Browsing by Author "Crossley, Mark"

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    'A certain danger': Contemporary performer engagement with the texts and methodology of Robert Lepage.
    (Canadian Journal of Practice-based Research in Theatre, 2009-10) Crossley, Mark
    Between September 2008 and February 2009, a cohort of third year Drama Studies undergraduates at De Montfort University (DMU) in the UK adapted and then performed ‘The Seven Streams of the River Ota’ by Robert Lepage and Ex Machina. In my capacity as a module tutor, I acted as a director for the project. The original professional production developed between 1994 and 1996 was indelibly connected to and constructed upon the individual, creative contributions of the artistic company (performers and technicians) that Lepage assembled. It is therefore, arguably, a multiple set of autobiographical narratives. By perceiving the text in this way, as a reflexive creation, it prompts several questions for practitioners: • What potential is there for performers to find creative ownership and authorship when they are approaching such a text for the first time? • Can the ‘embers’ of the written dramatic text ignite a new performance text? • What performance challenges are created when performers are asked to navigate between written (dramatic) and devised (performance) text within one production? The intention of this paper is to illuminate and analyze these questions by correlating our specific rehearsal and performance experience with the contemporary debate on Lepage’s own work. Reflections will be offered upon the possibilities and challenges created for performers in the intersection between an extant dramatic text of Lepage and the personalized, devising imperative of his working methodology.
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    Contemporary Theatre Education and Creative Learning : a Great British Journey
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021-06-23) Crossley, Mark
    This book considers the state of contemporary theatre education in Great Britain is in two parts. The first half considers the national identities of each of the three mainland nations of England, Scotland, and Wales to understand how these differing identities are reflected and refracted through culture, theatre education and creative learning. The second half attends to 21st century theatre education, proposing a more explicit correlation between contemporary theatre and theatre education. It considers how theatre education in the country has arrived at its current state and why it is often marginalised in national discourse. Attention is given to some of the most significant developments in contemporary theatre education across the three nations, reflecting on how such practice is informed by and offers a challenge to conceptions of place and nation. Drawing upon the latest research and strategic thinking in culture and the arts, and providing over thirty interviews and practitioner case studies, this book is infused with a rigorous and detailed analysis of theatre education, and illuminated by the voices and perspectives of innovative theatre practitioners.
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    Devising Theatre with Stan's Cafe
    (Bloomsbury Methuen Publishing, 2017-10) Crossley, Mark; Yarker, James
    Stan’s Cafe are one of the most innovative British theatre companies, making work in Birmingham and performing across the globe since 1991. To mark the quarter of a century since they began, this book has been created to capture what underpins their collaborative style and the devising methodologies they apply. For the first time, the artistic director James Yarker, and an extensive number of company members offer their insights, with chapters focusing on key areas of the production process from ideas, to rehearsing and directing, text, space and time, performance and audience. Each chapter also includes ‘Stan in Action’ activities that readers can use to inspire their own devising. Co-authored by Mark Crossley and James Yarker, the book is a rigorous but very accessible text that will appeal to theatre makers, academics, students and a general readership interested in contemporary performance and eager to know more about a company with a rich history and a unique approach to theatre-making.
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    Editorial Introduction and Editorial Essay 'Falling between': Opportunities and challenges of intermediality
    (Taylor and Francis, 2016-08) Chatzichristodoulou, Maria; Crossley, Mark
    This article frames the special issue by offering a broad reflection on the historical development of ideas that have informed debates concerning intermediality and its pedagogical contexts. It opens with a brief articulation of media and intermedial theory to inform the debate. The challenges of contemporary media hybridity are then set within an historical context by tracing the origins of current (perceived) knowledge dichotomies and hierarchies into the philosophical canons of western antiquity. In examining distinctions between the different types of knowledge and expression that form the constituent parts of contemporary intermedial theatres, the article considers philosophical debates, traces historical trajectories and probes social dynamics from Aristotle to the present. Moving on to the current historical and social context of intermedial practice and pedagogy, the article examines specific challenges and opportunities that emerge from our own intermedial age. This multifaceted and trans-historical approach leads the authors to suggest that old hierarchical and divisional structures impact upon contemporary practices, affecting how those are perceived, received and valued.
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    From LeCompte to Lepage
    (Intellect, 2012-09-18) Crossley, Mark
    Intermedial practice is becoming a ubiquitous feature of contemporary theatrical performance with complex, interdependent relationships being established between live and digital media. As professional practitioners continue to extend the boundaries of this form and theoretical perspectives are constantly refreshed to respond to such work, what are the implications for pedagogy within higher education? This article seeks to consider how educational professionals within the university sector may begin to construct an ‘enabling correlation between contemporary practice and emergent intermedial theory’ so as to facilitate dynamic learning opportunities for students.
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    Idioms of resilience: Mental health and migration in India
    (Sage, 2021-08-31) Raghavan, Raghu; Brown, Brian J.; Coope, Jonathan; Crossley, Mark; Sivakami, Muthusamy; Gawde, Nilesh; Pendse, Tejasi; Jamwal, Saba; Barrett, Andy; Dyalchand, Ashok; Chaturvedi, Santosh; Chowdary, Abijeet; Heblikar, Dhanashree
    Background: Resilience has proved to be a versatile notion to explain why people are not defeated by hardship and adversity, yet so far, we know little of how it might apply to communities and cultures in low to middle income countries. Aim: This paper aims to explore the notion of resilience in cross-cultural context through considering the lived experience of internal migration. Methods: A sample of 30 participants with experience of migration was recruited from a low-income slum dwelling neighbourhood in the city of Pune, India. These individuals participated in biographical narrative interviews in which they were encouraged to talk about their experience of migration, their adaptation to life in their new environment and making new lives for themselves. Results: Participants referred to a variety of intra-individual and external factors that sustained their resilience, including acceptance of their circumstances, the importance of memory, hope for their children’s futures as well as kindness from family friends and community members and aspects of the physical environment which were conducive to an improvement in their lives. Conclusions: By analogy with the widely used term ‘idioms of distress’, we advocate attention to the locally nuanced and culturally inflected ‘idioms of resilience’ or ‘eudaemonic idioms’ which are of crucial importance as migration and movement become ever more prominent in discussions of human problems. The nature and extent of people’s coping abilities, their aspirations and strategies for tackling adversity, their idioms of resilience and eudaemonic repertoires merit attention so that services can genuinely support their adjustment and progress in their new-found circumstances.
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    In Search of an Intermedial Drama Pedagogy
    (Drama Research, 2015-04) Crossley, Mark
    This essay focuses on the response of drama pedagogy to the contemporary developments in intermediality and the hybridity of media in performance contexts. Drama is becoming increasingly difficult to define as a medium as practitioners experiment with a myriad of new media, combining live and digital processes in theatre. The possibilities and tensions of this evolution have been well documented over the last forty years or more and the research field of intermedial theory has grown rapidly. What, however, are the challenges and opportunities that intermediality creates for drama pedagogy and what theories, methodologies, possibilities and concerns have been proposed to date? Has the response been concerted and wide-ranging or is this territory under explored?
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    Intermedial Theatre: Principles and Practice
    (Palgrave, 2019-02) Crossley, Mark
    This book aims to make complex ideas accessible. It offers a rigorous, yet readable, insight into key aspects of intermedial theatre principles and practices as they manifest themselves here and now in the first quarter of the 21st century, infused as it is with digital media and the new hybrid experiences this creates. Each chapter author addresses sophisticated ideas in relation to intermediality, but infused with their own experiences of making and spectating, addressing the reader directly throughout. Themes, practices and even certain productions (notably Complicite’s The Encounter) are revisited by different authors but with a new perspective each time, dependant on the focus of the chapter. The approachable analytical style is illuminated and grounded with a wide range of clear practitioner examples, selected by the chapter authors or written about by theatre-makers themselves in the final chapter. Every chapter concludes with a Practical Ideas section written by each author, offering the reader some thoughts on how to translate the concepts within the text into theatre practice.
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    A Recalibration of Theatre’s Hypermediality
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Crossley, Mark
    The unique capacity of theatre, as often proposed, is that it allows all media hosted within it to manifest themselves in their own particular forms, expressed by Claudia Georgi as ‘its ability to integrate other media without affecting their respective materiality and mediality’ (2014: 46), whilst simultaneously representing them as theatrical signifiers. This property of theatre has led to the 21st century sobriquet hypermedium, capable of incorporating many other media, as notably elucidated in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (2006). In the introductory chapter to that text, the editors Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt stated that ‘theatre has become a hypermedium and home to all’, within which all media can be sited and remediated to create ‘profusions of texts, inter-texts, inter-media and space in between.’ (24) However, it must be noted that Elleström is not persuaded on this specific argument of theatre as a hypermedium. In 2010, and again in the introductory chapter to this text, he wrote, citing Chapple and Kattenbelt, that theatre is ‘definitely extremely multimodal and it integrates many basic and qualified media, but it is an overstatement to say that ‘theatre is a hypermedium that incorporates all arts and media.’ (45) This chapter pursues Elleström’s perspective and seeks a more nuanced analysis of the interactions between multiple basic, technical and qualified media as they are represented within theatre. My contention is that alongside the significance of material mobility, there are specific temporal, spatial and sensorial modes which are fundamental in defining the mechanics and the potential of the hypermedium. This interplay of modalities creates new forms of hybrid signification through particular dialogues of immediacy and hypermediacy, participant authorship, angles of mediation and angles of exclusivity, transporting theatre into new and sometimes challenging relationships with other assertive qualified media, notably what I refer to as the architecture of commerce.
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    Resilience, mental health and urban migrants: a narrative review
    (Emerald, 2020-05-21) Coope, Jonathan; Barrett, Andy; Brown, Brian J.; Crossley, Mark; Sivakami, Muthusamy; Raghavan, Raghu
    The purpose of this paper is to provide a narrative review of the literature on mental health resilience and other positive mental health capacities of urban and internal migrants. The methodology for this narrative review included a search of articles published up to 2017. The abstracts were screened and relevant articles studied and discussed. Literature on the particular mental health challenges of urban migrants in India was also studied. References found in the literature relating to neuro-urbanism were also followed up to explore broader historical and conceptual contexts. Several key sources and resources for mental health resilience were identified – including familial and community networks and individual hope or optimism. Nevertheless, much of the literature tends to focus at the level of the individual person, even though ecological systems theory would suggest that mental health resilience is better understood as multi-layered i.e. relevant to, and impacted by, communities and broader societal and environmental contexts. This paper provides insight into an aspect of migrant mental health that has tended to be overlooked hitherto: the mental health resilience and positive mental health capacities of urban migrants. This is particularly relevant where professional ‘expert’ mental health provision for internal migrant communities is absent or unaffordable. Previous work has tended to focus predominantly on mental health risk factors, despite growing awareness that focusing on risk factors along can lead to an over-reliance on top-down expert-led interventions and overlook positive capacities for mental health that are sometimes possessed by individuals and their communities.
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    The River Flows On: Student performer engagement with the texts and methodology of Robert Lepage.
    (Education and Theatre Journal, 2010-10) Crossley, Mark
    Between September 2008 and February 2009, a cohort of third year Drama Studies undergraduates at De Montfort University (DMU) in the UK adapted and then performed ‘The Seven Streams of the River Ota’ by Robert Lepage. In my capacity as a module tutor, I acted as a director for the project. The original professional production developed between 1994 and 1996 was indelibly connected to and constructed upon the individual, creative contributions of the artistic company (performers and technicians) that Lepage assembled. It is therefore, arguably, a multiple set of autobiographical narratives. By perceiving the text in this way, as a reflexive creation, it prompts several pedagogical questions: • What potential is there for student performers to find creative ownership when they are approaching the text for the first time? • Can the ‘embers’ of the written dramatic text ignite a new performance text for the students? • What teaching and learning challenges are created when undergraduate drama students are asked to navigate between written (dramatic) and devised (performance) text within one production? The aim of this paper is to illuminate and analyze these questions through the specific rehearsal process and performance case study and reflect upon the possibilities and challenges created for drama students in the intersection between an extant dramatic text of Lepage and the personalized, devising imperative of his working methodology. In particular there will be a focus on the potential for the RSVP process (see description in main text) and the concept of ‘décalage’, as used by Lepage, to be perceived as a pedagogical framework upon which students may construct ownership and authorship over their own learning and creative practice. My intention is also to highlight some of the tensions created through such a methodology that embraces indeterminacy. Note – the citations I draw upon are consciously and unapologetically centered upon texts on or by Robert Lepage (rather than works related to educational theory) as my intention, as already stated, is to offer his methodology as a pedagogical model.
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    Systematic review of applied theatre practice in the Indian context of mental health, resilience and well-being
    (Intellect Ltd, 2019-12-01) Crossley, Mark; Barrett, A.; Brown, Brian J.; Coope, J.; Raghavan, Raghu
    This systematic review seeks to evaluate the documented uses of applied theatre practice within an Indian context. At its most particular level, the review focuses on theatre interventions within migrant slum (basti) communities and, where in evidence, the conjunction of applied theatre with research and practice from mental health and well-being, in exploring these latter issues within such communities and the level and modes of their resilience. The review also draws upon related global research to contextualise and inform the Indian context. At present, systematic reviews are not prevalent within the research fields of theatre or specifically applied theatre , yet such reviews arguably offer the breadth of objective evidence required to interrogate the efficacy of such practice. This review is therefore intended to rigorously map the existing academic research and the more diffuse online dialogues within India that are pertinent to the subject; to consider the relations, contradictions, absences and inconsistencies within this literature, and from this to articulate key findings that may be integrated into the planning and delivery of new initiatives within this field. In this regard it seeks to survey the current state of knowledge, identify problems, evaluate current theory as well as develop new theoretical paradigms.