Tag Archives: TDPT Blog

TDPT Issue 12.2 – Independent Dance and Movement Training, Now Published

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What is independence? Independent from what or whom? And what is training, learning and knowing?

These questions have formed the basis of our approach to this issue. Seemingly simple, these questions have been at the heart of Independent Dance’s work since 1984, when the organisation emerged out of informal collaborations between artists seeking a common ground to share training opportunities across dance forms. Remaining artist-led ever since, ID is preoccupied with supporting learning through dance, and with articulating what that might mean, and for whom.

We were therefore delighted to accept the invitation to guest-edit Theatre, Dance and Performance Training and have aimed to carry these threads throughout. We were also keen to reach beyond the boundaries of our own context and traverse borders between fields and forms. While ID has historically been associated with somatic practices, the range of practices featured in this issue is true both to the original intention of ID to support a very wide breadth of forms, and to our current commitment to supporting research across forms of dance, with questioning and open-ended curiosity being key ingredients, rather than an emphasis on product or aesthetic.

Through an international call-out, we invited proposals illuminating as broad a range of perspectives as possible, exploring how artists create, practice, and develop independent training forms, and what current practitioners consider relevant.

The resulting issue, published in July 2021, includes contributions ranging from articles to one-page ‘postcards’, by the following artists and writers: ‘Funmi Adewole, Casey Avaunt, Katrina Brown, Laura Cervi, Guy Dartnell, Thomasin Gülgeç, Stefan Jovanović, Lliane Loots, Simone Kenyon, Georgia Paizi, Helen Poynor / Hilary Kneale / Paula Kramer, Aswathy Rajan, Carolyn Roy, Stephanie Sachsenmaier, Niamh Dowling / Miranda Tufnell / Lucia Walker, Rebecca Weber, Simon Whitehead. It concludes with an obituary for Nancy Stark Smith written by Colleen Bartley.

The editors have selected the following two articles to be free to access until the end of October:

‘The dance artistry of Diane Alison-Mitchell and Paradigmz: Accounting for professional practice between 1993 and 2003’ by ’Funmi Adewole

‘Impermeable bodies: Women who lion dance in Boston’s Chinatown’ by Casey Avaunt

Contents:

Editorial — Henrietta Hale, Nikki Tomlinson, Gitta Wigro & Sara Reed

The Companionship Scores — Carolyn Roy (Article)

Impermeable bodies: Women who lion dance in Boston’s Chinatown — Casey Avaunt (Article — free to access in September and October 2021)

‘Critical Pathways’ – Training and Investigating the Art of Choreography-Making with Rosemary Butcher — Stefanie Gabriele Sachsenmaier (Article)

Decolonising dance pedagogy? Ruminations on contemporary dance training and teaching in South Africa set against the specters of colonisation and apartheid — Lliane Loots (Article)

Tik Tok and generation Z — Laura Cervi (Essai)

“From ‘Guru-mukha’ to Contemporaneity”: metamorphosing divergent trajectories of Mohiniyattam pedagogy and performativity — Aswathy Rajan (Article)

Standing — Thomasin Gülgeç (postcard)

Getting into your head: social distancing and the intimacy of audio-only movement sessions on earpods — Georgia Paizi (postcard)

.Behind from Appears Noticing — Katrina Brown (postcard)

Post card from an insider artist — Guy Dartnell (postcard)

Journeying towards multitudinous bodies: working with body weather practices through the creation of Into the Mountain — Simone Kenyon (Essai)

Walk of Life Training in Non-stylised and Environmental Movement — Helen Poynor, Paula Kramer & Hilary Kneale (Article)

The dance artistry of Diane Alison-Mitchell and Paradigmz: Accounting for professional practice between 1993 and 2003’ — Funmi Adewole (Article — free to access in September and October 2021)

Holding the edge: between embodied trauma and choreographic learning — Stefan Jovanović (Essai)

Shared discoveries in theatre and dance — Niamh Dowling, Miranda Tufnell & Lucia Walker (Article)

Locator — Simon Whitehead (Essai)

Social (distance) dancing during covid with project trans(m)it — Rebecca Weber (Essai)

Nancy Stark Smith February 11, 1952 – May 1, 2020. Dancer, Teacher, Writer, Curator, Editor, Phenomenon — Colleen Bartley (Obituary)

Notes on Contributors:

Guest editors, special issue

Henrietta Hale is co-director of Independent Dance (ID) since 2018, leading the curation of an artist-led, dance development and research organisation. She has a 25 year dance artist practice, most significantly as founder member of collective Dog Kennel Hill Project since 2004, creating performance research across theatre, gallery, screen and unusual sites, within a range of producing partnerships such as Whitechapel Gallery, Dance Umbrella, and Brighton CCA. Roles as a dancer/collaborator include Ricochet Dance Productions and Rosemary Lee projects and movement direction with visual artists. She has taught regularly in higher education contexts, significantly, Trinity Laban (2002 − 2013).

Nikki Tomlinson is a producer and dramaturg with a background in curation and performance-making. Over the past 20 years she has developed interests in performance, participation, social justice and interdisciplinarity, advocacy for and with artists and widening access in every sense to experimental work. Her previous roles include Lead Artist Advisor/Producer at Artsadmin, Programme Manager and later co-chair of Chisenhale Dance Space, ESOL Course Leader and Refugee Advisor at Hackney Community College. She joined Independent Dance as co-director in March 2020. Alongside her role with ID she is a Trustee of Home Live Art and continues to work freelance across the UK and internationally.

Sara Reed is an independent academic, researcher, writer, project manager and a qualified Feldenkrais practitioner. With a career that has spanned a wide range of dance, performance, arts and education contexts, she has published widely in the area of embodied-movement, dance, somatic practices and pedagogy. Her experience includes interdisciplinary teaching across art forms. Sara is an Associate Editor for TDPT Training Grounds and on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices and Dance, Movement & Spiritualties. She is Co-chair for Independent Dance and a trustee for Wriggle Dance Theatre – for children and families.

Gitta Wigro is a former co-director of Independent Dance. She is a freelance dance film programmer and curator, and part of the team behind the MA Screendance at London Contemporary Dance School. She has worked in artist and artform development at The Place, Arts Council England, and Independent Dance, as well as in freelance roles. As a dance film specialist, she has worked with many international festivals, including Leeds International Film Festival (UK), COORPI (IT), Festival Quartiers Danses (CA) Dance Umbrella (UK), among many others. She co-ordinates the International Screendance Calendar and other resources to support the dance film field.

The editors

Jonathan Pitches is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Leeds and Head of School of Performance and Cultural Industries. He specialises in the study of performer training and has wider interests in intercultural performance, environmental performance and blended learning. He is founding co-editor of the TDPT and has published several books in this area: Vsevolod Meyerhold (2003), Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (2006/9), Russians in Britain (2012) and, Stanislavsky in the World (with Dr Stefan Aquilina 2017). His most recent publications are: Great Stage Directors Vol 3: Komisarjevsky, Copeau Guthrie (sole editor, 2018) and the monograph, Performing Landscapes: Mountains (2020).

Libby Worth is Reader in Contemporary Performance Practices, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a movement practitioner with research interests in the Feldenkrais Method, physical theatres, site-based performance and in folk/traditional and amateur dance. Performances include co-devised duets; Step Feather Stitch (2012) and dance film Passing Between Folds (2017). She is co-editor of TDPT and published texts include Anna Halprin (2004, co-authored), Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist (2012, co-edited), Jasmin Vardimon’s Dance Theatre: Movement, Memory and Metaphor (2016). Chapter contributions include on clog and sword dancing for Time and Performer Training (2019, she co-edited) and ‘Improvisation in Dance and the Movement of Everyday Life’ for the Oxford Handbook of Dance Improvisation (2019).

Contributors

Funmi Adewole moved from Nigeria to Britain in 1994. She performed with African dance drama and physical theatre companies in Britain for several years before studying for a doctorate in Dance Studies. She is a senior lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Casey Avaunt is Assistant Professor of Dance in the Department of Performing Arts at Elon University. Her research interests include critical dance theory, Asian and Asian American performance, and the role of culture and gender in the production of choreography.

Colleen Bartley is an independent dance artist and improviser who lives with an invisible disability. She co-edited Contact Quarterly CI Newsletter (US) with NSS & co-organises London Contact Improvisation (UK). She holds a degree from Swarthmore College and a diploma from Laban Centre London. She teaches movement & dance and creates film and performance.

Laura Cervi is Serra-Hunter Lecturer at the Department of Journalism and Communication Sciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. PhD in Political Science from the University of Pavia (Italy) and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain). Journalist and amateur dancer. Her main research interest is media literacy and citizen participation.

Niamh Dowling is Head of School of Performance at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in London. Niamh trained with Monika Pagneux in Paris, Anne Bogart, Nancy Topf and Eva Karczag in New York and as a teacher of the Alexander Technique with Don Burton. She collaborated closely with Teatr Piesn Kozla in Poland for fifteen years. Niamh has been training in Systemic Constellations for 8 years, which has deeply influenced her practice and supported her holistic approach to education and performance training. Niamh is one of the practitioners on the online Routledge Performance Archive.

Stefan Jovanović is a queer-neurodivergent performance-maker who designs spaces and site-specific performances. His artistic practice embraces a maximalist aesthetic, creating speculative fabulations about future-forms of kinship and social healing. As a trained trauma therapist and architect, he incorporates spatial dramaturgy and philosophies of well-being into spaces of cultural production.

Simone Kenyon is an intra-disciplinary artist, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. For over twenty years she has developed a practice of expanded choreographies; encompassing movement, ecology, cultural geographies and walking arts to create participatory events for both urban and rural contexts. She is a current PhD researcher at the University of Leeds.

Hilary Kneale is an independent interdisciplinary artist, who works in collaboration with others from different fields. She is a published writer, movement practitioner, educator, guardian of Vision Quest, and healer, living within her own quest to remember the true nature of interrelatedness. Her work is widely body based and includes performance and ritual in the landscape, calling strongly to the ancient stories held deep within the earth. Having trained to embody, develop and teach practices with support of the work of Helen Poynor, and Northern Drum Shamanic Centre, she inhabits ways of opening the body, heart and mind, that reawaken the native soul.

Paula Kramer is an artist-researcher and movement artist based in Berlin. She holds an artistic PhD in Dance (Coventry University) and was a post-doctoral researcher at Uniarts Helsinki (2016–2019). Her work explores intermateriality through site-specific outdoor movement, rooted in Amerta Movement (Suryodarmo) and Non-stylised and Environmental Movement (Poynor). She collaborates with materials of many different orders as active agents in the creation of movement, performance and choreography; as well as daily life practices and sense-making. She publishes widely in the context of artistic research through bodily practices and is a board member of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices.

Lliane Loots holds the position of Dance Lecturer in the Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She completed her PhD in 2018 looking at contemporary dance histories on the African continent. As an artist/scholar her PhD research is framed within an ethnographic and autoethnographic paradigm with a focus on narrative as methodology. Loots founded Flatfoot Dance Company as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1994. As the artistic director for Flatfoot, she has travelled extensively within the African continent with her dance work.

Helen Poynor is an independent movement artist specialising in site-specific and autobiographical performance and cross-artform collaborations. She runs the Walk of Life training and workshop programmes in Non-stylised and Environmental Movement on the Jurassic coast in East Devon/West Dorset. Helen is acknowledged as a teacher by Anna Halprin and Suprapto Suryodarmo, with whom she trained. She is a mentor for established and emerging dancers and practitioners and a guest associate teacher with Tamalpa UK. Helen has contributed chapters and articles on her work to numerous dance publications including the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices. Helen is a registered dance movement therapist and somatic movement therapist. www.walkoflife.co.uk

Aswathy Rajan is a Lecturer in Dance at the International School of Creative Arts, Cochin, Kerala. She received BPA in Mohiniyattam from Kerala-Kalamandalam (2009) and MPA Dance from University of Hyderabad (2012) with First Rank. She qualified for UGC- Assistant Professor in Dance and started her Ph.D. as a UGC-JRF/SRF at the University of Hyderabad in 2020. During her Ph.D., she worked as a teaching assistant at the Dept. of Dance, UOH. She authored two books; “Dancethesis: An Amalgam of Dance perspectives” and “Aesthetics of Kuchipudi” besides writing several articles.

Carolyn Roy is a London based dancer who performs and teaches in the independent dance sector. Her work is concerned with attention, perception, being-with others and encountering our environment. Her current preoccupation is the political agency of dancing. She has recently completed a PhD at the University of Roehampton.

Stefanie Sachsenmaier (PhD Middlesex University, DEA Sorbonne Nlle, MA Goldsmiths College, SFHEA) is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Arts at Middlesex University and Programme Leader of BA Theatre Performance and Production. Her research centres on the processual in creative practice, with a particular interest in the ways that performance extends into the socio-political context. She co-edited Collaboration in Performance Practice (Palgrave 2016) and published a series of writings related to her long-term research with British choreographer Rosemary Butcher. She has a background as a performer and is an experienced practitioner of Wu Style tai chi chuan.

Miranda Tufnell is a dance artist, writer and teacher in movement and imagination and also an Alexander teacher and cranio-sacral therapist. She has been teaching and making performances for 40 years. Her work explores the ways movement shapes our sense of meaning, language and perception. With Chris Crickmay, she created a film Dance Without Steps and co-authored two handbooks on sourcing creative work: Body Space Image (1990) and A Widening Field (2004). She has worked extensively in the field of arts and health as documented in her most recent book, When I Open My Eyes – Dance Health Imagination (2017)

Lucia Walker has been teaching Alexander Technique internationally to both individuals and groups since 1987. She is also a movement artist and teacher specialising in contact improvisation and ‘instant’ composition, teaching and collaborating in dance, physical theatre, communication and movement research projects (Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative and Flatfoot Dance Company, South Africa, Rosetta Life, England). She works with a wide range of people including young people, people with chronic illness, professional musicians and singers. Working with performers is a particular interest and Lucia works regularly with classical musicians, singers, actors and dancers. She is also involved in Alexander Technique teacher training and assessment of readiness to teach Alexander Technique.

Rebecca Weber, PhD, MFA, MA, RSME/RSMT/RSDE, THE, FHEA is a Dance Studies lecturer at the University of Auckland. Co-director of Project Trans(m)it, director of Somanaut Dance, and editor for Dance, Movement, and Spiritualities, Weber’s research interests include: somatics, technology, choreography, cognition, and pedagogy.

Simon Whitehead is a movement artist and craniosacral therapist living in west Wales. Simon hosts the Locator workshop series and is a member of Maynard, an interdisciplinary artist collective that collaborate on a programme of engaged dance activity in the village of Abercych, working through on-going residencies, the village dance, workshops, local and international partnerships. As part of an AHRC-funded PhD(PaR), based at the University of Glasgow, he is currently exploring what posthuman ecology means with reference to an expanded choreography of touch.

The Practice Diaries Exchange: Call for Proposals

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In the last session of The Practice Diaries Exchange, we reflected on whether history matters to artists’ training or practice. We have received reflections from three diverse training practices – acting, improvisation, and martial arts. It is thought-provoking to hear varied voices on one topic! If you missed these inspiring articles, please check out the link https://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/category/the-practice-diaries-exchange/

The Practice Diaries Exchange is now launching a new topic for discussion. We welcome the proposal of questions from all artists, practitioners, researchers, students and blog readers who are interested in training or practicing processes of performing arts. The questions related to training/practice could come from your experiences, something you have been contemplating, or from a sudden creative idea. We welcome questions arising from or responding to the current pandemic era that has greatly influenced and/or changed artistic training/practices. However, questions are not limited to this suggestion. A proposal could include a short description to expand on the question.

Please send a proposal to the section editor, I-Ying Wu, at [email protected] before 10 December, 2020. The proposals that are not selected for this session could be scheduled to post in following sessions.

The Practice Diaries Exchange session 1: Call For Reflections

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The Practice Diaries Exchange will begin the first discussion session on the concept of training based on the question contributed by Prof. Mark Evans:

Does History Matter?

If I am training myself or undergoing training, does the history that underpins the exercises that I do matter to me or have any meaningful impact on the efficacy of the training? Training typically takes place ‘in the moment’ and the immediate experience of the exercises is often what seems to matter the most. But what about the background to those exercises, their provenance and ‘heritage’? Can exercises come with baggage – either ideological, gendered, colonial or otherwise? And if so, how do we as trainers and trainees address that baggage and deal with it?

This question reminds us of the significance of history, background, or heritage of training approaches as we often tend to focus on the immediate, perceptible experience during training. It inspires us to consider looking back to or remembering the foundational nature of training approaches that influence our training processes and the results. In our responses, let us go beyond dualistic appraisals with regards to advantages or disadvantages related to the question. Rather, as we train, it is worth pondering how we think of, and what we do with ‘heritage’ encompassed by a training practice, whilst also considering that the ‘heritage’ may have changed over time when a practice moves from one cultural realm to another.

Everyone who is interested in this topic is welcome to send reflections, responses or findings to the editor of the section, I-Ying Wu, at [email protected] any time before the session is closed on 31 July. The material can be in any forms such as writing, video, audio, or other creative forms that are suitable to present your ideas or arguments clearly on the blog.

The Practice Diaries Exchange – Call for Proposals

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The Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Blog has launched a new section, The Practice Diaries Exchange. The Exchange is a place to explore, discuss, debate and rethink the concept of training/practice in order to give weight to training/practice as a ‘deep-going’ process of cultivation that can lead to to profound understanding and realisation of embodied knowledge in performing arts. In order to create an open space where everyone may share their opinions, this section will run like a forum – calling for a question as a theme first and then collecting contributed articles for follow-up discussions. The question will serve as a stimulus to not only attract and invite various views from known or experienced knowledge but also to encourage people adopt a practice-as-research process for exploring the offered question.

To begin the first discussion session, we welcome the proposal of questions from all artists, practitioners, researchers, students and blog readers who are interested in training or practicing processes of performing arts. The questions related to training/practice could come from your experiences, something you have been contemplating, or from a sudden creative idea. If you are interested to raise a question for the first session, please send your proposal to the section editor, I-Ying Wu, at [email protected] before 29 April, 2019. A proposal could include a short description to expand on the question.

For more information about The Practice Diaries Exchange, please see the new page of the section.

The Practice Diaries Exchange

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Originating from ‘Answer the Question’ in the Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal, this new section, The Practice Diaries Exchange, offers a chance for all people who have experience or are interested in performing arts training, including practitioners, artists, researchers, students and readers to (re)think about, explore, and discuss issues related to practice/training. It aims to emphasise the significance of long-term training and practicing processes in the performing arts.

In order to enable people to have a common ground to share and exchange varied training experiences, The Practice Diaries Exchange focuses on topics related to concepts of “practice” in diverse backgrounds and contexts. The Exchange, will periodically raise particular themes such as: What is training? What is a practice or practicing? What does training/practicing mean to you? What is the most difficult in training/practicing? How do you face difficulties in practices? These discussions may expand into a myriad of creative questions that could begin artistic explorations or small practice-as-research projects. For instance, what would you want to ask or tell “Practice” if “Practice” was a person capable of responding to you? Similarly, how might “Practice” teach?

While the Exchange will hopefully provide useful discussion, answering a question does not imply the end of a discussion but rather marks the beginning of a new exploration in training/practice. The approach of practice as research tends to see research not only as a way to arrive at answers but also as a way to explore, a pathway to future enquiry. Practitioners may never find an answer that is forever right for some questions. They have to persist in questioning themselves so their training will continue. In other words, because there are always hidden aspects of meaning to uncover that differ from stage to stage of training, practitioners can never see the end of their practice, regardless of how long they have been practicing.

The Practice Diaries Exchange aims to serve as a global, interactive, and open space for knowledge exchange, exploration, and discussion in a fashion more akin to a forum than a one-way question-and-answer session. Blog readers are encouraged to suggest and present questions on this webpage. Similarly, all readers are welcome to respond to the questions in a range of ways which may not necessarily be in the form of an answer, but might take the form of thoughts, ideas, arguments, or even other questions that expand from the original one. Beyond being an open forum, invited guests will be asked to respond to specific themes so that readers can also learn valuable embodied knowledge from experienced practitioners.

Because we regard training/practice as a long-term, ongoing learning process, all readers from diverse cultural backgrounds, training approaches, fields, experiences, and training stages are equally valuable on this platform for knowledge exchange. Emerging artists and performing arts students are encouraged to use the questions proposed here in the Exchange as exercises or provocations for one’s own artistic research methodology, and to share their findings or arguments rather than try to arrive at “correct” answers. By means of inviting dialogue amongst varied artistic areas, training methods, cultural contexts and perspectives, and practice phases, we can expect that the ensuing multi-layered constructive debates and rethinking will lead to broader conceptualizations of training/practice as research. The Practice Diaries Exchange, with its emphasis on sharing embodied knowledge, holds the ethical premise of respecting the rich knowledge of masters, yet at the same time maintains equality by recognising that anyone could potentially be our teacher.

Every two months, The Practice Exchange Diaries will pose a question to initiate a discussion session. Prior to posting the question for each two-month period, the TDPT blog News Page will post a call to solicit proposals for the question to be discussed in the next session. A proposal could include a short description to expand on the question.

In addition to articles, contributors are encouraged to present their findings to merge various methods including text, speech, sounds, pictures, videos, actions, and other forms of documentation specific to their practice-as-research projects to illustrate innovative methods of training. Because the projects will be displayed on a website, please carefully consider how your ideas might be presented in ways that are suitable to displaying online.

To submit a proposal for a question or a response to a posed question to The Practice Diaries Exchange, please contact the section’s editor I-Ying Wu at [email protected]

New Blog Artist Awards

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Following the success of the first TDPT Blog Artist Awards, we are delighted to announce a call for a new round of these awards.

The first TDPT Blog Artist Awards were launched to help artists, practitioners, students and freelance performance-makers to engage with the blog.  We aimed to mitigate the financial barriers facing those who did not have the institutional support that university academics are accustomed to.

Accordingly, with the generous support of Routledge and the Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal, we were able to offer small pots of money (£50-150) to support artists who contributed to the site by investigating an area of performer training of interest to the wider community. Continue reading →

Welcome to New Blog Team Members

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Maria, Bryan and I are delighted to welcome three new members to the blog team.

Our new team members enhance the geographic diversity and the range of expertise of the existing team, broadening the blog’s diversity.  Our two new editors are Sarah Weston, a recent PhD graduate of the University of Leeds and I-Ying Wu, a self-employed artist and freelance researcher based in Taiwan and Canada who recently completed their PhD at the University of Northampton in the UK.  We also have a third new team member, Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, an advanced PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, who will be occupying an Assistant Editor role as she has just moved to the USA for a new post. Continue reading →

Reminder – Call for a co-editor of this Blog – Deadline 9 April

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Dear All,

Applications for a co-editor for the TDPT Blog close this Monday, 9 April.  Please apply or pass on to those who might be interested.

It might be particularly of interest to those Early Career Researchers looking to develop their networks of academics and practitioners.

Wee look forward to hearing from you!

Best Wishes,

James

View the original advertisement here

Call for a co-editor of this Blog

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We are currently seeking a new member to join the editorial team of the TDPT Blog, www.theatredanceperformancetraining.org.

Associated with the influential journal, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, published by Routledge, the blog’s interactive presence is designed to encourage a growing community of artists, academics, practitioners and researchers to share practice and debate issues that are currently alive within the disciplines of theatre, dance and performance training.

Now entering its third year, our blog has been highly successful in engaging new audiences for the TDPT journal, creating an online space that promotes spontaneous and productive conversation and debate. As we grow further it will represent a productive and discursive teaching ‘tool’ – or forum – within all levels of education and training preoccupied with dance, performance and theatre.

This opportunity will offer the chance to develop your own networks with scholars and practitioners, as well as contribute to the shape and direction of contemporary discussions on training.

We invite applications from researchers from any stage of their career, but especially Post-Graduate Research Students and Early Career Researchers who are actively seeking to develop their research and practice networks.  We also encourage those with an active interest in Practice-based research and/or Live Art, and those who have familiarity with editing audio-visual material.  As we are seeking to broaden our outlook and audience, we are interested to connect with scholars who reside outside England but above all we are looking for a team member who is highly organised, can work well in a team, and has a passion for the field of theatre, dance, and performance training.

The successful applicant will participate in regular Skype meetings with the Blog team to discuss the administration of the site and curation of posts.  They will also seek out new content from practitioners and scholars and liaise with these authors throughout the content-making process.  Such content may take the form of writing, photo essays, audio-visual files, and/or other innovative approaches. Applicants should be comfortable with editing and curating such content.

For further information, please contact blog editors, James McLaughlin, [email protected] (University of Greenwich), Bryan Brown, [email protected] (University of Exeter), or Maria Kapsali, [email protected] (University of Leeds).
To apply, please send a one-page statement of your relevant skills, interests and aspirations for the journal with an accompanying CV to James McLaughlin, [email protected] by Monday, 9 April, 2018.

TDPT Blog Artist Awards

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The TDPT blog was launched last year to encourage a growing community of artists, academics, practitioners and researchers to share practice and debate issues that are currently alive within the disciplines of theatre, dance and performance training. In November to mark the one year anniversary of the launch of the site we will be launching a series of blog posts supported by the new TDPT Blog Artist Awards.

One of our aims was to engage a new audience for the TDPT journal while also creating an online space that encourages spontaneous and productive conversation and debate. We are grateful to everyone who has posted their work on the site to date and we are looking to further grow our network of artists, researchers and performance-makers. The blog currently has around 1000 visitors a month from around the world.

We are keen to encourage artists, practitioners, students and freelance performance-makers to engage with the blog and are launching the TDPT Blog Artist Awards which aim to facilitate those not in full-time employment and students to be able to contribute to the site and the community. We have small pots of money (£50-150) to support artists who pitch an idea for a contribution to the site, either audio-visual, text-based or audio that disseminates an area of performer training that may be of interest to the wider community. To apply, please write a short proposal (no more than 300 words) outlining your suggested submission, format and any media you intend to use. You should also include in your statement how you intend to disseminate your post to your networks and help build new audiences for the blog.  Please email proposals to the blog editors: Maria Kapsali [email protected], Bryan Brown [email protected] and James McLaughlin [email protected].