teaching scholarship at the University of York’s Theatre, Film and TV department, where for the past two years he has taught on undergraduate and MA courses. His research interests include contemporary physical theatre and the ways in which processes of writing and devising interact in the creation of new work.
His own practice reflects this, with recent work involving workshops on devising for local community groups, as well as the development and direction of new writing at the York Theatre Royal Studio. He has also led directing workshops for the department’s HEA-funded ‘Performing Classical and Modern Plays’ project, initiated by Professor Mary Luckhurst. He has studied at the Universities of Oxford and York, and has also taught at the University of Oulu, Finland.
Michael Spencer has been designing in the professional theatre for over 20 years since graduating in 1983. The range of his work incorporates community theatre, commercial touring, repertory theatre and Opera.In 1991 he became the first person in the UK to receive an MA in Theatre Design, which then became the catalyst for a teaching career alongside continuing professional practice. He has been course director of what is now the BA Performance Design & Practice course (formally BA Theatre Design) at Central Saint Martins College for the past decade, during which time the course has undergone significant changes, aligned with those in an expanding field of practice.
Recent professional commissions include a site specific Attempts On Her Life (Crimp) at a disused gas utilities building in Colorado Springs and the design and performance of a pure maths paper, The Anatomy of Integers & Permutations for the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University and Berkeley University, San Fransisco.
Amanda Stuart Fisher is a senior lecturer at Central School of Speech & Drama. Prior to this she taught drama and dance at a secondary school in Haringey, before moving into the field of theatre education in 1996 when she worked as Education Coordinator at the Royal Court Theatre. She subsequently worked freelance as an applied theatre specialist on a number of projects, including playwriting in schools at Hoxton Hall (funded by Carlton) and Seven Sacraments by Neil Bartlett (Artangel/Gloria Theatre Company, 1998). In 1997-1998 she also worked as a drama workshop leader at a mental health centre in East London. Amanda‘s areas of specialism includes playwriting, verbatim theatre and theatre of testimony. Her applied theatre work is both practical and theoretical, focussing currently on the use of stories derived from lived experience and the ethics of practice in this context.
Amanda Stuart Fisher is a senior lecturer at Central School of Speech & Drama. Prior to coming to Central in 1999, Amanda taught drama and dance at a secondary school in Haringey, before moving into the field of theatre education in 1996 when she worked as Education Coordinator at the Royal Court Theatre. She subsequently worked freelance as an applied theatre specialist on a number of projects, including playwriting in schools at Hoxton Hall (funded by Carlton) and Seven Sacraments by Neil Bartlett (Artangel/Gloria Theatre Company, 1998). In 1997-1998 she also worked as a drama workshop leader at a mental health centre in East London. Amanda‘s areas of research and practcie include: playwriting, verbatim theatre and theatre of testimony. Her applied theatre work is both practical and theoretical, focusing currently on the use of stories derived from lived experience and the ethics of practice
Mark Swetz is the co-director of Compañía Y in Madrid and London (www.yeca.org). His practice based PhD research is on Blind Spectatorship at the Central School of Speech & Drama in London.
Mark is a director, producer and educator. He has taught at the university level in China, Spain, the UK and the US and has facilitated classes and workshops throughout Europe.
Colin Teevan is an established playwright and translator who also writes for Radio and TV. Recent plays have been produced by the National, Young Vic, Soho Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland.
http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/colin-teevan
Cathy Turner is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter. She is the joint author, with Synne Behrndt, of Dramaturgy and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and with Behrndt, recently edited a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on ‘new dramaturgies’ (2010). In 2010 she also edited a special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance, which documented and contextualised her practical research project into dramaturgical work with writers, ‘Writing Space’. She has also published widely on writing and writers. She is also a core member of artists’ collective, Wrights & Sites, a company making work connected to space and place. She has written about this work and about site-based practices more generally, most recently in ‘Site’, jointly written with Stephen Hodge, for Histories of Live Art (UK), eds. Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein, forthcoming.
www.expandeddramaturgies.com
www.mis-guide.com
Jesse Weaver is an Irish-based playwright who has recently completed his doctoral thesis on the changing role of the playwright in Irish theatre production during the last thirty years. His play Muhmah received its world premiere at the 2009 High Tide Festival, directed by Steven Atkinson. Chicago’s ‘the side project’ theatre company produced his most recent play, The Artist Needs a Wife, which the Chicago Tribune called “intriguing and deeply introspective … Weaver is [a writer] with considerable promise.” His work has also been seen in Dublin and New York. Jesse is a graduate of Boston University’s actor training program and has been seen on stage in Chicago with Next Theatre Company, Victory Gardens Theatre, and the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. His research interests includes the work Tom Murphy, Enda Walsh, and Marina Carr, as well as contemporary Irish theatre practice and the development of new work for the stage.
Gareth White is a lecturer in applied theatre at Central School of Speech & Drama. He trained at University College Bretton Hall and spent some time as a freelance actor, director and facilitator before beginning his doctoral research at Goldsmiths College, University of London. As a practitioner Gareth has specialised in work with community groups and in educational settings. He is formerly a director of Armadillo Theatre, a company producing issue-based workshops, performances and creative residencies, and an actor with Box Clever Theatre Company, touring widely throughout the South East. His interest in practical theatre making continues through directing performances with students: both large scale outdoor performances and smaller studio projects. He also collaborates on experimental participatory performance pieces within Central and in other venues. Gareth has previously taught at Goldsmiths, Wimbledon College of Art, Bretton Hall, the University of Kingston, South Bank University, and Richmond American International University.
Nick Wood is senior lecturer in dramaturgy and course leader of MA Advanced Theatre Practice at Central School of Speech & Drama. He trained at Oxford University and worked first as a playground leader with Ed Berman in North Kensington, and then as an assistant director with Lindsay Anderson at the Royal Court. Nick’s writing credits include plays at Hampstead Theatre, Orange Tree, Kings Head, BAC as well as work for radio and television. Directing credits include a UK tour with the improvisation group Theatre Machine. He was a founder member of the Equality Group – exploring non-hierarchical approaches to making theatre – which performed at the ICA. He has written articles for Artscribe and The Independent, written science books for young children and drawn a regular series for children’s television. At Central, he was a convenor of Dramaturgy: A User’s Guide Conference (1999), Edward Gordon Craig Colloquium (2002) and founder (with Mischa Twitchin) of the Dramaturgy Forum (2000). He is a regular judge at the New Writing Festival at Oxford University, and for the Total Theatre Awards at the Edinburgh Festival.
Elizabeth Wride is currently in the third year of a Creative Writing PhD at Swansea University. Her doctorate involves writing two dramatic pieces (a radio and a stage play) based on an historical Welsh event: The Smalls Lighthouse Incident (which involves the sudden death of one keeper and the descent into madness of his surviving colleague). Her goal is to write two separate dramatic pieces that fit their respective media well (radio and stage) and could not be easily translated to be performed within another medium. Her paper Measuring Shelf Life is based partly on her involvement (as a runner) on Volcano Theatre’s 2010 production of Shelf Life.
Martin Wylde is course leader of the MA Acting at Central School of Speech & Drama and a theatre director. He has commissioned many plays and worked with a number of leading playwrights including Sarah Kane, Peter Oswald, Harold Pinter, and Amanda Whittington amongst many others. He commissioned Colin Teevan to write Alcmaeon in Corinth, (2004, London, Oberon Books) and directed the premiere at Live Theatre in Newcastle where it was entitled Cock of the North.
http://www.cssd.ac.uk/content/martin-wylde
Naz Yeni is a PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University. After a career in professional theatre, she developed an interest in teaching drama, dance and English. Her MA dissertation in applied linguistics was an analysis of ‘the role of language in presenting social reality and the interpretation of discourse’ (King’s College London). Her MEd thesis was a case study about ‘the experiences of year 10 drama students during the teaching of a set text from a multimodal perspective’ (Cambridge University). Her current research in ARU focuses on ‘staging the text and the director’s interpretation of the playwright’s linguistic style’. Koroglu, her latest project has been accepted by the Turkish State Theatres. The play is based on a well-known folk tale and the theatrical adaptation uses Yasar Kemal’s contemporary version of this legend. The performance is a re-working of traditional story-telling from a postmodern angle using physical theatre techniques.
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