In this one-year project I will examine the contemporary ritual of the memorial silence as sound-led theatre. I will explore a range of research themes relating to the function of sound and aurality in theatre by holding a series of 3 flashmob events, in which participants perform memorial silences. These performances will provide dramaturgical material for a second stage of practical studio-based scenographic experimentation with silent theatre. A third stage will involve the preparation of a podcast and DVD that will represent the research process and results. Outcomes will be informed by peer review in Prague and the USA as well as in the UK.\n\nMy project will examine the conventions and taboos of silence in theatre performance through scenographic experiment on the theme of memorial silence as theatre. Research questions include:\n\n How does uncontrolled environmental noise relate to perception of meaning and sense of presence in performance?\n\n To what extent is such noise 'materially anecdotal'/that is, reminiscent, as well as constitutive, of time, place, and culture?\n\n How can abstract concepts such as the acts of honouring or memorialising be juxtaposed with noise as a performance text? \n\n What are the possibilities for creating a scenography of remembrance? \n\n How can noise in the theatre be made to operate as (Cageian) musical underscoring?\n \nIn theatre, the convention of silent listening is such that noise from 'outside the frame' (talking, coughing, sirens, traffic or telephones) remains anathema. Its effects are so disruptive and undesirable that they are not seen as a legitimate area of inquiry. Thus theatre sound design has focused on the composition and control of the soundscape and, in effect, the masking of native noise. This is despite the fact that musicologists since John Cage have recognised incidental noise (within demarcated periods of silence) as music.\n\nThe ritual of the memorial silence has a long history but has increasingly become part of the post-9/11 zeitgeist. The occasions for mourning silence have changed significantly: crowds at sporting events now often perform a preludinal 'minute's silence' for a variety of reasons. In some cases these events have evolved into 'a minute's applause' in order to mask dissent. \n\nAs a participative ritual, the memorial silence has all of the elements of theatrical event. There is underlying or commonly understood text (a given time, designated site, duration and shared subject of memorial) and there are genre-based expectations of bodily behaviour and gesture. Often there are also costumes and props appropriate to the event. Previous work on this cultural practice by musicologists and historians has neglected the theatricality of memorial silence. My own exploration will seek to fill this gap, investigate new approaches to aural dramaturgy and support the development of a new field of inquiry into theatre noise. \n

This practice research examines how personal narrative and self-authored performance can generate nuanced understandings of male unaccompanied minor experiences within host and peer communities, by developing new performance strategies for creating theatre with, for and by this community. Due to their extreme experiences of survival 'without papers', these adolescents are often positioned in migration studies outside a Western paradigm of childhood, and are frequently misunderstood by host communities. Yet the voices of refugees are often absented from research, performance and public discourse, enacting forms of erasure and silencing. This practice research project considers how performance practices might reposition and/or destabilise hegemonic knowledge about young male refugees in order to restore agency and trouble the discourses of suspicion, distrust and victimhood that have become associated with asylum seekers in general, and male unaccompanied minors specifically. The practice elements of the project are centred around the development of a new piece of performance work with the theatre company I co-founded in 2015, Phosphoros Theatre, that works with a core company of actors who came to the UK unaccompanied. At the centre of my methodology is a collaborative approach that incorporates making and holding space for refugee artists. Much of this performance research considers the tense relationship between personal narrative, identity construction and political agency, as asylum stories become the basis for gaining legal recognition of refugee status. Adopting self-representation as a mode of inquiry, this research addresses and contests the fascination and desire for authentic refugee studies, truth telling and aesthetics of suffering. It seeks to establish empowering new forms of theatre making that enable a significant rethinking of male unaccompanied minor identity, developing new ways for refugee actors to interact with and articulate their lived experience, in a reframing of who gets to speak about forced migration, adolescence and vulnerability, in what way and how.

This project examines how theatres and museums are currently shaping public memory of difficult pasts through their staging of narratives and objects. Engaging directly with research partners and major cultural institutions, the project is a collaboration among the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of Minnesota, Cricoteka, Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor (Kraków), Teatre Lliure (Barcelona), ESMA Museum and Teatro Cervantes (Buenos Aires), Holocaust Research Institute, Jewish Museum London and Imperial War Museum's Holocaust Gallery. The primary aims are: (i) to analyse how public memory of 'difficult pasts' is being staged in contemporary theatre and museal practices; (ii) to chart how these practices are increasingly informed cross-institutionally; (iii) and to foster transnational collaboration and dialogue to enhance these practices. Through fieldwork (archival research, research visits to museums and theatres, interviews with curators and theatre makers), workshops, public talks, and an international symposium the project team will specifically analyse transnational case studies in Argentina, Lithuania, Poland, Spain and the UK, which will widely extend research on the distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies and more broadly through memory studies, history, Holocaust studies, cultural geography and modern languages. Argentina, Lithuania, Poland and Spain all share highly politicized and extremely divisive debates over their difficult pasts, specifically in relation to authoritarianism, fascism and communism. Theatres and museums have been key sites for these debates, which shape and broaden public memory. Over the past few decades, widespread attempts to expose or reinterpret the public memory of formerly taboo historical narratives have come to public concern through their staging in theatres and museums for live audiences. We have also selected project partners in the UK to establish transcultural research links that will broaden the remit and impact of the research. Staging difficult pasts, theatre makers have innovated narrative forms and reframed theatrical and artefactual objects, while museum curators have increasingly privileged the 'staging' of historical narratives over the display of objects, producing performative encounters as their primary object. Thus, the project's focus will both advance transnational research on the staging of difficult pasts through narrative and object, and the key points of intersection between theatres and museums and their shaping global memory discourses. Workshops, public talks and the symposium will bring together practitioners and scholars from theatre and performance studies, visual culture, museum and curator studies, history, Holocaust studies, cultural geography and modern languages. Through workshops, we aim to document and analyse current strategies and aims employed by leading theatre makers and curators. Inviting artists to collaborate with institutions outside of their own cultural spheres, we will foster transnational dialogue and provide the opportunities for innovation across cultural sectors. We are inviting theatres and museums to work across their traditional disciplinary boundaries to generate innovation and develop strategies that serve their public aims. Forms of dissemination will have an extensive audience. These include interdisciplinary edited collections, workshops, public talks, learning materials for university libraries, the Routledge Performance Archive and the Holocaust Research Institute, and a project website, and grey literature reports.

When the UK theatre industry begins to rebuild activity in the wake of COVID19, it will be critical that it furthers recent moves by policy makers and artists to challenge socio-economic inequality, now exacerbated in every part of society by the pandemic. This research, development and engagement fellowship will respond to a critical question in support of such a project: How might a re-orientation of class discourse within theatre scholarship inform future artistic practice and policy in the industry's efforts to challenge class discrimination in theatre and wider society? To address this question the fellowship will engage in a political analysis of the ways in which a broadly-conceived 'working-class subject' currently manifests in UK theatre practice, policy and scholarship. Existing research suggests that welcome new industry initiatives to widen working-class participation in the arts, and improve working-class representation within the theatre industry, will not be sufficient on their own to challenge the inequitable balance of cultural power as it currently stands. There is evidence that access to the theatre industry, at all entry points, remains reliant on assimilation into the existing (classed) cultural norms due to a long-standing ideological myth that working-class subjects are deficient in cultural capital. Consequently, the working-class origin artist struggles throughout their career with imposter syndrome and their agency to challenge cultural norms is limited by the existing rules of the game by which they must play, and their own lack of cultural confidence to do otherwise. In this way, cultural power and ideological (classed) norms remain undisturbed and continue to be propagated, regardless of demographic change. For this reason it is critical that the myth of working-class cultural deficit is made subject to analysis, exposure and challenge. This fellowship proposes that such a project must begin with an examination of the limitations of current manifestations of the working-class subject in theatre practice, policy and scholarship. The initial research will primarily be undertaken through sociological analysis of representations of the working-class subject in selected professional productions and participatory programmes. The research will additionally map the access, agency and authorship granted to working-class communities and participants within selected activity during 2022 - 23 of projects aimed to diversify and democratise artistic production. The above analysis will be driven by a sustained period of research into sociological studies of class and stratification, which the PI will use to kick-start a reorientation of class discourse within theatre studies away from its current focus on the most precarious working-class subjects towards consideration of a much broader spectrum of working-class identities. This research activity will seek to influence and invigorate sustained interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre artists and scholars from sociology, cultural policy and theatre studies through two symposia, a three-day conference and a special issue journal. This interdisciplinary scholarly research will also be further placed into dialogue with a wider field of artists, producers and policy makers from the theatre industry through three regional workshops that will be designed to enable industry professionals to engage with the research questions and insights from the project in relation to their own policies and practice. The aim of these workshops is to examine what the practical and material outcomes for projects and policy informed by these insights might be and where the insights of the research so far might be contested or developed.

Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) established in 1999, is a leading organisation delivering arts interventions in the criminal justice system in the UK. Unique in their interdisciplinary approaches, continually evolving models of practice, and sustained engagement with public understandings of the justice system, critical examinations of Rideout's practice are limited in performance studies and criminology. Their significance within the UK prison arts landscape offers scope for a series of creative public engagement activities and innovative research methodologies. This fellowship will take place over 24 months around the company's 25th year and critically engage with Rideout's body of work, paying specific attention to their interdisciplinary creative practice, provocation of public conversations around justice, and historical significance within the wider network of arts and criminal justice practitioners. Beyond a specific engagement with the company, this research will reorient research and practice agendas to focus on the political and aesthetic value of interdisciplinarity, a distinctive aspect of Rideout's work, arguing that this is a productive and under-utilised strategy to both critically and artistically explore the complexities of prison sites and experiences of incarceration. In focusing on interdisciplinarity, this theatre based project will foster collaborations with scholars and practitioners in music, dance, and neuroscience to explore how these different modes of work and critical perspectives (when held alongside performance) might open up new understandings of incarceration both within and beyond the field of prison theatre. Finally, the research will investigate the complexities of, and propose specific approaches to, archiving the work of prison theatre organisations at a time when there is a growing interest in the histories of established arts and criminal justice companies in the UK. This project will ask 1) How has the work of Rideout Creative Arts for Rehabilitation contributed to and shaped prison arts practices, public understandings of justice, and policy reform in the UK over the past 25 years?; 2) What new knowledges of carceral sites and understandings of incarceration can be produced from utilising an interdisciplinary approach in arts projects that engage people in prison?; 3) What strategies can archival practice offer to capture the acutely ephemeral nature of prison theatre practices and how might contemporary arts and criminal justice practitioners be supported to engage with the emergent histories of this field? The project will deploy several methodological approaches and deliver various collaborative activities. Interviews with the Rideout team, board members, artists and participants who have worked with the company, and other practitioners working in arts and criminal justice will create an oral history of Rideout. Collaboration with Bristol Theatre Collection will create a publicly accessible archive of the company's work which will be drawn on for this research. Three interdisciplinary Creative Residencies will be coordinated in collaboration with Rideout at partner prisons to explore how interdisciplinary approaches operate in their work. These residencies will be documented ethnographically in order to critically interrogate this model of creative practice. Finally, a practice-as-research approach will be taken to conduct a series of research-informed theatre workshops, delivered in collaboration with Rideout, for people with experience of prison to explore and dramatise Michel Foucault's foundational text on justice and imprisonment, Discipline and Punish. Rideout's extensive body of work and relatively long history provide significant opportunities for Bartley to enhance her capabilities in specific research practices (oral history and archival, Practice-as-Research, ethnography) that are gaining traction within arts and criminal justice settings.