Rose Bruford College

Her Spectacular Entrances sees Showwoman and performance maker Marisa Carnesky chart the research, processes and productions of her 30 year career in the UK. It explores the projects that have defined her work including the solo show Jewess Tattooess in the 1990s, the large-scale ride Carnesky's Ghost Train in the 2000's, the company stage show Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman in the 2010s through to the stage and promenade performances of Showwomen in the 2020's. It proposes the potential power of the word Showwoman as a development from the term Showgirl and explores how new communities of women performers inhabit it. Carnesky looks at the relationship of her practice and contemporary performers to lesser-known women's performance heritage. Moreover she considers the drive to sustain a long term practice of making cross genre performance work that draws both from art and entertainment traditions.

The Round is an augmented reality platform that allows users at home to watch live streamed 3D characters being produced by real actors in a motion capture suite. The project holds the idea of “liveness” in high regard and considers it an important part of the theatrical experience that needed to be preserved in the creation of an at-home, digital experience. The live theatre experience in itself is often enormously technical with pre-recorded visual and audio experiences that are designed to be repeated. We ask the question, what is live theatre and how does this map to live streamed digital experiences, particularly involving motion capture? Whilst liveness, in this context, refers to the experience of the audience and their relationship with the performer, there is another aspect of live that affects the process of creating and designing a piece of digital theatre. The ability to affect and determine results from “live” changes to ideas on stage from the theatrical design team became an important part of the iteration of the production itself. This is part of the traditional theatre making process which doesn’t easily map into the limitations of digital immersive content creation. This project however attempted to rectify that by introducing innovative technologies that allowed existing theatrical control systems and the skills used to run them to operate Unreal Engine 4 game engine, live for the show. By retaining traditional theatrical equipment and skills, the entire production team who were all new to delivering theatre in a virtual medium, were able to adapt their existing practices and approach to communication in order to maintain fast design iteration and effective collaboration within an entirely new digital medium. This paper looks at the creation of the first prototype of The Round and the effect of using traditional theatrical technologies and processes in combination with real-time platforms that are trying to adapt to the live theatre model. Whilst trying to understand the role of the live design process in this context, the subject of “liveness” will be discussed from an audience point of view and the necessity of “live” with or without “life” in the medium the audience is watching.

ABSTRACT Brian Friel acquired the appellation 'Ireland’s Chekhov' or the 'Irish Chekhov' during the 1970s when critics began to comment on similarities in their respective dramaturgies. Here Friel’s 'affinities' with Chekhov are outlined through his several observations on the playwright; a brief examination of three of his own plays with Chekhovian echoes and resonances; the consideration of his 'translations' of major plays described as “after Chekhov”; and an introductory appraisal of an original piece where Friel invents a fictional 'afterlife' meeting for two of Chekhov’s characters from different plays.

ABSTRACTA memorial piece for our late colleague Professor Simon Trussler, editorial advisory board member, Emeritus Professor, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance (UK).

"The history of the provincial press in England." International Journal of Regional and Local History, 14(2), pp. 143–144

Peter Zazzali – like many former actors who have passed through the American University system – has returned to academia in order to make a viable living, while remaining connected to the artistic...

In my research, I am developing an actor training methodology called “The Yoga of Acting” which combines Stanislavski’s “System” with Kriyas (dynamic movement), breath exercises and meditations from Yogic philosophy and practice for application in theatrical realism, My research aims to explore and investigate possible areas of confluence between the two methodologies to develop a “toolbox” for use in the Actor’s work.The Yoga of acting allows the actor to experience the “truth” of their own personal physical, mental, and breath state. As Stanislavski stated: “It is necessary to feel this truth at all times...to develop one sensitivity to truth....I speak of the truth of emotions, of the truth of inner creative urges, which strain forward to find expression, of the truth of bodily and physical perceptions. I am not interested in a truth that is outside me. What is important to me is the truth in me.”The Yoga of Acting is aimed to be a bridge to connect the actor emotionally, in Stanislavski’s words: to the “spirit within” and the “inner spirit throughout.” I am applying the practice of Kundalini Yoga, which is a dynamic movement-based Yoga focusing on Chakric energy and breathwork, in the creation of this methodology.This paper is focused on work which was undertaken at a workshop I delivered at DAMU in Prague, in March 2017.

ABSTRACTFor more than 30 years the operation of stage lighting for theatre has almost always involved the replay of pre-recorded lighting states, so that the operator makes no creative contribution to the performance ‘in the moment’. Meanwhile, digital performance practices have examined the relationship between the performer and a variety of technologies, often problematizing this relationship in diverse ways. However, theatre lighting and its operation have rarely been given such attention.In this article I describe a custom-built lighting control system, ‘Theolux’, designed to enable the operator — who I term the Lighting Artist — to respond and make an expressive contribution in the moment of performance. In particular, Theolux has a variety of interface controls that the lighting artist can choose to use, each of which offers a different expressive potential and which collectively constitute a ‘playable’ instrument. I go on to describe a performance work, Passages, made specifically to investigate my proposal that some creative decisions about the lighting should be deferred until the moment of performance, enabling the lighting artist to respond to the other performers and to the audience. I give an account of some of the affective performance qualities produced by using Theolux to control the lighting during Passages, and describe my own experience as the lighting artist using the various interface idioms during different sections of the performance. I also recount audience members' experiences, which both confirm some of my own observations and begin to suggest the performance-making potential of my revised approach to theatre lighting.