The Performance Research Hub has small pots of up to £500 available to fund participatory events which explore co-creative and collaborative work in theatre and performance.
The Hub provides an arena for researchers and practitioners with shared interests within this field to come together to discuss the theory of performance and to cross-fertilise ideas and practice across a wide range of academic disciplines and communities. This programme of events links directly with the initiatives of the Performance Research Hub, enabling external artists and partners to work with academics to co-create, collaborate and share their research and work in new ways and with new and wider audiences.
For the Trinity Term round, the successful projects are:
B*TCH: An Evolutionary, Revolutionary Cabaret Collaboration
Lead applicant: Dr Frances Clemente, MML
A comedy cabaret event arising from meetings between Dr Frances Clemente, a researcher working on the animalisation of female characters in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Italian literature, Helen Arney, a science communicator and musical theatre writer specialising in women and STEM, and Lucy Cooke, a zoologist and author of Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution, and the Female Animal (2022). The sessions will lead to the creation of three musical theatre/comedy cabaret songs about the female animal kingdom, debunking myths and assumptions about it related to gender and sexuality. The songs will stem from the encounter of the three different perspectives of the participants, intersecting humanities research, science research, and creative and public engagement practices.
Making Gender in Performance: A Participatory Workshop
Lead applicant: Zhaoyi Yan, Music
This event will bring together approximately 15 to 20 Oxford researchers, graduate students, artists and performance practitioners to explore how gender identity is made, read and negotiated through performance. The workshop will use gender and performance as a shared question across theatre, music, dance, opera, ritual, visual culture, queer performance and everyday embodied practice.
Rehearsing the Nurafkan Archive
Lead applicant: Dr Ashkan Sepahvand, Ruskin
A workshop that convenes around the Nurafkan Archive, a Bodleian Special Collection containing the writings of Ali Mirdrekvandi, a peasant-labourer from Iran. This unique corpus remains unpublished, unsearchable on the Bodleian’s online catalogue, and un-digitised. As a result, the Nurafkan Archive is significantly under-researched. My project aims to change this by organising a workshop in which the archive is shared with artists and researchers from the Iranian diaspora and beyond who will engage with the material for the first time. The workshop approaches the Nurafkan Archive as a radical site of witnessing Empire, where subjectivity persists in the face of ruination. A repertoire of resistance emerges through Mirdrekvandi’s words, offering a contemporary occasion to “rehearse” his story. Through repetition and reactivation, rehearsals become a tool for sensing collectively how Mirdrekvandi’s words call out to other worlds and what unexpected solidarities might arise.
Scripted Women
Lead applicant: Yael Kramer, AMES
This workshop invites reflection on how female figures—both those represented in ancient compositions and those embodied by their performers—were imagined, voiced, and enacted within the performative cultures of the ancient world. By bringing together scholars working across regions, languages, and disciplines, we aim to foster a conversation attentive to the social, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions of writing and performing women. Whether articulated in biblical narrative, liturgical poetry, magical formulae, historiography, or the civic theatre, the representation of female speech calls audiences to listen to, and at times inhabit, the female perspective, however constructed or mediated it may be.
Terms Poetry
Lead applicant: Dr Michael Glenfield, Wycliffe Hall
A series of performances which bring together powerful poets and attentive audiences. The desire is to create a performance space for developing and experienced poets who have a connection to Oxford – city and university – with opportunities to rehearse before the performance. The event will see several poets (between 3 and 5) present new work, with interludes for music, wine and conversation. The series is designed to bring together poets from wide-ranging backgrounds, ages, and poetic traditions. This plurality of voices offers an exploration of how people experience the world differently depending on who they are and where they come from. Poetry is one of the most identity-rooted art forms: it carries the rhythms, histories, and perspectives of particular lives and communities. By placing these voices in concert with one another and the audience, Terms creates a space in which questions of identity – cultural, geographic, generational, linguistic – are not merely represented but actively explored and performed.
