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, 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 from 2024–2025:
Gemma Harman, Laura Griffiths, Sarah Needham-Beck, Stacey Green, Imogen Aujla, Alexandra Baybutt, Polly Hudson, Catherine Harber: 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.
ResDance Series 6: Episode 2: Archives, Provenance and the Dancing Body with Laura Griffiths
In this thought-provoking episode, Laura offers insight into her experiences as a researcher and educator and shares her thinking around notions of archive in relation to contemporary dance practice. Throughout the episode, Laura encourages listeners to challenge how we might re-think the archive and introduces ideas around originality, provenance and the body as an archive, where the journey begins and understanding remains.
ResDance Series 6: Episode 8: Science inquiry in dance practice with Sarah Needham-Beck
In this episode, Sarah shares insight into her background as a researcher and her research across dance and occupational performance settings. We discuss her interests in applying scientific principles to a dance context and how researchers can assist dancers with the training and performance demands they may face. Throughout the episode, we explore the wider considerations around supporting the individual in their dance pursuit through the importance of open communication and finding effective ways of working collaboratively between the researcher, artist and practitioner. Sarah highlights the value of dance science education and the need for a greater understanding around the nuances of dance practice within research settings.
ResDance Series 6: Episode 11: Racial Equity in Dance with Stacey Green and Imogen Aujla
Stacey and Imogen share insight into their thinking and considerations around racial equity in dance. Through exploring the work of the TIRED movement and their current 3-year research project looking at representation in dance training and education (Red Research Project), we discuss the importance of removing the fear of discussing racism in dance and acknowledging the need for good practices to be adhered to within the dance industry. Through reflecting upon her personal and professional experiences, Stacey advocates for a unitedness and bringing together of the dance community, an openness of communication and a greater celebration of the pioneers and origins of dance influenced by black culture. Stacey and Imogen highlight the value of giving voice to students and practitioners within the field and a quest to work collectively to improve racial equality and representation in the dance industry.
ResDance Series 7: Episode 4: Doing Movement Research Through Practice with Alexandra Baybutt
In this episode, Alexandra shares insight into her experiences as an artist, researcher and somatic movement educator. Through situating her thinking in her research practice, we explore ideas around collaborative practices and experimental methods of festival making, the cultures of practice in dance, and the centrality of the body. Throughout this episode, Alexandra reflects upon her positionality as a researcher and the importance of sharing the voices of the people she researches to ensure their visibility is known.
ResDance Series 7: Episode 7: Notions of Care, Rest, and Kindness with Polly Hudson
In this episode, Polly shares insight into her experiences as a dancer, maker, researcher, teacher, and gardener. Through situating her thinking in her practice and life we explore notions of care, rest, and kindness as ethical stances, and as vital components of an artistic methodology that places ecological consciousness at its core.
In this episode, Catherine shares insight into her experiences as an educator and researcher and her interests in the intersection of functional and aesthetic components of dance performance. Through situating her ideas within her research practice, Catherine offers insights into methodological approaches for validating dance-specific measures and the value of working collaboratively across disciplines. Throughout the episode, Catherine reflects on how an openness to dialogue and embracing new perspectives continue to inform her curiosity within the field.
Gemma Harman is a researcher, educator, Senior Lecturer in Dance and Dance Science at the University of Chichester, and the host of ResDance™ podcast.
Adrianne Wortzel: Five Robotic Installations
Camouflage Town follows a theatrical telerobot, “Kiru”, which lived in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and interacted with onsite and online visitors. Kiru talked to visitors, surveilled, and commented on its environment, and transmitted video imagery and sound to the web. When autonomous, Kiru was a cultural curmudgeon with five different personalities, all present at once: Wizard, Librarian of Juxtapositions, Philosopher, Preacher, and Storyteller. There was a sixth personality blank slate always lurking in its psyche, left to visitors to define through the robot’s speech, camera movements, and motion. They create the camouflage and make Kiru a new persona, alter ego, digital machine, and character.
Tableaux Vivant Dans Un Monde Parfait
The landscape designer Frederick Olmstead foresaw where the process of industrialization would lead, to the separation of the spheres of work and life and leisure, to the emergence of the suburbs and the daily migration of peoples between these spheres. Since then, the home as a home has never again been the intersection between the world of work and leisure. HE and SHE, the robots in this artificial idyll, look through video cameras, they perceive their surroundings, they seem to experience and enjoy their picture-book idyll. And we watch them do it, and we enjoy it because they show us: Everything is in order. The world of dollhouses, including ours, is intact.
Battle of the Pyramids is a performance installation of reconfigured robotic toys (30+ Elmo TMXs stripped of their red furry coats) performing seemingly military maneuvers in rigid choreographed formations. This work is a testimony to the tragic consequences of imperialism and the dangers, follies, and sadness of a rationale for blind obedience that makes victims out of warriors. While all the toys have been programmed with the same 3 sequences of actions, when several of them are turned on simultaneously under the same conditions, they go out of synch almost immediately. Making these toys work in perfect synch, with groups of them performing synchronized actions in turns, and their limited and jerky movements appearing as highly disciplined "military movements", could be particularly unsettling and humorous at the same time.
NoMad is an Island is an interactive robotic installation which took place in the main square of Linz, Austria as a part of a week-long performance at Ars Electronica Festival in 1997. In NoMad is an Island, a panoply of user-driven robots appear and disappear, moving along a map of their own making while writing down the world. This production was put on by Wortzel’s Robotic theatre entity, Globe Theatre. The robots as agents mingle more or less inconspicuously in everyday life, 'capturing’ day-to-day life in their respective environment.
Sayonara Diorama is an electronic multimedia performance and original play with robots, live actors, video and remote participants. This production was put on by Wortzel's Robotic theatre presenter, Globe Theatre. The small paintings on wood were "portholes" for the ship the Beagle in the story. This piece was performed at The Lovinger Theater and Lehman College, in New York in 1998. This work was funded by the Electronic Media and Film Program of The New York State Council on The Arts via Lehman College Art Gallery.
Adrianne Wortzel is a media artist based in New York and a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Entertainment Technologies and Emerging Media Technologies at New York City College of Technology.
Patricia Bardi: Somatic Practices, Interviews, and Performances
Active Breath is an innovative somatic practice developed by Patricia Bardi over many years of independent research and is a key aspect in the accredited certification program Voice Movement Integration (VMI) Somatic Practice centred in Amsterdam. Active Breath focuses on integrating our awareness of the intrinsic connection between body, mind, and emotions through our physical experience of breath, voice, and movement.
Patricia Bardi is interviewed by Michael Oliver, who attended the VMI Somatic Practice training program along with being a student at the Mime School at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam. Looking at the body’s role in performance practice training, the interview focuses on how the practice of Vocal Dance has developed in Patricia Bardi’s performance work. They discuss how the Vocal Dance performance practice evolved to become another key aspect of the VMI Somatic Practice educational methodology. The VMI Somatic Practice training program incorporates embodiment practices that define and integrate the breath and vocal presence in somatic movement training.
Vocal Dance is an approach to improvised ensemble performance that brings the animation of the voice into a fully alive and vivid physical expression with movement. The performers interact, choreograph, and communicate through voice and body—movement and sounds—attentive to the spectrum between everyday gesture, sound scape, and embodied flow of movement. Locus Unfurled is inspired by how a community space, a place of coming together, brings many different types of people—their voices, bodies, personalities—into one location.
Tangle Part 1: Daylight and Part 2: Night Bloom
Patricia Bardi, Vocal Dance and Text; Alex Maguire, Music and Piano
Patricia Bardi and Alex Maguire create performances that build bridges and dismantle boundaries between movement, dance, voice, and music. They allow room for the unexpected to emerge while creating finely-tuned and evocative characters of emotion, memory, and image. Their collaboration has evolved and deepened over decades and continues to be a vital and alive performance exchange moving seamlessly through a sculpted, refined, and dynamic interaction. They are able to anticipate and embellish each other’s imagistic phrasing and expression, creating a unique and holistic interactive performance combining improvisation and experiential composition.
Patricia Bardi is the founder and director of the accredited certification program Voice Movement Integration (VMI) Somatic Practice, combining Vocal Dance, Voice Movement Integration, and Vital Movement Integration Bodywork centered in Amsterdam. This is 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).
André M. Zachery: “Salt” from Drexciya Redux: Immersive Installation
“Salt'' is an excerpt from a current work-in-development collaboration between interdisciplinary choreographer André M. Zachery and interdisciplinary sound/media artist Sadah Espii Proctor entitled “Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans and Other Urban Legends”. This section is named and inspired by a novel of the same name by Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace, the tale of “Igbo Landing” and the legend of “the people who could fly”. “Salt” featured as one of four pieces comprising Drexciya Redux, an immersive audio-responsive media designed by André M. Zachery using Isadora media programming, performed at New York Live Arts – Live Ideas 2021. Drexciya Redux submerged audiences into a digitally immersive experience of projection mapping and sound design based on the mythological realm of Drexciya through both a stand-alone responsive media installation and a cabaret of interdisciplinary performances and queer interruptions by an intergenerational contingent of Black artists activating the possibility of a new world.
André M. Zachery, artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Renegade Performance Group, is an Assistant Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts in the Dance Department at NYU.
Christina Chau and Helena Grehan: First Lights — Moombaki (2021)
Moombaki is a three-part drone light performance that premiered in Western Australia at the Fremantle Biennale in 2021. Moombaki translates from local Aboriginal (Nyoongar) language into ‘where river meets sky’ (Biennale). The work combined the choreographed drone performance with a narrative guided by story and knowledge held by the traditional owners of the land to explore notions of ‘place’ and provide an insight into ideas and images of what the land means to this community of elders.
Christina Chau is a lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. She is the author of the book Movement, Time, Technology, and Art.
Helena Grehan is Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, at Edith Cowan University. She writes about performance, technology, ethics and spectataorship.
Electa Woodbridge Behrens and Øystein Elle: Decomposing Decay: A Suite of Speculative Archives
Decomposing Decay is the result of an artistic research laboratory with two researchers, a filmmaker, second year students from the Norwegian Theatre Academy, and the decomposing building ‘Hallen 1’ on the dry dock in Fredrikstad which has a 7-second sound delay. It explores non-hierarchical modes of making as well as working with performing scores and notions of ‘layering worlds’. Historically the work draws on fluxus, dada, deep listening practices, extended vocal techniques, and intra-active approaches to working with text/sound/song as material. Emerging strategies explore notions of ‘dramaturgies of listening’, in which we sound, not only ‘to be heard’, but where our sounding invites us to direct our listening in different ways.
Electa Behrens (USA/Norway) works as the Artistic Leader for Acting and Performance at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. She is a performer, mother, theorist, teacher.
Øystein Elle (Norway) is an Associate Professor at Østfold University College, where he teaches music and performing arts.
Divya Kasturi and Suparna Banerjee: NowHere Part I and Part II
NowHere (2011), a London-based South Asian contemporary performance, presents a profound exploration of diasporic identity through a blend of dance, monologue and digital arts. As a duet by Divya Kasturi and dance artist Urja Thakore, it draws movements from Bharatanatyam and Kathak dance traditions, coupled with Western release and contemporary techniques. The music composition is by Tim Jennings and John-Marc Gowens and the dramaturgy is by Chris Fogg. Its light and set are designed by Anthony Hateley and Helen Murphy, respectively. In this piece, Kasturi adopts digital technology to project her screen double, designed by John-Marc Gowens, creating a visual dichotomy that navigates the cultural and linguistic differences between her homeland, Chennai, India and her new migrated home in Stevenage, Britain.
Divya Kasturi is a cultural trailblazer in dance whose career spans continents and disciplines. She has been blending the rich traditions of Bharatanatyam with cutting-edge technology for the past decade alongside performing exquisite classical work.
Suparna Banerjee is an independent dance teacher, researcher and also a visiting artist-scholar at Iowa State University (ISU), United States. She also taught dance at FLAME University in India.
George Rodosthenous: Six Musical Theatre Interviews
Producing Musical Theatre: An Interview with Bradley Reynolds
In this interview with producer Bradley Reynolds, Professor George Rodosthenous discusses the attributes of a successful producer, marketing styles and producing musical theatre on Broadway and in the West End. Reynolds talks about his Tony voter experience and working on several Broadway and West End shows (Mrs. Doubtfire, The Notebook, and The Devil Wears Prada). He comments on the success ratio of contemporary musicals and explores issues such as current theatre prices, filming musicals for a wider audience, as well as his future projects. The Interview is in two parts; the second part of the Interview was opened up and attended by students on the ‘Exploring the Musical’ Discovery Module of the University of Leeds.
Lighting Musical Theatre: An Interview with Chris Davey
In this interview with lighting designer Chris Davey, Professor George Rodosthenous discusses issues of training, colour palettes, and lighting musical theatre. Chris explores the differences of lighting for a straight play (Macbeth), a dance theatre piece (The Car Man) and musical theatre (Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music). He analyses his working methods in relation to collaborating with a set designer and a director. In addition, Davey explains how music affects light and his relationship to the musical score, as well as the importance of previews in his work. His work with associate/assistant lighting designers and resident chief electricians is also analysed in depth here, in order to show the inner workings and requirements of the intense technical rehearsal period.
Performing in Musical Theatre: An Interview with Paige Peddie
In this interview with musical theatre performer Paige Peddie, Professor George Rodosthenous discusses issues of training, diversity, and characterisation in musical theatre. The musical Dreamgirls is used a case study, but there are also several references to The Lion King and the technique known as ‘acting the song’. Peddie talks about her experiences working as a lead character in musicals, but also as an understudy and what these two different approaches entail. She explores what inclusivity means in the rehearsal room and shares with us her preparation techniques, working with the different directors on a show (musical/movement) and her plans for the future.
Musical Direction of Musical Theatre: An Interview with James Holmes
In this interview with musical director James Holmes, Professor George Rodosthenous discusses issues of working with performers, achieving clarity with lyrics, and offering meticulous musical direction in musical theatre. Holmes explores the differences of working with opera and musical theatre singers using a range of examples (Shostakovich, Bernstein, Weill) and rehearsal room techniques. Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music are used as a case studies to explore the intensity and complexity of the music. Issues of balance, the use of microphones and complex over-layering of material are explored in depth through a fascinating plethora of musical examples from well-known musicals.
Designing Musical Theatre II: An Interview with Colin Richmond
In this captivating interview, George Rodosthenous engages in a stimulating conversation with the accomplished set designer Colin Richmond. Delving into Richmond’s wealth of experience, the discussion unfolds with questions that provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the craft of set design. Richmond discusses the roots of his creative journey as he shares insights into his training and approach to designing sets for musicals. Unravelling the intricate layers of the creative process, he articulates the delicate balance between artistic vision, The Theatre Green Book (theatregreenbook.com), and practical considerations, seamlessly navigating challenges like budget constraints. Richmond sheds light on the symbiotic relationship between lighting and set design, emphasizing the pivotal role they play in enhancing storytelling.
Actor-Musicians in Musical Theatre: An Interview with Louisa Beadel
In this insightful interview, Professor George Rodosthenous engages in a conversation with Louisa Beadel, delving into the multifaceted world of actor-musicians in musical theatre. Beadel shares personal insights and expertise, covering a range of topics from warm-up routines for performances to the unique challenges of working in productions like Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical and The Blonde Bombshells of 1943. Beadel discusses the diverse roles she has played, including navigating the character of “Fame”, shedding light on the role of costume in shaping characterization. The interview explores the nuanced differences between working on plays and musicals, the significance of the music captain's role, and the demands of family shows. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at the actor-musician preparation for two or three-show days, emphasizing the importance of understudies and the specific skills required in this unique domain. Finally, Beadel shares personal sentiments on employing actor-musicians in musicals, creating a comprehensive and engaging overview of the intricate and vibrant world of actor-musicianship in theatre.
George Rodosthenous is Professor of Theatre Directing at the University of Leeds and has edited Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen and The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen.