RSC IF: Spatial Dramaturgy - Cities, Space and Design as Performance
Amahra Spence, part of the 2024-25 cohort of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Interdisciplinary Fellows programme was a visiting fellow with TORCH for a year. During that time Amahra met with researchers in Music, as well as Oxford-based artists, to work on her project.
"My fellowship led me to think about spatial dramaturgy as a critical framework through which theatre-making and performance practice entangle with the design of built environments. Drawing on Black feminist thought, decolonial spatial theory, and performance studies, I’m interested in the ways that space is not a neutral container but a script: one that directs movement, distributes visibility, organises relation and encodes power. Theatre-makers, long attuned to the politics of staging, blocking and audience configuration, possess methodologies that can productively intervene in architectural and urban design practices. By reading space as dramaturgical structure, we shift from designing objects to designing relations. Through this reframing, spatial practice becomes accountable to questions of embodiment, surveillance, repair, and collective imagination."
You can read Amahra's project overview here:
Amahra Spence (standing, fourth from left) and the other 2024-25 RSC Interdisciplinary Fellows
