Postgraduate Researchers in GSA
The Effect of Celebrity Actors on Contemporary London Commercial Theatre 2021-24
Evey is a funded PhD student at GSA with a background in contemporary performance practices and devised performance, with a BA (Hons) in English and Drama. Her research work focuses on the impact and effect of celebrity figures as performers in mainstream London theatre in a post-pandemic industry. This work considers the star performer as an element of an artistic product, and focuses on how public persona, fan culture, and memories of past roles can impact and change a theatrical production in a specific cultural moment.
What are the consequences of reintegrating Laban’s Rosicrucianism into the teaching of LMA to actors and theatre makers?
“Only From Exile Can We Come Home”: Hip Hop Dance as a response to gender and sexuality-based trauma since the 1970s and its potential as a cathartic choreographic method.
Gemma Connell is a choreographer, theatre maker and researcher who specialises in community dance practice and dance theatre. Her thesis title is: "Breaking the cypher-circle: resistance of gender violence and reclamation of power through spatial re-orientation in British Hip Hop Dance Theatre."
World-building and immersive scenography.
Methexis, Process and Live Action Role-playing: Representation in Performance as Routes of Inheritance.
Thinking Theatre as Phenomenology and Affect: a new model for post-16 theatre education in England.
Flo Fitzgerald-Allsopp is an arts producer based in Bristol UK. Her Techne-funded PhD research explores how contemporary artists might more ethically encounter non-human animals through performance practice. Foregrounding an intersectional and decolonial approach, she investigates how relations across 'otherness' might be reimagined through performance during times of multispecies crisis. Through these practices she seeks the emergence of an interspecies feminism; a non-anthropocentric feminist ethic that recognises the interlocking nature of human and animal oppression.
https://www.flofitzgerald.com/
Image of Flo and her rat companion, Bow, photographed by Nic Kane.
Scenographic sensibilities beyond design.
From non-time to time’s presence: transformations of the experience of contemporaneity in durational theatre and performance.
My name is Sylvia Solakidi and I am at the final year of a TECHNE-funded Theatre Research PhD at the Centre for Performance Philosophy, University of Surrey. I have a background in visual arts and performance studies and a BSc in Biology. I am interested in experiences of temporality in performance and their interactions with the temporality of the global market and networks of the contemporary world. My PhD research explores the concepts of contemporaneity, presence and duration in post-dramatic theatre and discusses them alongside phenomenological writings in philosophy and anthropology. My writings are in the field of the creative critical and I have published research papers in: Platform Postgraduate Journal, Antennae Journal, Kronoscope Journal, Performance Research Journal, Global Performance Studies Journal, Streetnotes Journal.
I won one of the prizes in the competition "Your Project as a Poem" for the Academic Writing Month AcWriMo 2021: ‘Your Project as a Poem’ Winners | Doctoral College news (surrey.ac.uk), and I have a new research paper published in the special issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies of the Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques, the Journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics The Hearing Body in Robert Wilson’s and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Letter to a Man – Critical Stages/Scènes critiques (critical-stages.org).
The photograph is of the dedication to my PhD and also in all my writings/publications. This friendship drives the narrative in the thesis.
Lighting States - LightingScapes: Transformative Encounters with Light in the Choreographic.
(Re)positioning the interpreter: British Sign Language interpreting for musical theatre
Ellen is a disabled and neurodivergent theatre practitioner, dramaturg and communication support worker. Her previous research has focussed on disability access and representation in the musical theatre industry; from exploring accessible pedagogy to representations of the anomalous body in relation to the nineteenth century freak show. Her current thesis explores the role of the sign language interpreter as an audiovisual translator in musical theatre, asking what competencies are required for such an undertaking, and advocating for the interpreter to be brought into the creative practice.
For more information please visit www.ellenarmstrong.co.uk
Jonas Schnor is a dramaturge and philosopher in the field of contemporary performance and dance.
My PhD research investigates Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming imperceptible in relation to performance processes and works. Through a series of collaborations with contemporary choreographers and performance makers, I examine the onto-epistemological implications of imperceptibility in/as performance.
https://surrey.academia.edu/JonasSchnor
http://www.techne.ac.uk/for-students/techne-students/techne-students/techne-students-2018-19/schnor
Photography by Maurício Pokemon
Narratives of Home: The Practice of Space in Socially Engaged Theatre.
Gemma Kerr is a theatre-maker and director with a background in new writing, site-responsive performance and socially engaged theatre. She is an Associate Artist at The Point in Eastleigh, where she is based.
Her Techne-funded PhD research seeks to investigate the possibilities of theatre and performance in exploring resistance to gentrification and displacement through the co-creation of work exploring narratives of home, with participants living through displacement and dislocation. The background to this research is the many redevelopment projects that promise to ‘revitalise’ depressed and deprived districts, bringing new housing and retail but frequently ignoring thriving existing community infrastructures.
Learn more about Gemma here and see her Techne profile for more.
Problematic Deaths: The Art of Killing in Early Modern Tragedy.
A sense of scale: thinking with miniatures in new materialist choreographic practice in the time of the Anthropocene
Sian Goldharber is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Bristol. Her practice-based PhD project focuses on performance with miniaturised objects within the context of new materialist and object-oriented choreographic practice. She is investigating the affective potential of miniaturised objects and worlds within a performative setting to connect human scale perception with an awareness of more-than-human scale, and to imagine radical new ways of being and thinking ecologically.