Category Archives: All Events

New Book: Inside the Rehearsal Room by C3’s Rob Marsden

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Associate Professor and C3 Centre member Rob Marsden’s text ‘Inside the Rehearsal Room‘  is now out, published by Bloomsbury/ Methuen Drama.

Book launch at Wednesday 2nd March at 6.30 at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. RSVP to r.j.marsden@staffs.ac.uk email

Inside the Rehearsal Room is both an instructional and conceptual examination of the rehearsal process.

Drawing on professional practice and underpinned by theory, this book moves through each stage of rehearsals, considering the inter-connectivity between the actor, director, designers and the backstage team, and how the cumulative effect of the weeks in rehearsal influences the final production. The text also includes: – Auto-ethnographic and fully ethno-graphic case study approaches to different rehearsal rooms – Interviews with directors, actors, designers and actor trainers – A consideration of the ethics of the rehearsal room and material selected for production – Practical exercises on how to creatively read a text from an acting and directing perspective.

Informed by over 20 years of directing experience in the UK and Europe, Robert Marsden’s book offers a practical guide that ultimately demystifies the rehearsal process and challenges how the rehearsal room should be run in the 21st Century.

Interviews include with Rufus Norris, Kate Wasserberg, Kirstie Davis, Ivo van Hove, Roy Alexander Weise, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Steven Boden, RC-Annie, Katrina Lindsay, Paule Constable, Stephen Mear and many more…

Catch-Up: Art/Practice-Based Research Seminar Series #5 – Who is it for and how can we communicate it?

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Guest Speaker: Dr Charlie Tweed
With the traditional publications still defining many academic careers, it becomes a challenging task for researchers working with practice-based methods. Luckily, the emergence of alternative platforms for dissemination makes this task more attainable and relevant to various non-conventional outputs. This session explores the possibilities and challenges of practice-based focused online journals and other platforms focusing on alternative forms of research-based in creative methods.

Catch-Up: New Civic Imaginaries (#1) Maria Sanchez and Anna Francis

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New Civic Imaginaries proposes a shared civil space of ideas that “belong” to society rather than to the individual or the institution. The presentations, chaired by Becky Nunes,  collected here represent the fields of research that faculty of the School of DTA at Staffordshire University are currently engaged with.

In this session:

  • Wednesday 2 February 2022. 3.30-5.00 p.m
  • Dr. Maria Martinez Sanchez: The Fun Palace: Architecture, Theatre and Cybernetics
  • Anna Francis: Towards a 100 year Plan
DTA_SEMINAR1Download

Upcoming Event: How Culture 3.0 is your city?

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Carola Boehm: My #Culture30Walks – How Culture 3.0 is your city?

 

Summary:

Even before the pandemic the UK, along with many other countries, has seen a shift in  how we want to value the way we engage in cultural activities, culminating in the Arts Council England’s 10-year strategy of “Let’s Create”, firmly focussing on supporting access of communities and individuals to cultural production.

For Carola Boehm, a self-described musician-tech-academic, Luigi Sacco’s concept of Culture 3.0 is a key one, characterised by ‘everyday creativity’,  co-creation, open platforms, ubiquitously available production tools and individuals constantly shifting and renegotiating their roles between producing and consuming content. This ‘doing away’ with gatekeeping systems supports access, diversity and is evidenced to simply make all our lives healthier, happier, more creative and more resilient.

In testing that notion, she took some walks and documented them in a few twitter threads. These culture30 walks aimed at making visible how places that have attended specifically to cultural policy have almost unknowingly enhanced the everyday creativity that one encounters on a simple 30 minute walk to work. One by one, a #culture30walk told her a story of how culture30 a city really was.

On February 9th, 7pm (UK time) she will explore this with thewalking artist community as part of the Walk – Listen – Cafe (https://walklistencreate.org/category/walk-listen-cafe/?post_type=walkingevent), discussing how this Culture 3.0 concept interfaces with those of the walking artist community.  

The curated twitter thread from 2019 can be still seen at #Culture30walk 

Catch-Up: Art/Practice-Based Research Seminar Series #4 – Methodological quagmires in the post-disciplinary era

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Art/Practice-Based Research Seminar Series
(led by Agata Lulkowska at Staffordshire University)

Catch up on past events in this series, a place for inspiring discussions about art/practice-based research and methods. More details of the whole series: https://www.agatalulkowska.com/seminar-series

  • Session 4: Methodological quagmires in the post-disciplinary era
  • 19th January | 15:30-17:00
  • Guest speaker: Prof. Carola Boehm 

Although Practice-as-Research has been welcomed in the academic communities, it often finds itself in positions needing to justify its effectiveness. The resistance to new methodologies is common when looking at the evolution of interdisciplinary research enquiry, and practice-as-research is often inter- or even trans-disciplinary in its nature and thus encounters the age-old divide between those methodologies supporting theoretical enquiries and those supporting practically oriented lines of enquiry. And as our knowledge domains grew, this left additional tensions in the choice or acceptance of research methodologies. My presentation will foreground this in the context of ever-growing knowledge domains that are in need of new methodological developments.

Catch-Up: Art/Practice-Based Research Seminar Series #3 – Creative methods

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Art/Practice-Based Research Seminar Series
(led by Agata Lulkowska at Staffordshire University)

Catch up on past events in this series, a place for inspiring discussions about art/practice-based research and methods. More details of the whole series: https://www.agatalulkowska.com/seminar-series

  • Session 3: Creative methods
  • 15th December | 15:30-17:00
  • Guest speaker: Nicole Brown, UCL

This session explores the wide range of creative methods which could be applied to practice-based research. It reflects on the processes to choose the most relevant methodology, practical application of some, processes, and the implications.

Upcoming Profs in the Pav with Ian Brown

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Celebrity and the Attention Economy: how popular culture can commodify an audience’s attention

 

Event

 

Professor Ian Brown will base his presentation on a series of artworks produced as part of artists’ group Common Culture (Ian Brown, David Campbell, Mark Durden). The work uses appropriation and the ready-made to engage audiences in a critical assessment of a celebrity culture which functions by commodifying its audience’s attention, leading to questions on its cultural and social value.

OMG I love common culture !!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️  and ME, The Total Show were made in response to an American internet celebrity who capitalized on the intimate relationship he had built with his online followers by trademarking the name ‘Common Culture’ to brand, promote and sell a range of products.  The Die Raum gallery was turned into a Common Culture shopfront, with logo, weblink and an accumulation of graphic stickers based on the online posts of the celebrity’s fan base. The Rampa gallery collates appropriated and translated material into an enclosed interior space for consumption. The two exhibitions involve a parodic mimicry of the internet celebrity’s commodification of his audience, himself and his products. This explores how the aesthetics, interactions and transactional intimacy built by internet personalities are ruthlessly deployed to convert followers into consumers and attention capital. 

OMG I love common culture!!!!♥♥♥♥ Die Raum, Berlin, Germany. 29th Feb — 19th April 2020 

Gallery Website: http://www.dieraum.net/index.php?/exhibitions/2020-0045-common-culture/

ME, The Total Show Rampa, Porto, Portugal 30th April – 29th May 2021

Gallery Website: https://www.rampa.pt/event/me-the-total-show/

Catch-Up: Art/Practice-Based Research Seminar Series #2 – Creative Process meets academic rigour

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Art/Practice-Based Research Seminar Series
(led by Agata Lulkowska at Staffordshire University)

Catch up on past events in this series, a place for inspiring discussions about art/practice-based research and methods. More details of the whole series: https://www.agatalulkowska.com/seminar-series

  • Session 2 – Creative Process meets academic rigour
  • 24th November | 15:30- 17:00
  • Guest speaker: Assoc. Prof Michael Branthwaite 

This session will explore the questions of the process – how do you approach creative methods in art/practice-based research? What are the priorities and how to maintain the right balance between creative freedom and academic rigour.

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Upcoming Industrial Crafts Research Symposium

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Staffordshire University’s Professor Neil Brownsword is presenting at the upcoming virtual event:

The Industrial Crafts Research Network’s two-day inaugural symposium,

Exhibiting Skill: Understanding, Documenting, and Communicating Skilled Practices of Historical Industrial Environments.

Registration for this symposium can be found here.

Poster and  Programme downloadable here.