Collisions 2021: Regeneration and Liberation. 28 Sept & 29 Sept

Through COLLISIONS, research degree students and creative fellows engage with what it means to be researching with, through, in and by practice, and share this engagement with a wider academic and public audience.

This year we present COLLISIONS with both in person performances, presentations, workshops and installations, and also as streamed content, showcasing how current practice-research students across several institutions are making digital practice. All in person elements will strictly follow Covid19 safety guidelines.

As we emerge from lockdown disoriented and fatigued, COLLISIONS 2021 will be curating conversations around regeneration and liberation within practice research. How might we re-orientate our practice, and ourselves, in relation to the people/communities we work with to embrace new relationships and futures? Can we find liberation in what Rebecca Solnit calls the 'spaciousness of uncertainty'? (2016)

What have been the challenges in adapting our practice to hybrid and Covid safe models and contexts? How do we reflect productively on past or current practice to develop research for an uncertain future? COLLISIONS FESTIVAL 2021: Regeneration and Liberation aims to encourage dialogue and reflection across past and present projects alongside interviews, Q&As and discussion, asking how our research insights might speak to each other’s work and help us stay connected.

COLLISIONS takes place on Tuesday 28 September and Wednesday 29th September.

Audiences can choose to engage with the whole festival in person, or selected presentations online. Tickets are free but we ask that everyone registers via Eventbrite to keep face to face performances safe, and to ensure streaming details are sent to those people accessing the content remotely.

The festival welcomes queries about accessibility requirements - please e mail [email protected]

OVERVIEW:

DAY ONE - Tuesday 28 September

11.15 Registration opens with coffee & refreshments in Judi Dench Studio

12 noon Welcome to COLLISIONS 2021! Festival opening by RCSSD Principal Josette Bushell-Mingo with Broderick Chow.

12.15 onwards: Magdalena Mosteanu: The Interactional (Performance Installation)

12.30 Francesca Filatondi: Creative, interpretative and performing dynamics in Artistic Swimming (Performance) WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO

1.00 Francesca Filatondi (repeated) WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO

1.30 LUNCH BREAK

2.30 Maud Lannen: Per-forming the Haptic Maternal: an introduction to Somato-Intersectionalism as resistant practice (Performance Lecture) DENCH STUDIO/ YOU TUBE

3.15 Marina Stavrou: E T - Her (A Play In Three Parts - audio) WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO

4.00 Break

4.30 David Shearing shares his own research and practice, and leads discussion with the day's participants and audience WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO / YOU TUBE

5.30 Live music from Charlie Pyne, introduced by Filomena Campus DENCH STUDIO

6.00 Informal discussion and drinks

Scroll down for more information about our contributors and their work.

DAY TWO - Wednesday 29 September

11.00 Welcome and refreshments with screenings of current RCSSD digital practice research work, including Anna Woolf's digital story for London Arts and Health

12 noon Josephine Leask: Introduction to Day Two of the festival

12.15 onwards Magdalena Mosteanu: The Interactional (Performance Installation)

12.30 Kate Duffy-Syedi: Stories for Sleeping (Phosphoros Theatre) WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO

1pm LUNCH BREAK

2.00 Alison Porter: Land of Eagles - The Boyfriend Trick (Film, installation and interactive podcast) WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO

3.00 Ella Parry-Davies: because I know somebody is listening - interactive soundwalk from Beirut made in collaboration with Alehandro, and interview with Ella by Rebecca Hayes Laughton DENCH STUDIO

3:45 Break

4.00 Duska Radosavljevic: Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Post-Verbatim, Amplified Storytelling and Gig Theatre in the Digital Age (Presentation) DENCH STUDIO

4.30 Jane Munro: Movement through Disorientation: a discussion of co-authorship in the making of the activity pack 'De-stress through Movement' for immigration detainees WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO

5.00 #SetHerFree - three members of the Women for Refugee Women Drama Group, introduced by Rebecca Hayes Laughton, talk poetry and resistance WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO

5.30 Marilena Zaroulia discusses her own research work and chairs an informal discussion with the day's participants WEBBER DOUGLAS STUDIO / YOU TUBE

6.15 Hawiyya Dance: Palestinian Dabke as Resistance (Performance and workshop) DENCH STUDIO

6.45 Discussion continues with drinks and music DENCH STUDIO

8.00 Collisions 2021 closes

Please see more detail about the work presented below.

The Event will be recorded locally at RCSSD for the Collisions archive and recordings uploaded to the COLLISIONS 2021 YouTube channel

Introduction and welcome to COLLISIONS 2021 from RCSSD Principal Josette Bushell-Mingo and Collisions Academic Mentor Broderick Chow

Magdalena Mosteanu

PhD candidate at FTT, University of Reading.

Magdalena’s practice encompasses performing, creative research, directing and facilitation of theatre workshops. Most recent projects include creative research on theatre in Pr*son with Jubilo Foundation (interview with Jubilo), research on food storytelling as a mediator for cross-cultural contact (Easy as Pie online installation), research on legacies of displacement (Peeling Onions with Granny Artist Collective) performing in a Polish-Nigerian production On Missing by Wretched Theatre, translating and directing a play by Olivia Negrean FEAST or Women’s Appetite for Shakespeare and an autobiographical performance I Remember. Magdalena is also a Sessional Lecturer and Academic Mentor at the FTT, University of Reading.

The Interactional

This installation stems from her research on cross-cultural theatre practices and explores how performance art may inform and provoke change in the social fabric through facilitating human interaction. Through The Interactional she engineers a place of encounter, a habitat for ethics, where two people connect in a reciprocal gaze. The idea for the installation emerged from the collision of her practice in theatre in Pr*son and research on face-to-face contact. The interactional responds to Levinasian notions of ‘face as a first discourse’ and ‘nudity of face’ and seeks to address the question of how we may truly understand our own individual place in the world, as well as the presence of an Other through face-to-face encounter. The Interactional essentially facilitates the very simple action of facing each other, by setting the stage and giving space. In doing so, The Interactional hopes to create the habitat for ethics and encourage the act of looking which in turn supports a reconfiguration of complex patterns of the social encounter.

Note: The Interactional runs throughout the two days of the festival in The Experimental Studio

Music for The Interactional composed by Jack Webb

Francesca Filatondi

PhD candidate at London Metropolitan University, her thesis is based on a somatic investigation of the being through a trans-disciplinary approach (theatre, dance and artistic swimming) within performing arts.

Francesca is Italian and since 2012 she has been living in the beautiful mountainous Rhone-Alpes region in France. She has been swimming most of her life. After being a member of the National Italian Synchronized Swimming Elite Squad, silver medal at the European Cup in 2001 and gold medal at the World Master Championship in 2012, she continued to train artistic swimming at international level in France, Switzerland and as Head of the Coaches for the Youth National British Squad in UK.

In February 2020, she founded an international company of artistic swimmers named UNDINE AQUATIC THEATRE based in France, with the purpose of developing an artistic swimming training and choreographic method to expand performing arts contemporary horizons/backgrounds. Apnea is a short film designed around the aquatic theatre where artistic swimming, theatre and contemporary dance merge together in a liquid scenario. The suffocating sensation of limiting space and lack of relationships due to the sanitary restrictions set by Covid19 is here represented in a choreography that wants to depict performers’ experience and horizons currently made of absence of contact, physical absence of friendly relations and absence of projects that unite and make people vibrate and be inspired.

Maud Lannen

Maud Lannen is a French artist, choreographer-researcher and poet. Her transdisciplinary practice brings together training in Fine Art and Performance Making, with a focus on postmodern dance. Her research is centered on reproduction (mechanisms and the bodies of) and touch as practice and ethics, which she grounds in the genealogy of resistant and aesthetic movement practices. She is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University under the supervision of Prof Anna Furse.

This performance lecture introduces her PhD practice-research, ‘Per-forming the haptic maternal: dialogical neo-human dances and choreographies’, and preliminary findings, notably the radical dance form that emerged from it, which she names Somato-Intersectionalism (S.I.).

[email protected]

Introduction by , PhD Researcher RCSSD

Charlie Pyne is a London based bassist and singer. Her craftsmanship, versatility and joyful approach to music has shaped Charlie’s career, seeing her become the solid backbone of some of contemporary jazz’s most exciting talents, both on stage and in the recording studio.

Charlie has recently worked with the Ilario Ferrari Trio, Down For The Count Swing Orchestra, Issie Barratt’s Interchange, the National Theatre productions ‘The Visit’ (2020) and ‘Paradise’ (2021), Disney’s motion picture ‘Cruella’ (2021), Yazz Ahmed’s ‘Polyhymnia’, Filomena Campus’ ‘Theatralia’ and Joe Thompson at The Ivy Club. She also leads her own project, Charlie Pyne Quartet, who released their debut album ‘Dancing Shadows’ in 2019.

She has performed at many wonderful venues across the UK, including Cadogan Hall, Royal Festival Hall, the Purcell Room, Pizza Express Jazz Club, Ealing Jazz Festival, Crazy Coqs, Jez Nelson's Jazz In The Round and Ronnie Scott's. She is also an accomplished singer and in September 2018 won the Boisdale Music Award for "Best Jazz Singer”.

Charlie has a BMus (Hons) from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she studied double bass with Steve Watts and Jeff Clyne.

David is an artist and academic creating and researching immersive multimedia environments and spaces. He is interested in how people and audiences engage both physically and conceptually with performance, design and materials and am founder of the multidisciplinary design studio Variable Matter. He makes and researches events that takes place in theatre spaces and in applied and social contexts, exploring audience engagement by creating intimate, and at times spectacular, art and performance installations using video, sound and organic materials. In 2017 he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for Performing Mountains, a 24-month AHRC fellowship project led by Professor Jonathan Pitches.

https://www.cssd.ac.uk/staff-profiles/dr-david-shearing

Anna Woolf

PhD student RCSSD

Anna has over 15 year experience in digital marketing working for entertainment companies such as Disney and Netflix. Her research examines socially engaged and participatory art, health and applied theatre in relation to teenagers suffering from the very complex autoimmune disease Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis. Her work spans the interdisciplinary nature of applied theatre and digital practices such as social media, online communities, filmmaking and digital facilitation.

The video and podcast were created in conjunction with participant Wayne and the English National Opera. Wayne had a really traumatic experience of having COVID-19 and had gone from feeling fit and healthy to being relatively debilitated from the virus. He took part in the ENO Breathe programme to feel connected to other people who had experienced a similar thing to him, the added benefit being that singing for his health really impacted his breathlessness and anxiety in a positive way. Wayne was really proud of the end result which was launched and shared in an online event with over 200 people as part of Creativity and Wellbeing week in May 2021.

http://cultureonprescription.org.uk/

/ Phosphoros Theatre

PhD student RCSSD

Stories for Sleeping

This digital piece explores the practices of care and friendship that ripple through communities of refugee young people, and how the experience of listening gestures inter-relational care and radical hope. The piece sits alongside Kate's practice research project Stories for Sleeping, whereby refugee young people have been creating audio-narratives to be shared with peers around the UK, as a response to widespread sleep issues that affect this community.

The piece explores nostalgia, belonging and (re)becoming, and the intimate ties forged between friends when family are absent. It decentres secure knowledge of unaccompanied minors as ‘service users’ and instead positions self-authored performance as a way of encountering care, solidarity and community. Crucially, the film extends beyond the participatory nature of Stories for Sleeping, and explores how performance practices might generate alternative forms of allyship and engagement between refugees and settled communities. It sits within a lineage of recent research across disciplines into the experiences of networked care in youth on the move.

www.phosphorostheatre.com/

Alison Porter

Alison Porter is a writer and researcher in the third year of her PhD at the University of Warwick where she is researching the use of verbatim theatre to address social injustice. The main enquiry of her research is the relationship between the facts in 'true stories' and artistic intervention.

Land of Eagles - The Boyfriend Trick is a creative response to the issues of modern slavery and human trafficking in the UK. The work consists of a dance film and a series of audio monologues based on the story of an Albanian survivor of trafficking for the sex trade. The facts were gathered through The Medaille Trust (safe house provider) and the story is told from the perspectives of the victim/survivor, her trafficker, her mother and her case worker. The monologues were recorded by a cast of professional actors; the dance was performed by Marisa Flamino and filmed by Polina Zelmanova (a post graduate student in Film & Television Studies at The University of Warwick).

Website: whiteknighttheatre.com

At Warwick: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/theatre/staff/alisonporter/

Twitter: Ali Porter@WKnightTheatre

Website: https://homemakersounds.org/

Dr

Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, RCSSD

Post-Verbatim, Amplified Storytelling and Gig Theatre in the Digital Age

This 18-month long research project engages with an increasingly apparent prominence of speech and sound in the 21st century theatre and performance. Postulating that the aural aspects of speech, sound, voice and sound design emerge to replace the late 20th century dominance of literary textuality (new writing) and/or corporeality (physical theatre) as the primary dramaturgical motors in live performance, the project argues that this renewed interest should be viewed paradigmatically. The internationally discernible paradigm includes works specifically designated here under these three mutually porous categories.

In the course of the Fellowship, Duška Radosavljević has worked with the Post-Doctoral Research Associate Flora Pitrolo on the interdisciplinary project which involves original field research in performance-making as well as networking and public engagement activities. In partnership with London-based Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), new work was commissioned from relevant artists selected through an open call, to form part of the primary research. Research findings were designed to be disseminated through ‘Lend Me Your Ears’ podcast (in collaboration with Tim Bano and Digital Theatre Plus), a workshop (to be designed with Jane Boston), a professional practice document for curators (in collaboration with the V&A), an international project conference, a Figshare dataset, a special journal issue and a monograph.

The project website can be found here

Dr Jane Munro

Lecturer in Movement RCSSD

Jane's recent research looks at privilege, borders and participation in dance in an article published in Choreographic Practices in April 2021. She has also developed her movement practice to offer dance with detainees in immigration removal centres. In 2019 she undertook the community dance project: Dance in Detention with Music in Detention (Hear Me Out), working with facilitating dance with detainees and with patients in a psychiatric hospital. The intentions to share this at Tate Exchange in 2020 with Flourishing Lives were put on hold through COVID-19 but will be re-scheduled in Autumn. In 2020, she collaborated further with Music in Detention creating the De-Stress through Movement Activity Pack for detainees held in their cells for most of the day in lockdown. She is currently writing an analysis of the problematics and possibilities of this project for the journal Critical Stages/Scenes Critiques.

Jane will be discussing her practice and the project Movement through Disorientation: a discussion of co-authorship in the making of the activity pack 'De-stress through Movement' for immigration detainees

introduces poetry performances from three members of the Women for Refugee Women Drama Group

PhD Student RCSSD

They will discuss the resilience of campaigners and movement building throughout the pandemic, and also the opportunities and challenges of live performance practice online. The creative performance project is set against the organisation’s research work into the women’s experiences of seeking asylum in the UK, and the sustained project directly challenges the Home Office’s hostile discourses in cultural, social and political space.

Refugeewomen.co.uk

See some short films here: TaPRA Gallery 2021

[email protected]

Marilena Zaroulia's research focuses on performance and cultural politics, particularly in post-1989 Europe. She has published on performance and migration, politics of representation, and imaginings of national belonging. She recently completed 'Re-membering Assembly', a co-authored article exploring dimensions of theatrical assembly, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://www.cssd.ac.uk/staff-profiles/dr-marilena-zaroulia

Hawiyya Dance

Hawiyya Dance Company was founded in 2017 as an all-women’s Dance Company who explore identity, culture and resistance through dance. Hawiyya draws upon traditional folkloric dabke with a twist of contemporary dance through their skills and experiences in other dance forms, narratives and musical influences.

The culturally diverse dancers are united in their commitment to the Palestinian cause, and other anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles with the aim to raise awareness on silenced human-rights causes and demonstrate solidarity through dance and culture.

FB: HawiyyaDabke

Instagram: @HawiyyaDabkeCurfew: contemporary production in partnership with El-Funoun www.curfewdance.com

Photo credit: Jose Farinha

You can see performances and contributors from past years of Collisions on the RCSSD website

https://www.cssd.ac.uk/Research/Collisions

or do watch the short compilation video on the vimeo link provided below...

Do get in touch with [email protected] if you have material from Collisions past that you would like to share with us.

Event Venue

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Eton Avenue, London, United Kingdom