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 2023 and 2024:
Ki Manteb Soedharsono: Dewi Ruci with commentary Bernard Arps
Dewa Ruci: A Shadow Puppet Performance by Ki Manteb Soedharsono
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’).
Maria Kapsali and Dorinda Hulton: Yoga and Actor Training
Yoga and Actor Training offers a practical introduction to, as well as a discursive overview of, the ways yoga practice can be used in contemporary actor training. Approaches explored in this series of audio-visually recorded workshops with student actors lay down some of the foundational correspondences in the relationship between yoga and actor training. Together with contextual essays, the videos are designed to support and encourage further collaboration between the two disciplines.
The RPA has added the full-length versions of six Yoga Workshop Approaches, replacing short excerpts that had previously been included in Fall 2016, complete with full commentaries:
Workshop Approach 1: Four Body-Mind Dialogues
Workshop Approach 2: Movement Improvisation
Workshop Approach 3: Imagining and Writing a ‘Character’
Workshop Approach 4: Four Factors of Voice and Speech
Workshop Approach 5: Working with a Post-Dramatic Text
Workshop Approach 6: Physicalizing Emotional Subtexts
It has also added two brand-new videos from Maria Kapsali and Dorinda Hulton:
Yoga and Actor Training Introduction
Index of Postures
And three new Contextual Essays:
Foreword and Introduction
Essay 1: Historical Overview
Essay 2: An Overview of the Development
Maria Kapsali is Associate Professor in Physical Performance at the University of Leeds. Her research has produced a wearable technology for sound and movement interaction and the monograph performer Training and Technology (Routledge 2021).
Dorinda Hulton is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Drama at the University of Exeter and co-directed eleven practice-as-research inter-arts performances of ‘new work’ with Cypriot artists on either side of the military border between 2003–2017.
Mark Freeman: Gifted
Gifted
Site-specific dance is an investigation of space and place. A static sculpture—steps without a destination—is transformed by dance asking: What is this place? Why are we here? Where are we going? The city across the river is lost in mist. The Gifted dancers inscribe the landscape. Their gift transforming geometry and perspective, re-structuring space. Filmed on location Almada, Portugal.
Mark Freeman is a Professor of Television, Film and New Media at San Diego State University. He has produced and directed, written and edited programs for broadcast on public television. Freeman's films have won numerous awards. They have screened at museums including the Museo do Oriente (Lisbon), Weltmuseum (Vienna), Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History (Washington, D.C.), the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art (NY). Please see markfreemanfilms.org.
Gemma Harman, Susanna Dye, and Manisha Aggarwal: ResDance Podcast
ResDance™ is a podcast created by Dr Gemma Harman as a way to engage listeners with emergent ideas and practices central to dance research: anchor.fm/gemma-harman
ResDance Series 4: Episode 2: The dialogue between access and creativity in dance practice with Susanna Dye
Susanna reflects upon her thinking and experiences working with movement and dance in community, education and interdisciplinary performance contexts. Through exploring her ways of working, she shares insight into her processes of identifying and dismantling access barriers she experiences in her professional practice. Underpinned by her question of “what is moving me in the space”, she considers ways of transforming access barriers; her Stimming performance research project, the dialogue of the body with the environment and her future research interests. Throughout the episode, Susanna highlights the importance of asking questions and acknowledging needs.
ResDance Series 5: Episode 4: Widening awareness and learning on mental health in dance with Manisha Aggarwal
Manisha discusses her interests in supporting dancers with their mental health and wider considerations of mental health within the dance sector, more generally. Through situating thinking around her current PhD research, Manisha shares her thinking around barriers around mental health in dance, the application of research findings to sport and dance settings and the importance of context when considering such application. She highlights the importance of cross-discipline research in widening awareness and learning around mental health and reflects upon her position as a researcher in being situated across disciplines. Throughout the episode, Manisha advocates the need for mental health to be a priority and for there to be greater emphasis on the role the dance sector can have on a dancer’s engagement with dance itself.
Gemma Harman is a researcher, educator, Senior Lecturer in Dance and Dance Science at the University of Chichester, and the host of ResDance™ podcast.
Black Theatre Workshop: Three videos with commentary by Janice J. Anderson
Harlem Duet (Part 4)
Written and produced by Djanet Sears, Harlem Duet is a prequel to Shakespeare’s Othello and explores Othello’s relationship with his first wife, Sybil.
Africa Everywhere – Montreal
Quincy Armorer, former Artistic Director of the Black Theatre Workshop, remarks on the company’s staying power as a primarily Anglophone and Black theatre company in a largely Francophone and white arts scene in Montreal.
Binti’s Journey (Part 1)
Binti’s Journey is an adaptation of the young adult novel The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis. Binti’s Journey centers on the perspective of 13-year-old Binti, who has lost her father, Bambo.
Black Theatre Workshop is Canada’s longest running Black theatre company and is committed to reflecting Black culture and community by developing and providing visibility for Black Canadian artists. Black Theatre Workshop is an award-winning English-speaking theatre company based in Montreal, Quebec.
Janice J. Anderson is a PhD Candidate in Humanities at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with research interests in Black women’s literatures and Black theatre and performance.
Sistren Theatre Collective: Sweet Sugar Rage with commentary by Lisa Tomlinson
Sweet Sugar Rage
Sweet Sugar Rage (1985) is a documentary film concerning women sugar cane workers in and around Hayes Newton "New Sugar Town," Clarendon, Jamaica. It creatively weaves in interviews, theatre, and workshops to highlight working-class African-Jamaican women's oral histories and experiences. Through the various medium, the viewers gain insight into the lives of the women sugar cane workers, which focuses on domestic chores, minimal/low wage, occupational health and safety hazards, and the physically demanding work on the sugar belt. In particular, the interviews are used as the basis for a theatre workshop, which allows participants to analyse the labour exploitation of women and develop strategies to resist oppressive structures. The performance of the play is for an audience of sugar workers.
Sistren Theatre Collective is an independent popular theatre company which has developed since 1977 from the initiative of working-class women in Jamaica. Using drama workshops and original plays, the group works at advancing awareness on questions affecting women, particularly Caribbean women.
Lisa Tomlinson is Lecturer, the Institute of Caribbean Studies, the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She is the author of The African-Jamaican Aesthetic: Cultural Retention and Transformation across Borders.