Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

This research project will interrogate the work of black British women playwrights, charting their work in the National Theatre's Black Plays Archive over the past six decades. To achieve this, my research project will take an intersectional approach to reassessing their work. I will pose questions about how 'race', 'gender', 'class' and 'sexuality' intersect within their plays and interrogate what they are saying about British theatre and history. Michael Pearce claims that, 'Black British theatre is a barometer for a changing Britain' (Pearce, 2017); whilst I agree with this statement, I will investigate what black British women's theatre has to say about a changing Britain. British theatre is still dominated by androcentrism and 'whiteness'; this research aims to address this imbalance by exploring and celebrating the works of black British women. In order to carry out this research I will be looking at the different works of women in the Black Plays Archive, I will then chart how these works were perceived and welcomed on their conception, examining how 'race', 'gender', 'class' and 'sexuality' played out in both the plays and in their contemporary historical context. Next, I will reassess these works using a range of postcolonial theory, feminist theory and theatre criticism to reconfigure their significance in the BPA and - more broadly - in the schema of British history. I also aim to focus on how black women's histories have been narrativised in Britain and ask: how do we define and look at these playwrights and their works? Ultimately, this research hopes to address the historical imbalance of the past 60 years in British theatre, reassessing black women's contribution to British theatre by challenging the archival 'gaps' that have marginalised them in the histories of modern British theatre.

This collaborative doctoral project between Central and the BFI's Sight & Sound journal examines the long-term effects of racialised representations in UK film and TV production on first-generation migrants from the Caribbean. Employing documentary film as a practice-based methodology, it interrogates, through recorded oral histories and analysis of archival footage, the Black British experience and its media representation from the 1960s-present. The project's reparative method places, at the centre of its practice, the lived experience of media representation and its impact on identity formation for those who lived through the racialised landscape of post-war Britain. Its focus is on a 60-year period encapsulating immense social and cultural transformation for the Caribbean community, including independence from British rule and the 'Windrush' era of mass migration, both coinciding with the rapid expansion of the domestic TV market in the UK.

This project aims draw a complete and systematic picture of the theatrical life of the city of Newcastle and the surrounding Tyneside region from the perspectives of the audience members who experience it. It will aim to encompass every piece of theatre that takes place in the area during the six-month period of study-professional, amateur and commercial. The project will collect data on who is attending which sort of theatre, what motivates spectators to attend, what experiences they have while there, and in what ways these experiences and values are different for amateur, commercial and subsidized theatre. The project uses a tested combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media analysis to address these questions. While a number of theatre scholars have written about extraordinary performances and audience experiences, it is far more challenging to collect complete data on the more typical examples of theatergoing which, while not traditionally attracting as much scholarly interest, are the daily bread keeping the theatre afloat as an art form and an industry. By including a wide variety of theatrical forms and focusing on audience's experiences, this project will help contribute to a much more nuanced and useful understanding of the role that theatre can play in contemporary British society. The findings will be useful to theatre makers who wish to better serve their audiences, but they will also assist in advocacy for increased financial support for the arts and, in particular, to show how the function of subsided, professional theatre is not one that can be replaced by its amateur or commercial counterparts . The project will work with the Empty Space, a key collaborative hub in Newcastle, and former Arts Council England North East executive director Mark Robinson of the think tank Mission Models Money to ensure that the results of our investigation are made available in an accessible, clear and useful way to the Tyneside theatre community, policymakers and the general public. This project draws its methods from the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP), a group of theatre sociologists from seven European countries. STEP has developed methods and metrics to collect this data on theatre and audience experience, and has refined and tested them in a number of smaller European cities. Thus far, comprehensive data has been gathered on Groningen, the Netherlands; Aarhus, Denmark; Berne, Switzerland; Maribor, Slovenia; Tartu, Estonia; and Debrecen, Hungary. Both the Principal Investigator and the lead Research Assistant have experience working with STEP and its methods, which are based primarily on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Dutch theatre scholar Hans van Maanen. STEP has been devising, testing, and refining its theory and methods since 2005. Common techniques and measures will facilitate comparisons both between different sorts of theatre within Tyneside, and between Tyneside and its continental cousins. Such a comparison will clarify what is distinctive about British theatre culture-not just in terms of its aesthetics, but in terms of the function it serves for its audience and the larger society around it.

This project begins by asking an age-old question in a new context. The question is of how an actor is to be convincing. It has vexed and provoked actor training since at least Stanislavski, and the question has been around much longer. I will be asking the question in a new context, that of clowning.\n\nThe main objectives are to examine the techniques and tools of performance available to the contemporary clown. And thence, to explore how clowning can move on as a key performance technique in the 21st century.\n\nI will be concerned with three broad areas which, in my view, are in need of investigation. They are:\n\n1. Techniques of 'presence' in contemporary clown (self-ridicule, failure, contrariness, profanation)\n2. The 'rules' of clowning\n3. The relationship between clowning and acting\n\nIn the last half century, clowning has undergone a major transformation. Since Jacques Lecoq founded his Paris school in the late 1950s the search for, and discovery of, one's personal clown has become an invaluable tool for the performer. Simply put, the personal clown is 'discovered' when we accept our failure in front of an audience, our clown appears, and as a consequence the audience laughs. \n\nContemporary clown practitioners have taken this basic tenet and developed it in a variety of directions, some seeking spiritual truth, others greater laughs, others self-discovery, others political activism. We now have clowning for business people, clown-analysis and clown-shamans. \n\nHowever, there still remains a gulf between the clown world and the theatrical world in general. On the one hand, clowns have ventured little into traditionally theatrical territory, such as text, long narrative, or 'serious' themes. On the other hand, mainstream theatre knows little of the discoveries made by clowning, particularly in actor training. In addition, clowns themselves have not so far engaged in disseminating or reflecting on their techniques, nor have academics or critics given much attention to these matters.\n\nIn my own work over the last 20 years as a clown-actor-performer, I have consistently been attracted to the boundary between clowning and theatre, drawing upon my experience in theatre, circus, variety and street performance. In Macbez (1999), for example, my aim was to re-write Shakespeare's Macbeth, using clown gags, but without losing any of the 'weightiness' of the play, avoiding parody at all times.\n\nI am not suggesting that all clowns should do Shakespeare, or that all actors should be ridiculous, but there are many profitable lessons to be learned by looking at clowning within the context of theatre in general.\n\nIn order to explore these issues, this research project will be organised as an ongoing series of workshops, or 'clown laboratory' at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Because most of the cutting-edge work in this field is developing in mainland Europe, I shall also spend time at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona (ECB). CSSD is historically a place of training for stage actors; ECB trains clowns. The research project therefore provides the opportunity to build institutional partnerships across national borders and to bring innovative European work into the mainstream of British clown studies. \n\nBeginning with looking at how clowns and actors achieve 'presence', we will aim to arrive at asking the questions: Where is the boundary between clown and theatre? Is there one? If not, why are they divided? What has created this division? What forms of theatre would emerge when this division is disregarded or dissolved? \nThe results of these investigations will be made public through performances given each year of the project, designed to test and share the work with both the general public and other clown practitioners. Results will also appear in the form of articles, the beginnings of a future book on the subject.