Items where Subject is "Performance"

Zine, self and micro-publishing has seen a spectacular resurgence in the
last decade, with individuals within tight communities pushing the boundaries of the practice in terms of form, content and process.

This paper will examine ways in which this reinvestment of illustrative authorship
has been stimulated by the iterative and performative aspects of zines, self and
micro-publishing, through the discussion of varied publications’ genesis with their
illustrators – including my own self-published book The House.

This paper will consider how performance underpins both the motivation and
creative process of such publications so as to highlight potential contributions of
the scene to wider illustrative authoring practices.

Gobbledegook Theatre’s Ear Trumpet is a site-responsive outdoor theatre performance in which a team of “sonic investigators” have discovered pockets of sound, trapped in the Earth beneath our feet. The show allows audiences to listen, using “ear trumpets”, a collection of recycled trumpets, trombones and gramophone horns that have been re-purposed as listening devices. In this paper, Dr Jon Croose describes the aurality of Ear Trumpet through a qualitative, practice-led methodology of first-person performance-as-research, interviews with the artists, and analysis of audience response. The essay considers Augoyard & Torgue’s notion of ‘sharawadji’ in Ear Trumpet in terms of ‘sonic effect’ (2006, xv; 8) arising, the author argues, from its encouragement of ‘the consciousness of early listening,’ (2006, 13) and through a combination of the sonic effects of anamnesis, de-contextualisation, de-localisation, attraction, phototonie and quotation. The paper considers how Ear Trumpet positions the relationship between ‘physical environment, the socio-cultural milieu, and the individual listener’ (2006, xiii) and reveals how participants’ suspension of disbelief in the pseudo-science of ‘sonic geology’ allows them to posit the possibility of multiple ‘historic dimensions of sound’, in a way that reframes their everyday soundscape and ‘magically and suddenly transports [them] elsewhere’ (2006, xv). Finally, it raises questions about the effect of sharawadji in terms of the tension between theatrical illusion, “belief” and critical distance among audiences, and considers a possible politics of aurality in performance contexts.

This paper reveals how UK street carnival is located within policy discourses that facilitate notions of creative economy, inter-place competition and the representation of institutionally-preferred versions of local, regional and national place-identity. The paper draws on ethnographic research within two community town carnivals and the professional Battle for the Winds carnival performances that launched the 2012 Olympic sailing at Weymouth. It considers the evolution of policy-driven carnival vocabularies that were designed to articulate preferred ‘Jurassic Coast’ and Olympic place identities for the south-west UK during 2012, and their effect on two vernacular, community street carnivals in East Devon and Dorset. The paper exposes the cultural tension between these vernacular events and the ‘official feast’ of Jurassic Coast and Olympic carnival, in terms of their performance of contradictory place-identities and contested notions of artistic community. It describes the popular challenge to aesthetic hegemony that these community carnivals presented during 2012. Finally, the author argues for a reassessment of the artistic value of vernacular carnivals, and affirms their status as a culture of resistance that creates alternative, sometimes inconvenient, symbolic constructions of community and place to those preferred by institutional actors operating within a neo-liberal discourse of inter-place competition.

Investigating the performing body as both a still and moving image In the Gap Between is a live performance work consisting of 5 performers and lasting approximately 15-20 minutes.
Informed by synchronised dance structures such as Corps de Ballet and The Chorus Line; the work utilises key characteristics of these structures (moving in sync, single file arrangement, repetition, pace & pauses) as a means to explore the body as an image. The movement vocabulary for the live work is developed in rehearsals where performers explore every day micro-actions such as shifting weight, turning, stretching & leaning. By slowing movement down, the work invites the performers to fully explore these often-overlooked gestures whilst challenging audience spectatorship.

Reflecting on a tour of the Western Front trenches in 1916 the writer Reginald Farrer suggested that it was in fact wrong to regard the ‘huge, haunted solitude’ of the modern battlefield as empty. ‘It is more’ he argued, ‘full of emptiness… an emptiness that is not really empty at all.’ Contemporary artists, poets, and composers seized upon the concept of a crowded emptiness, of gaps, pauses and silences that were in fact crammed with resonance, populated with overwhelming memory.

This paper and film screening considers the phenomenology of aural emptiness and its manifestation during remembrance and repatriation ceremonies. It focusses on a short film by Kate Davies ‘The Separation Line’ which is a montage of 14 repatriation events held at Royal Wootton Bassett between 2007 and 2011. The film lasts precisely 9 minutes and 50 seconds, which is the temporal length of the town’s High Street, lined on either side by mourners maintaining an unsteady silence.

Celebrating the interplay between dance and mark making, this performance presents the conclusion of a participatory research project led by AUB academics Jenna Hubbard and Adele Keeley with community dance company Co-Evo. The Moving Canvas Project explores the kinesthetic inhabitance of wearable canvasses marked with pens to create unique and original textile design whilst creating choreography.

This visual essay will explore the themes of collaboration, play, the digital intermediatory space and how we engage with the digital ‘other’ of yourself. The research builds on the work of Stark Smith's The Underscore (1987). This long-form dance improvisation structure is used to frame the creative journey which takes place within a jam session offers a platform to explore and consider how the experience might be re-framed with in an online context. The research also draws upon the writing of Weber, Mizanty & Allen (2017) who present digital conference tools as a method to create and teach choreography, and Francksen’s writing around how the use of digital technology produces the digital body, which can interact with the performative body (2014). The research further extends the understanding of these digital spaces as places for intangible, ephemeral, and communal play. This new practice gave a chance for reflection on both our artistic practices and our lives during the pandemic; Halprin’s Life/Art Process has been a supportive model for understanding the therapeutic nature of jamming practice (1995). The drawings and short films created during this project document the process, but also have currency as individual artefacts. The observations and recommendations below will be presented alongside empirical research about the relationship between the artists’ practice and how through drawing and movement they found beneficial creative exchange, in a temporary digital space.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 14 and 15 outline a broad concern for us to take better care for our lands and oceans and act on the negative anthropogenic impact that we, as humans, are having on this planet. However, I propose that many of us see ourselves as separate from nature and lack a connection with it. This, in turn, affects the way we treat it. In this research I explore how we can frame our futures by telling visual stories about the land and sea and the geological foundation of the world we live in. This is achieved by exploring the relationship between natural landscapes, earth sciences and the ‘bodily’ canvas. By presenting examples of costume and textile design in response to a specific brief this visual essay introduces the notion that by anthropomorphizing nature through costume design a sense of connectivity between humans and nature can be bridged. Although there are many examples of how nature has been used as a springboard for garment design this article draws attention to theories explored in social science that claim if we attribute human characteristics to natural forms we feel greater connectivity towards it. I present ideas that using the visual detail of the landscape and by exploring the opportunities of how these can be embedded into costume design we can create a playful public engagement performance tool. This approach has the potential to, not only investigate new ways of interpreting landscape and geology through a costume-design-led performance model, but also challenge the way people think about the natural world with the potential to foster pro-environmental behaviour.

This research project explores the notion that by anthropomorphizing nature through an emergent practice of landscaped inspired costume design a sense of connectivity between humans and nature can be bridged. It builds on somatic costume research by Dean (2014 and 2016) and asks the question: How can the body be used as a somatic landscape to create a playful public engagement performance tool to promote a connection with the natural landscapes of Dorset.

A costume -design -led approach was executed by combining theoretical and empirical research that explored the connectivity between the landscape and the body. This included field trips and visual hands-on research included rock rubbing, sketching, fossil hunting, archival research and investigative walking. Most significant was the dialogue with the earth scientists from the Jurassic Coast Trust who supported the research and its development. Combining this practice-based approach with theories in social scientists (Tams et al. (2013), Berry & Wolf-Waltz (2014) and Lumber, Richard and Sheffield (2017)) the outcome of this research highlights how the intervention of performance, or more specifically costume design in performance, can be used as a method to get its audience to think about natural landscapes. Cited in Resonance in Rocks: Building a Sustainable Learning and Engagement Programme for the Jurassic Coast, Proceedings of Geologists’ Association, the work was referred to as a ‘remarkable piece of interpretation’ Khatwa Ford, (2018).

This film explores the relationship between the free expression of improvised drawing and the intertwined practice of movement and music in what we frame as ‘creative jamming’. The film tracks the journey from studio-based improvisation jamming to on-line practice imposed by the onset of the 2020 pandemic which forced remote working and collaboration. Our sites of encounter shifted from performance spaces to our home environments, where multiple spaces were simultaneously connected using technology. Through the practice we discovered that bodies, objects, materials and movement could be shared, replicated, recycled and mirrored back to us. The film observes how the pandemic opened new spaces for play, imagination and world building; the adaption of practice from live to digital performance breeds both difference and familiarity. No longer inhabiting the same physical space, this new environment, created and framed by the lens of the laptop and phone camera, holds the practice somewhere between different houses creating a catalyst for new observations and inquiry. The film demonstrates that the gap created by the COVID-19 lockdown bought with it new creative elements including using the technology as a mode of enquiry, rather than merely a form of recording the performance.

This article develops a comparative analysis of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten, and Eva Szasz and Robert Verrall’s Cosmic Zoom, seen through the lenses of Bergsonian and Deleuzo- Guttarian philosophy. The author claims that, despite similarities with respect to their subject matter and modes of production, there are significant stylistic differences between these films that are suggestive of divergent ontological, epistemological and political commitments. Of particular importance is the foregrounding of objectivity in the case of Powers of Ten and subjectivity in the case of Cosmic Zoom – a distinction that is reflected in their respectively quasi-indexical and expressive modes of representation. This fundamental tension similarly conditions their differently inflected approaches to time, space and measure, drawing attention to the strange intertwining of representation, abstraction and affect that is characteristic of much animated film. Ultimately, it is proposed that, in the context of Powers of Ten and Cosmic Zoom, animation’s capacities for abstraction and expression are differently distributed, resulting in a cosmopolitical opposition which can be aligned with the Deleuzo–Guattarian distinctions between major and minor language, and royal and nomadic science.

Many of the questions that are central to the consideration of graphic design and communication have a strong resonance with issues appertaining to the philosophy of affect. It seems strange then that whilst there has been much interest in the affective turn in the context of the arts, it has been relatively absent
from discussion of graphic design. This seems particularly odd when we consider the ways in which matters of feeling, emotion and behavioural disposition are often combined in the context of advertising and visual communication – that is, in the at once semiotic and political regulation of the social, or, conversely, in the modes of resistance that emerge out of practices of design activism. This article attempts a (re)reading of contemporary and historical graphic design, through the concept of affect.

A challenge for performers working in interactive and participatory performance forms is a need to navigate between the position of the ‘Architect’, designing and structuring an audience’s experience, and that of the ‘Clown’, sustaining a performance state that is present and responsive to the particularities of individual interactions. While design and structure can preoccupy the development of new work, rehearsing for participatory performance proves a challenge when the pivotal ingredient – an unpredictable audience – is absent. How can training support performers to attend to both performance structure and the immediacies of interactive exchange? How can it support them to think critically about the aesthetics, ethics and politics of both? This article reflects on my pedagogical process of working with a group of undergraduates in spring 2017, exploring training approaches to support their devising process as they created a self-directed interactive theatre piece. It offers an ethnographic glimpse into the studio work and students’ responses, as we investigated approaches to developing the performer as ‘Architect-Clown’. Drawing on 10 years’ experience as a performer-deviser in this field, I sought the tack between these two training zones, applying pedagogic methods that work to develop performance qualities of listening, presence and improvisation, alongside methods aimed at developing a critical and reflexive approach to experience-design. Are the two roles as distinct as is suggested? How might they interact, and what might be gained (or lost) from this cross-training studio approach?

This article examines the performative digital practices of India’s feminist campaign group Blank Noise, with a focus on their 2016 project #WalkAlone. The event sought to explore and challenge embodied notions of female safety and visibility in night-time urban public spaces, by inviting women to walk alone in a place of their choosing between 9pm and midnight. In doing so, Blank Noise called on participants to ‘walk alone, together’, utilising digital documentation tools and media platforms to network these dispersed embodied acts. Drawing on my participation in #WalkAlone from the remote position of the UK alongside online documentation of the project, I examine how these tools established ‘digital proximities’ between participants, transforming our solitary acts into collective embodied action. I argue that Blank Noise’s project extends Butler’s notion of ‘plural performativity’ (2015) into a digital public sphere, by constructing a mode of embodied assembly within media spaces. Here, digital proximities between dispersed participants forged a concerted enactment from the private and personal actions of individual women, walking on the stage of the nocturnal city.

Alongside South India’s rapid urbanisation, the early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the arrival of new digital technologies and social media platforms in India, opening new possibilities for performance on a mediatised urban and global stage. In a wave of popular performance practices emerging around 2011–2, Bengaluru (as with other cities across India) became the site to a host of flash mobs staged in urban spaces and filmed for online publics. This chapter examines the flash mob performance trend of that era in relation to national discourses of ‘New India’as an example of forms of cultural practice characterised by an ‘aesthetics of arrival’ in globalising India.

At 1 p.m. on 6 February 1971, eight “actors,” a reporter, and a cameraman entered a space at an undisclosed location with the intention of spending 24 hours together. They did not belong to a single artistic group and some of them had never met before. Tōmatsu Shōmei’s photographic record of this event appeared in the spring 1971 issue of the magazine Kikan shashin eizō accompanied by sections from a transcript of the tape recording. The images and the text – jointly titled NO.541 – offer fragmented glimpses into the situations and conversations unfolding in the room and also function with and against each other, as in a dialogue.

The jointly written text continues this dialogue in the writing up of major themes contextualizing the performing and recording of this work: the space, the magazine page, and the body. We imagine ourselves in NO.541 and enact this intermingling of space-times by reproducing not only some of Tōmatsu’s photographs but also parts of the transcript in translation. Joining the conversation, we adopt some of the main strategies of the image-text, such as fragmentation, improvisation, and refusal of any singularity. Woman C and Man G take on the role of mediums, channeling, for instance, a possible future re-enactment instead of producing a conclusive account of the event.

Contact: A Festival of New Experimental Film and Video, Apiary Studios, London, 6-8 May 2016. Curator.

Participating artists including George Barber, Louisa Fairclough, Nicky Hamlyn, Sally Golding, Malcolm Le Grice, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Matthew Noel-Tod, Heather Phillipson, Greg Pope, Lis Rhodes, Ben Rivers, Guy Sherwin & Lynn Loo, Jennet Thomas, Jennet Thomas, Andrea Zimmerman.

Contact: A Festival of New Experimental Film and Video featured 70 film, video and performance artists across three days in its venues’ three studios. Its curatorial focus combined a multiplicity of forms, in an accessible and aware manner, which brought together niche and new audiences and formed an important contribution to the contemporary condition of experimental film practices in the UK.

This independent survey, which was supported by ACE, presented single and multi-projector and performance-related works, and specially commissioned installations. To schedule the works in a relatable manner an innovative structure was initiated – the works were presented in small clusters, rather than the normative, often lengthy and formally inappropriate, short film programme format - which challenged viewing hierarchies, introduced new artists, providing the opportunity for the ‘sampling’ and discovery of unknown works. This conception was appreciated by the audience and artists alike (William Raban wrote: ‘Your programming was enlightened').

The Festival programmed established and emerging artists, from original members of the London Filmmakers Co-op to recent graduates, who showed new and untested works. These were selected in consultation with organisations such as no.w.here, collective-iz, Unconscious Archives, Nightworks and Screen Shadows. This ethos reflected the field’s and Festival’s co-operative and collaborative intent, and was emphasised by the supportive presence of many of the artists throughout its duration.

To document the event’s intentions and methodology a publication was produced, which included contextual essays, discussion pieces and all the Festival’s details (Guy Sherwin wrote: 'the brochure is simple, informative, elegant’). This also addressed its legacy through further disseminating its composition and ideas, as such collectable reference points are vital indicators of experimental film and video’s development. The Festival’s discursive structure, which celebrated the fields’ diversity and vibrancy, was enthusiastically and critically received, with each day selling-out.

The Contact Festival included the work of over 70 artists and filmmakers, featuring single-screen films, multi-screen/performance-related works and site-specific installations. Accompanied by a publication including discussion pieces by Luke Aspell and collective-iz (on collective practices), Sally Golding, James Holcombe and Cathy Rogers (on different manifestations of contemporary expanded cinema), and short essays by Maria Palacios Cruz (LUX, Deputy Director), William Fowler (BFI, curator of artists' moving image) and Nicky Hamlyn (filmmaker and writer), plus complete listings.

The Contact Festival included the work of over 70 artists and filmmakers, featuring single-screen films, multi-screen/performance-related works and site-specific installations. Accompanied by a publication including discussion pieces by Luke Aspell and collective-iz (on collective practices), Sally Golding, James Holcombe and Cathy Rogers (on different manifestations of contemporary expanded cinema), and short essays by Maria Palacios Cruz (LUX, Deputy Director), William Fowler (BFI, curator of artists' moving image) and Nicky Hamlyn (filmmaker and writer), plus complete listings.

Contact is a unique configuration of eight artists, which is structured equally across two exhibitions, at New Art Projects, London. These artists work in distinct and interrelated mediums and forms that explore material, temporal and spatial relations working with stil and moving images, analogue and digital practices, human and machine processes. Their distinct approaches and applications produce different, but related, medium engagement, viewing regimes and cross-disciplinary discourse. They are in contact with materials, forms, context, one another, and are part of an ongoing conversation that generates new connections and ideas.

Curated by: Andrew Vallance

Part 1: 20 July-17 August 2024
Jenny Baines, Sophie Clements, Carali McCali, Cathy Rogers

Part 2: 18 January-8 February 2025
Savinder Bual, Jim Hobbs, Simon Payne, Andrew Vallance

A series of eight film screening and expanded events, which featured 22 artists. It drew on Film Talks: 15 Conversations About Experimental Cinema's discursive pairings, enabling them to show and perform work.

The applied interaction, between maker and work, in a specific context, further developed the conversation for all - peer-to-peer, artist-to-audience, work-to-context - enriching subject related understanding.

The public returning to the printed text re-animated the original words, indicated further questions and offered new insight, all that can only occur in an informed live interaction.

The events sought to explore (in different ways) how practitioners and viewers can be brought together in sites of co-presence, be part of a collaborative and discursive enterprise that shares and explores conceptual and contextual encounters.

Film Talks is an edited collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema from a range of eminent and emerging film and video makers. The book represents a contemporary snapshot of the ways in which experimental cinema is perceived by its practitioners, often in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large and wider social issues. It is an invaluable guide for those keen to immerse themselves in the insights and perspectives that only artists can offer.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Underline produces public film and live performance events. Thus far, it has had three iterations (2022–4), which were staged as part of Open House Festival, London.

It would re-imagine urban public space through artistic intervention, encouraging active co-existence and co-experimentation. Its past programmes featured an open call and invited participants, an inclusivity that places the inexperienced (of all ages) next to international figures, who are all locally connected. The exhibited film and performance work was presented after dark, in an otherwise overlooked location, a Victorian railway bridge that divides the historic terraced street, Beck Road, in east London. The road was closed for the event and the arch of the bridge was repurposed, becoming a screen, creating a truly common space, an inclusive ‘stage’, that brought residents, artists, visitors, neighbours alike together as creators and audience - European Heritage Days, observed it ‘featured a remarkable line-up of locally-made video art.’

Underline explores the re-imagining of urban space, an environment in which a disconnect can develop between the individual and place, producing disenfranchisement, a contested realm. Its method addresses ‘sense-of-place’ and its impact on ‘sense-of-self’ and community, proposing that artistic intervention can engender creative participation and collective engagement, which can help produce more common understanding, a new ‘sense-of-ownership.’

This chapter describes the study the author carried out with two 2nd year acting degree students assessed as dyslexic, and how they gained an autonomy over the processing and performing of Shakespeare’s text. The study aimed to develop inclusive teaching strategies to facilitate the abilities of those with dyslexia and bypass their difficulties with reading. For those with dyslexia the reading and speaking of Shakespeare’s text can present significant challenges. This difficulty undermines practical work and masks the abilities of the dyslexic student actor. Conversely, Shakespeare’s rich language encourages a construction of meaning through visually interpreted modalities. The study demonstrated that the participants created an additional text of drawings, colours and symbols, replacing the alphabetical text, embedding meaning into long-term memory. This chapter shares the experiences of the two students and the author as teacher. These observations offer insights for improving inclusive pedagogical choices, when working with dyslexic acting students.

Abstract
This article discusses the challenges that dyslexic acting degree students can experience when engaging with classical text, offering a pedagogical strategy that facilitates the reading, and acting of Shakespeare. Calling attention to restrictions that dyslexic acting students can experience, the author considers how these difficulties might be overcome. It is re-iterated throughout the literature that those with dyslexia have problems with decoding, word recognition, working-memory and automatisation of skills. Shakespeare’s writing contributes additional challenges with idiosyncrasies of word-use. Describing her action-research trials with dyslexic acting students, the author shares her development of a teaching method, which supports identification of meaning and hierarchy within the text, interlinked with an appropriation of physical practice drawn from Brecht and Stanislavski. The final action-research cycle drew from Kintsch and Rawson’s Text-Base (2005) to enable a comprehension and memory of the text, underpinned by the Lexical Retrieval hypothesis (Krauss et al., 2000). The strategy was trialled in a performance of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis with dyslexic acting students. The participants’ modes of processing the text were encouraged as components of performance. Feedback supported the view that this method is effective in assisting dyslexic individuals in realisation of words, self-efficacy and enriched performance.

Abstract
In this article, the author reports on her early research into understanding dyslexia, observing its characteristics and affect on some acting students in their work, and discusses ideas for supporting dyslexic acting students in their performance of Shakespeare. Three Acting degree students assessed as dyslexic are presented as case studies in their observed behaviour and the author shares ideas for further action research. The author reports on the students’ strengths and difficulties arising from dyslexia in their reading, understanding and speaking of Shakespeare’s text towards performance. Disclosing challenges the students have met in engaging with the text, and challenges the author faced as their teacher in endeavouring to assist them, the article incudes descriptions of teaching methods that have succeeded or failed in this task.
Having shared the students’ work with six specialist who possess various aspects of expertise involved in dyslexia, the experts comment on the student case studies and their particular challenges. Their expertise is in neurology, dyslexia research, linguistics, speech therapy, the acting of Shakespeare and educational psychology. Several explanations are given in regard to how dyslexia manifests itself in the individuals’ work and processes, and ideas for teaching are offered in supporting acting students with dyslexia. Finally, the author shares her ideas for future investigations and testing specific teaching strategies during her PhD research.

This article shares the author’s research focusing on the facilitation of acting students with dyslexia in actor training. For some individuals with dyslexia the translation of the written text into image-based symbols using technological modalities can play a crucial role to access and make concrete the meaning of the words; in this case Shakespeare. Describing the author’s exploratory construction of a computer tool to assist students with dyslexia to read Shakespeare’s words, the article progresses to focus on one individual with dyslexia, whose illustrative PowerPoint compositions representing Shakespeare’s words, afforded her an autonomy over the text, whilst supporting working memory weaknesses.

Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training focuses on neuro and physical difference and dis/ability in the teaching of performance and associated studies. It offers nineteen practitioners’ research-based teaching strategies, aimed to enhance equality of opportunity and individual abilities in performance education.
Challenging ableist models of teaching, the sixteen chapters address the barriers that can undermine those with dis/ability or difference, highlighting how equality of opportunity can increase innovation and enrich the creative work. Key features include:
• Descriptions of teaching interventions, research and exploratory practice to identify and support the needs and abilities of the individual with dis/ability or difference
• Experiences of practitioners working with professional actors with dis/ability or difference, with a dissemination of methods to enable the actors
• A critical analysis of pedagogy in performance training environments; how neuro and physical diversity are positioned within the cultural contexts and practices
• Equitable teaching and learning practices for individuals in a variety of areas, such as: dyslexia, dyspraxia, visual or hearing impairment, learning and physical dis/abilities, wheelchair users, aphantasia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autistic spectrum.

The chapter contents originate from practitioners in the UK, USA and Australia working in actor training conservatoires, drama university courses, youth training groups and professional performance, encompassing a range of specialist fields, such as voice, movement, acting, Shakespeare, digital technology, contemporary live art and creative writing.
Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training is a vital resource for teachers, directors, performers, researchers and students who have an interest in investigatory practice towards developing emancipatory pedagogies within performance education.