Research News

The latest research news for Drama can be found below.

  • January 2012 - September 2012 - David Roesner has gained an AHRC Fellowship to support his research on 'Musicality in (the) Theatre. Concepts and practices of interart processes in theatre-making'.
  • October 2011 - Rebecca Louke's theatre company Red Cape have been awarded £75,000 from Arts Council England for their production 1 Beach Road which received a 3* review in The Guardian.
  • October 2011 - Cathy Turner has been offered a book contract from Palgrave for 'Dramaturgy and Architecture: Writing Spaces'.
  • October 2011 - David Roesner has been awarded pump-priming funding for a project called 'Type-casting. Acting identities in a globalized world' with Thomas Morton in Psychology.
  • September 2011 - Adele Senior has been awarded pump-priming funding for a project called 'Performing with Bacteria: An investigation of the genetic effects and cultural affects of the performing human body on in-vitro and in-vivo bacterial cultures' with Dr Olivia Champion and Prof Richard Titball from Biosciences.
  • September 2011 - Sarah Goldingay has been nominated for a Times Higher Education Innovation award for the Howard Barker premiere and symposium.
  • September 2011 - Rebecca Loukes has been awarded pump-priming funds for her project 'A Stratigraphy of Performer Training: an interdisciplinary investigation' with Richard Brazier.
  • September 2011 - Anna Harpin's theatre company, Idiot Child, have received a 4* review from The Guardian for their latest show You're Not Doing It Right. The show was written and directed by Anna Harpin.
  • June 2011 -  Bryce Lease has been invited to BIARI (Brown International Academic Research Institute) to join the Global Humanities research group for two weeks in June.
  • June 2011 - Sarah Goldingay and Mick Mangan have organised the premiere of Howard Barker's BLOK/EKO at the Exeter Northcott (with a cast of over 50 students and community performers) and a one day international symposium on his work.
  • June 2011 -  Dorinda Hulton will be showing performances of a dance piece she directed called Collateral Damage in June. The performance of Collateral Damage is a dramaturgical reworking of a promenade performance/installation/exhibition (entitled The Silence of Eurydice) which was first presented in April 2010. It will be showcased twice at an international conference in Nicosia entitled 'Dance/body at the Crossroads of Cultures' (16th-18th June 2011). 
  • June 2011 - Pieter Verstraete gave a paper about the topic of memory in contemporary music theatre and opera at the PSi conference in Utrecht, which also includes an exploration of a new Network idea on Opera and Politics, together with Pamela Karantonis (Greenwich University). e has also been invited to speak in June at an international symposium on Opera and Libretto organised by the Òpera Butxaca i nova creació in Barcelona as part of their opera festival: http://obnc-symposium-en.blogspot.com/p/programme.html.
  • June 2011 - Peter Hulton and Jon Primrose have provided technical and design support for a DVD-ROM which is a principal output of the Performing Presence project, led by Nick Kaye and Gabriella Giannachi. The DVD-ROM will be published as 'Acts of Presence' by Nick Kaye and Gabriella Giannachi in The Drama Review, Winter 2011, in conjunction with an article on performance and virtual reality. Peter Hulton's DVD on Andrei Droznin will be published by Routledge in January 2012.
  • June 2011 - Emily Kreider's theatre company, Jammy Voo was successful in their recent Arts Council England National touring grant application. They will be touring their new piece, A Corner of the Ocean, into some exciting festivals and venues this June and July including the Tobacco Factory and the Northcott.
  • June 2011 - Rebecca Loukes  had two papers published while on maternity leave:
    Loukes, Rebecca (2010) 'Kinetic Awareness: The work of Elaine Summers Part 1', Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 2:1, 75-89.
    Loukes, Rebecca (2010) 'Kinetic Awareness: The Work of Elaine Summers Part 2 - Interview with Elaine Summers', Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 2:1, pp. 91-101.
  • May 2011 -  Phillip Zarrilli’s collaborative work with Kaite O’Reilly and Jo Shapland, Told by the Wind, toured by invitation to The Dance Center in Chicago for performances 20-21 May, 2011 as part of the Chicago: Past, Present, and Future Symposium. Zarrilli and The Llanarth Group have received Arts Council Wales funding for a new performance work, The Echo Chamber. Co-created with Peader Kirk (MKultra London/Athens), Ian Morgan (Song of the Goat, Poland), and Kaite O’Reilly and performed by Morgan and Zarrilli, The Echo Chamber will have an initial two week premiere run from 27 January, 2012 at Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff). With Gaitkrash (Cork, Ireland), he is remounting an earlier production of Beckett’s Play for the June, 2011 Cork Midsummer Festival. Zarrilli’s review essay, ‘Altered Consciousness in Performance: West and East,’ is published as part of the Praeger two volume series, Altered Consciousness.
  • May 2011 -  Cariad Astles has been invited to be a keynote at a conference in Tallinn Estonia on contemporaneity in puppet theatre.
  • April 2011 - Sarah Goldingay has been awarded a Bridging the Gaps Development Fund for "Performing and Transforming Pain: an investigation into how religiospiritual contexts change emotional, psycho-physiological experiences and perceptions of pain".
  • March 2011 - John Somers received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Turkish Drama Association for services to Turkish drama at a conference in Antalya, where he delivered a keynote and a fifteen-hour workshop.
  • March 2011 -  James McDonald has just published, Carnival Texts: Three Performance Texts with Intellect Books. The collection includes three related performance texts for undergraduate performance which take Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of Carnival as a starting point for an exploration of physical, moral and cultural upheaval in a post-modern age. In this title, the texts make use of contemporary post-Brechtian performance theory in an attempt to present a new dystopia.
  • March 2011 -  Kaite O'Reilly has been awarded the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for 2010 for her version of PERSIANS, produced by National Theatre Wales in August, 2010.
  • March 2011 -  Anna Harpin has published Intolerable Acts in a special issue of Performance Research: On Trauma, March 2011. And Land of Hope and Glory: Jez Butterworth's Tragic Landscapes in Studies in Theatre and Performance, Feb 2011
  • March 2011 -  Phillip Zarilli has just been awarded an Arts Council of Wales grant toward developing the next production of THE LLANARTH GROUP entitled, THE ECHO CHAMBER, for this new production he will be collaborating with three other artists in the co-creation of the work--Ian Morgan (SONG OF THE GOAT company member), Peader Kirk (MKultra, London and Athens), and Kaite O'Reilly. Ian Morgan and Phillip will perform. THE ECHO CHAMBER will premiere for a two weeks run at Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff) in January, 2012.  
  • February 2011 -  David Roesner has published, Musicality as a paradigm for the theatre - a kind of manifesto, Studies in Musical Theatre, Vol.4, no. 3, 2010, 293-306.
  • February 2011 -  Prof. Phillip Zarrilli delivered the 2011 Ralph L. Collins Memorial Lecture at the Indiana University Department of Theatre and Drama at the Wells-Metz Theatre. The title of his lecture was "'...presence...' as a question and emergent possibility". In the past few years others giving the Collins Memorial Lecture have included Martin Sheen, Stephen Sondheim, Suzan-Lore Parks, and Simon Callow.
  • January 2011 - Southall Story project awarded major AHRC grant
  • October 2010 - Tilly No-Body performance collaboration between David Roesner and Bella Merlin (UC Davis, USA)
  • September 2010 - Prof. Phillip Zarrilli awarded major American prize for books on theatre practice
  • July 2010 - Dr Anna Harpin's new play 'I Could've Been Better' performed in Bristol.
  • June 2010 - Prof. Mick Mangan awarded AHRC fellowship for his research project 'Staging Ageing'
  • May 2010 - Dr Jane Milling awarded £28,420 by the AHRC for her practice-led research project 'Revitalising the Prom: Popular Performance and History at the Seaside'.
  • April 2010 - Centre for Intermedia awarded an AHRC / BT Pilot Research Networking Scheme award for £11,995 for 'Digital Reconstruction in Archaeology and Contemporary Performance'
  • January 2010 - Prof. Phillip Zarrilli received two grants from AHRC and Arts Council of Wales for a practice-led research project 'Told By The Wind'.