What's New
The RPA is thrilled to offer content from Routledge titles to provide context and further understanding to our videos, including excerpts from Annie Loui's The Physical Actor, Avra Sidiropoulou's Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method, Suzette Coon's Short Plays with Great Roles for Women, Maria Shevtsova's Chekhov in an Age of Uncertainty and Postmodernist Aesthetics, and excerpts from Gary Cassidy's Contemporary Rehearsal Practice: Anthony Neilson and the Devised Text.
New material added to the RPA in 2022 and 2023:
from Patricia Bardi:
Contrary to the compositional practice of using improvisation as an organisational feature, Bardi and Maguire approached the problem anti-clockwise: improvisers using composition as a formal element. The piece, inspired by a short story by Adolfo Bioy Cesares, Venetian Masks, deals with the frustration of longed-for hopes never quite being fulfilled as expected. The video is an excerpt from this evening long performance.
Light Becomes Her (Performance Excerpt 1998) and Light Becomes Her (Evening Length Performance 2000)
For many years Patricia Bardi has been involved in the research and development of new forms of physical performance and has created a unique style known as Vocal Dance that combines dance, movement, voice and language. Light Becomes Her is a dynamic collage of voice, dance, movement and character. Theatre director George Isherwood collaborated with Patricia Bardi on a kaleidoscopic look at one woman and the multiple aspects of the different women living inside her.
Duet Improvisation (Amsterdam, NL, 1996) and Duet Improvisation (New York City, 1998)
Patricia Bardi (vocal dance, text) and Arthur Brooks (music, trumpet) collaborated over a number of years, creating a series of improvised performances exploring a nuanced and textured expressive language investigating the relationship between embodied sound texture, music movement, dance, voice and text.
Pin Drop Echoes Through (Florence, Italy, 2018)
Patricia Bardi and Alex Maguire create performances that build bridges and dismantle boundaries between movement, dance, voice, text and music. They allow room for the unexpected to emerge while creating finely tuned and evocative atmospheres of emotion, memory and image. In Pin Drop Echoes Through, Patricia Bardi’s written text provides a ground plan for the improvised collaboration with Alex Maguire’s music to transform and evolve the expressive qualities of sound, rhythm, movement and dialogue in the performance.
Patricia Bardi is the founder and director of the certification program Voice Movement Integration (VMI) Somatic Practice combining Vocal Dance, Voice Movement Integration, and Vital Movement Integration Bodywork centered in Amsterdam - an accredited program in somatic movement education and natural health practice. She is a dance/voice artist, researcher, educator, bodywork specialist, registered somatic movement therapist (ISMETA), and licensed natural health practitioner (BATC).
Bardi is the originator of Organ Rebalancing, an accredited advanced bodywork training, and has received a London Arts Choreographer Award and an Arts Council England bursary researching North Indian vocal music in India. Bardi continues to tour extensively as a teacher, performer, and researcher. She contributed the chapter “Awakening Resonance in the Moving Body” to Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond, published by Routledge in 2020.
from Peter Hulton:
A Digital Essay on Performance
Drawing on a half century of documenting performance across multiple genres, from post-modern dance to physical theatre to body work and site-specific performance, with audio-visual examples from some 53 practitioners including Eugenio Barba, Tim Etchells, Joan Skinner, Kristin Linklater and Steve Paxton, Peter Hulton’s A Digital Essay on Performance considers performance as a body in operation with imagery and attempts to identify some of its foundational features.
Peter Hulton is founding editor of the project Arts Archives and Theatre Papers. He has produced audio-visual material for publications by Routledge, Methuen, and The Drama Review and is on the editorial board of Performance Research.
from Ki Manteb Soedharsono and Bernard Arps:
Dewa Ruci: A Shadow Puppet Performance by Ki Manteb Soedharsono, with commentary by Bernard Arps
On the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, the story of Bratasena’s quest for the purifying water and his enlightenment by the ‘Resplendent Deity’, Dewa Ruci, is told in ever-changing ways, depending on the medium and the religious and cultural environment. Celebrated Javanese shadow puppeteer Ki Manteb Soedharsono’s video Dewa Ruci (2000) was designed to bring this story and its Javanese wisdom to new audiences.
Bernard Arps is Professor of Indonesian and Javanese Language and Culture at Leiden University, Netherlands. His most recent book is Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind: The Javanese Shadow-Play Dewa Ruci Performed by Ki Anom Soeroto (2016). On the RPA, he has offered his reflections on Ki Manteb Soedharsono’s video rendition of the famous Javanese shadow-play Dewa Ruci (‘The Resplendent Deity’).