Personal profile

Research interests

My research focuses on interdisciplinary performance practice within mainstream theatre and opera. The project includes an examination into the ways in which we acquire, develop and maintain physical skills, alongside an exploration of the processes, practices and institutional structures that support performer training within the UK. My research seeks to establish the ways in which training practices support or resist interdisciplinary practices and the tensions found between disciplines corporeally, between training institutions and industry, and between creative practice and commercial pressures. I am particularly interested in the methods and processes by which cognitive understanding becomes embedded as seemingly instinctive corporeal knowledge and the extent to which this physical knowledge can be adapted.

 

Recent papers

 

‘Reappearing residues – the (de)formed body and interdisciplinarity’. TaPRA Annual Conference, Performer Training WG. Aberystwyth University. 6 September 2018.

‘Embodiment and Instrumentality’. Cognitive Futures Conference. University of Kent. 3 July 2018.

‘Fragmented Bodies, Fractured Wholes: Embodiment and Instrumentality’. Performance and Culture Conference. University of Malta. 8 March 2018.

'Perpetual Improvment: Potentiality and a Globalised Ideology of Training'. TaPRA Annual Conference, Performer Training WG. University of Salford. 30 August 2017.

'Interdisciplinarity and Opera: Progress or Paradox?' TaPRA Interim Event, Performer Training WG. University of York. 22nd May 2017.

'Nurturing the Individual: Performance training as child development and the commodification of confidence'. 21st Century Performance and Research Conference, University of Malta. 9-11 March 2016.

'Rehearsing (inter)disciplinarity: bodily skill in interdisciplinary production practivce and the 10,000 hour problem - a provocation'. TaPRA annual conference, Performer Training Working Group, University of Worcester. 8-10 September 2015.

'The skill behind the spectacle of War Horse: Embodied Knowledge and skill development in the rehearsal room'. Performance and Interdisciplinarity Conference, University of Malta. 27-28 March 2015.

'The skill behind the spectable of War Horse: training and skill development within the rehearsal room'. People and Processes: Behind the Scenes of Theatre and Performance. TaPRA interim event, PG working group, University of Manchester. 7 February 2015.

'An issue of Horse and Hound: hybridity and interdisciplinarity as creative solutions in A Dog's Heart and War Horse'. Merging Media Conference, University of Kent. 1 February 2014.

 'Testing boundaries; interdisciplinarity and the voice'. Training and the Voice, TaPRA Interim Event, Training Working Group, University of Portsmouth. 7 May 2014.

 

Personal profile

I completed my undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway in 2006 and went on to work as a freelance assistant director in opera for companies such as Opera Della Luna, Opera by Definition and Scottish Opera. I returned to complete my MA in Directing in 2010 where my final piece, Bryony Lavery's More Light, won the Next Stage award, allowing me to direct and produce the production for my company Half Remembered Dreams at the Edinburgh Fringe 2012.

Teaching

Over the last seven years I have had the pleasure of delivering a variety of courses, both practice and theory based, to students at Royal Holloway, University of Winchester, and University of Portsmouth. Modules have included: Theatre and Performance Making, The Idea of Acting, Voice and Context, Theories of Voice, Theatre and Text, Theatre, Drama and Performance Histories, and The Idea of Knowledge and the Body.