Welcome to the second research newsletter of the Department of Theatre and Performance!
Alexa Reid recently took part in a residency at the Birth Rites Collection Summer School. Birth Rites is a collection of contemporary art currently housed at the University of Kent focusing on childbirth. During this residency Alexa developed a response to the collection through a series of film sketches/performances to camera, and animations, including The Coronation (July 2023 – still from film below), Kneading (July 2023), and Lechon (July 2023.) These exercises for camera examine aspects of the far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis that is ‘Matrescence – the time of mother-becoming’, coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael.
Over the last year Alexa has been fostering relationships with the Midwifery department at Kings College London, Croydon University Hospital Midwifery Services, and the Royal College of Midwives Museum and Archives housed at The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, with the aim to develop a series of interdisciplinary works that examine matrescence, birth, and the relationship between mother and midwife. Alexa is hoping to spend some time within a clinical antenatal team in the coming months as part of the development phase of this project.
Philippa Burt has an article published in the 200th issue of New Theatre Quarterly: ‘Edward Gordon Craig as Director-Dictator’ (November 2024). The article examines the work of the iconoclastic theatre director, Edward Gordon Craig. In particular, it examines his School for the Art of the Theatre, which he ran in Florence from 1913 to 1914 and show how, through its organisation and curriculum, Craig used the school to establish a group of obedient followers who were highly disciplined and willing to follow his every command. Further, it considers the School’s practice in relation to Craig’s work in and out of the theatre and his political views to consider why he prized discipline above all else. With regard to the latter, the article reveals, for the first time, his intense misogyny and celebration of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how this informed his school scheme and was informed by it. The article also draws on extensive archival research, much of which has not been published previously, including research undertaken during my month-long residency at UCLA in February 2024.
Clare Finburgh Delijani will be presenting her latest project, Green Negritude, at a major conference on Aimé Césaire in Martinique in November 2024. Founded in the 1930s and lasting until the 1950s, negritude was a cultural and social movement initiated by French Caribbean and African thinkers & artists. A rallying cry, it championed the self-affirmation of Black heritage and creativity and their contribution to civilisation outside the validation of dominant European colonial culture.
Clare’s new project proposes how, in addition to their activist protest against racial injustice, negritude writers imagined different ways of relating humans and the environment. She vindicates what she calls ‘green negritude’, by foregrounding the movement’s proto-ecological sensibilities. In May 2025 Clare’s Green Negritude project, for which she is applying for a major funding award, will bring together leading intellectuals and performanceartists from the emerging area of decolonial ecology, for a workshop at the University of Oxford which will examine the lasting impact of the negritude movement on ecological thinking today.
Natalie Katsou is a lecturer in Law and in Theatre and Performance. She is currently working on her postdoctoral research ‘Performing Asylum: Embodiment and the law in the UK and in Greece’, jointly hosted by the Law and Theatre and Performance departments under the mentorship of Prof. Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos and Prof. Clare Finburgh-Delijani, respectively. In 2023-24, she was the recipient of the Postdoctoral Bridging Award at Goldsmiths. Natalie has secured a partnership with the Immigration Law team at Garden Court Chambers for her research, and recent conference papers that were presented over the summer include: ‘Witnessing the passage: How can embodied practices influence legal frameworks in refuge and asylum seeking in Greece and in the UK’ (International Federation for Theatre Research, 2024); ‘The stage of the law. Illegal Migration Act and the practice of asylum hearings in the UK’ (Canadian Association for Theatre Research, 2024); and ‘Spectral readings on spectral figures in theatre. Trace, memories and writing as performing in contemporary Greek plays’ (Derrida Today Conference, 2024).
Marie-Gabrielle Rotie created Blodeuwedd: she’s neither owls nor flowers an installation / performance, as part of an event The Visitations, co-produced with Stella Pearce, and bringing together seven distinct intergenerational performers (aged between 22 to 89) exploring Butoh and ‘beyond’.
During the Covid pande
mic in 2020, I bonded with a Barn Owl that visited my garden, dusk and twilight, seeming to act as a mythological guide and witness to the traumatic unravelling of a marriage. Incarnating the Welsh mythical Blodeuwedd, man-made of flowers but turned into an owl, became the channel to heal wounds in acts of alchemical transformation. Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967) based on the myth of Blodeuwedd, and Remedios Varos painting Creation of the Birds (1958), where the main figure is both alchemist witch-owl-birdand creative artist, are points of reference. My research situates at the intersection of corporeal feminism (Grosz) with the transformat
ive visceral force of the abject (Kristeva), and searches for an embodied meeting of the material and the immaterial, through the intermediary of the mythological ‘feminine’.
Also, I was movement choreographer on Robert Eggers’s upcoming film Nosferatu, with a UK release date on 3 January 2025. You can find recent Press mentions of my choreography for Lily Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard HERE, HERE and HERE
In the spring of 2024, Fiona Graham collaborated again with Alleyne Dance Company as research dramaturg on All Too Well for Tiroler Landestheater in Austria. She is currently writing Becoming Dramaturg: Possibilities for an Ethical and Expanded Practice for publication with Bloomsbury in 2026. This work will be informed by current practice research projects with Professor Carol Brown (Melbourne University) and Dr Kate Hunter (Deakin University).
Adam Alston is continuing work on the Staging Decadence project. His latest book, Staging Decadence: Theatre, Performance, and the Ends of Capitalism (Bloomsbury 2023), won the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s David Bradby Monograph Prize in September 2024, and in January this year he published an anthology of dramatic literature, Decadent Plays: 1890-1930 (Bloomsbury 2024), which was co-edited with Professor Jane Desmarais (ECW). He is currently working on an article exploring the ‘decadent scenography’ of the visual artist Angel Rose Denman. In the spring, he curated a Friday Late cabaret at the V&A exploring ‘decadent costume’ in collaboration with Veronica Isaac (University of Brighton): a night of gangrenous glamour and fabulous filigree featuring live performances from Hasard Le Sin, Jolie Papillon, Lilly Snatchdragon, E. M. Parry, Sadie Sinner, and Nando Messias, and films by Angel Rose Denman and jaamil olawale Kosoko (rehearsal shot below). In November, he also acted as co-producer and dramaturg on a night of decadence and debauchery at The Box club in Soho, working in collaboration with the obscenely delightful performer Rose Wood.
Staging Decadence rehearsal shot at the V&A, April 2024.
Rachael Newberry has a new chapter coming out in a collection edited by Ugur Ada, British Theatre and Young People: Theory and Performance in 21st Century (Routledge 2025), titled: ‘“It’s just the persuading bit”: Children, performance and climate change in the UK’. The chapter considers the relationship between environmental and ecological performance, and its engagement with, and relationship to, young people in the UK. Taking as a starting point the dearth of young voices in conventional climate-related theatre, she looks at three specific case studies to propose a reimagining of the collaborative process. Focusing on works by Cornelia Parker, Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari, and the educational theatre company Cap-a-Pie, Newberry explores ways in which the creative industries might harness the child-like qualities of playfulness, imagination and incorruptibility, to propose a more optimistic future for climate activism and creative awareness. In the face of the global climate crisis, the question we might ask is, how might children offer an opportunity for us to think differently, without being cast as our saviours or rescuers from impending climate chaos.
Over the past year, Molly McPhee launched a ‘Nightingale Collective’, bringing together more than twenty theatre practitioners, health and justice professionals, and policymakers in London and Birmingham. Molly and her key collaborators, Zeddie Lawal of More Than a Moment: Action With & For Black Creatives, and anthropologist of public health Dr Megan Clinch (QMUL), held a series of ECRF-funded R&D workshops to determine how the Nightingale Collective will respond to the ways in which the UK Government compels theatres to co-deliver health and wellbeing, as well as justice, initiatives– often with minimal resources attached (e.g. social prescribing). The Nightingale Collective’s workshops focused on developing what we are calling ‘postprophetic worldbuilding’ within theatres as places for acting otherwise civically against seepages of dominant structures predicated on inequities; and what a possible ‘Nightingale Theatre’ of the future might look like and entail. Molly, Zeddie and Megan presented on this work at the Performance Studies international conference in June 2024, and have had two papers accepted for publication in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space and TDR: The Drama Review in 2025. Additionally, Molly has been working on a national roll-out for ‘Stages’, a human rights-led theatre in education project. Stages takes as its starting point the 10 Stages of Genocide, offering creative and participatory experiences to expand understanding of the long temporalities of injustice as a process that proceeds in increments. Stages has now launched following an extensive period of collaboration with children, artists and teachers in the Hastings & Rother area.
The Lowry hosted court hearings as an Ministry of Justice Nightingale Court during the pandemic.
At the end of September, Robert Gordon ran Representing Histories: the Past in/of Musical Theatre. It was a successful conference, with fifty participants and a number of Goldsmiths staff and alumni participating, with three workshops on voice and new musicals by MA Muscial Theatre Associate Lecturers (Amir Shoenfield and Caitlyn Burt) as well as much-valued alumni. Olaf Jubin chaired two group panels on German- and English-language musical theatre as well as presenting a paper. Olaf also delivered an invited paper on Tim Rice at the Songs or Poetry for Music conference at IULM University in Milan, at which Robert delivered an invited paper on Sondheim. Robert also submitted the final typescript of his book The Theatre of Kander and Ebb to Methuen, six months after it received a very positive peer reviewer’s report.
Katja Hilevaara continues to work on The Finch Girl Project. She has just submitted a co-written chapter, ‘Flying with the Bird Mothers: The Curious Story of a Girl with A Bird in Her Mouth’ with Emily Orley, for an anthology, Mothers, Mothering, Land and Nature, to be published by Demeter Press in 2025.
This chapter has been created through a collaborative writing exercise in which we experiment with a method of call-and-response exploring ideas to do with motherhood, raising girls, and biopolitical symbiosis. We engage with fabulation as a strategy to decentre the idea of human exceptionalism. Reimagining the Finch Girl story we challenge ways of thinking that come from an anthropocentric world view, and instead open out to the possibility of multiple parallel modes of existence of which the finch is an example of. We do this to not only recognise our ignorance of different ways of inhabiting and perceiving the world, but also to acknowledgethat human-centric knowledge enfolds dangerous and problematic ‘givens’ which are ingrained in the narratives that have shaped us: the patriarchal, the progress-oriented, the linear, the heteronormative, the hierarchical, the racial, the white, the colonial. Katja also submitted a funding bid for the Goldsmiths ECRF in order to scope out collaborators and develop partnerships for The Finch Girl Project in preparation for an AHRC Catalyst bid next summer.
Gabriel Díaz, a member of our PGR community, presented at Integral Voice: VASTA’s 2024 Leeds Symposium in October this year at Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University. The symposium addressed key questions surrounding the future of voice practice. Gabriel led participants in an exploration of how testimonies and voice can transform the understanding of migration. By challenging and reshaping dominant narratives through theatre and performance, the session invited attendees to consider the political, institutional, and ethical dimensions of voice in creating stories that echo the complex realities of contemporary migration. See: https://vasta.events/integral-voice/
As a 
ance was the first in Europe to be written in the vernacular as opposed to Latin. It has provided the English language with the medieval word farce, the early-modern word role, and the modern term mise en scène. Molière is single handedly responsible for launching European-style playwriting in North Africa. Today, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that it’s harder to get tickets for the Festival d’Avignon, one of the world’s largest theatre festivals, than for the Rolling Stones’ farewell tour.
A team of disabled and neurodiverse performers presented a rehearsed reading of a segment of the show, followed by contributions from a panel of neurodiverse artists: designer Emma Melati Wee, choreographer Emily Orme and director Matthew Xia.
– that featured live performances from Sadie Sinner, Miss HerNia, and Hasard Le Sin, a performance lecture by Adam, an exhibition of decadent costume by Julia Bardsley, and specially-commissioned screenings by jaamil olawale kosoko, Toco Nikaido, and Angel Rose.
The play, featuring five Chilean artists residing in Europe, aims to bridge the distance and reconnect with their native land. Through authentic testimonies and documents, the production provides a closeup of Latin American resistance and its worldwide impact.
ndow? On Defining “Lived Experience” in Cinema’ in August this year.
Over the summer, she collaborated with colleagues in Psychology and Computing, together with Siobhan Davies Dance, to produce the ERC-funded 
