Performance@King’s is a cross-college performance and theatre research and teaching grouping. This was a corollary of several discrete conversations in different areas of the College, recognising that no such grouping existed, and of murmurs of hope, that articulating performance and theatre through cross-college overlaps of thought, collaboration, and a sense of community might lead to new thinking, to working groups, module sharing, events, performances, happenings, or to more conversations.
While its home sits within the Department of English under the Creative Practice, Performance and Theatrical Culture research strand, Performance@King's is a cross-College initiative to bring together expertise from across Faculties. The pedagogical practice and research initiatives led or convened by scholars working at King’s, has made the Department of English a suitable home for theatre and performance.
Research
The group is as much grounded in the creative collaborations and activities of its members as in their scholarly work. This research expands the boundaries of performance studies from within the expanded landscape of performance at King’s. The collective scholarly work of the affiliated members of Performance@ includes topics perhaps familiar to the field of performance studies: labour, liveness, virtuality, presence, film, dance, pageantry, folk culture, the everyday, gender, sexuality, museum studies, historiography, and archival imaginaries. Yet, dispersed across the many departments engaging in theatre and performance studies at King’s, these themes have also been carried out in the context of radically methodologically diverse enquiries into print cultures, Latin American Studies, the French Revolution, translation, Shakespeare, medical performance and corporeality, war, migration politics, domesticity, material culture, handiwork, and far more. Researchers work across creative practice and academic endeavours, reaching far into the cultural and public worlds outside King’s.
The Performance Research Group also operates out of the Department, taking a approach to the study of performance. The group’s members are involved in research in theatre, dance, and live art, as well as in performances operating within a wide range of disciplines, social contexts, and systems.
The network's doctoral and postgraduate research community regularly hold reading groups and seminars.
Education
English is also home to an MA in Theatre, Performance & Critical Culture and an MA in Shakespeare Studies, the latter of which is taught jointly between King’s and Shakespeare’s Globe through the Shakespeare Centre London.
People
Lecturer in Performing Arts
Professor of Performance and the Humanities
Senior Lecturer in Performance and Medical Humanities Education
D'Oyly Carte Senior Lecturer in Arts and Health
Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory
Professor of Theatre
Projects
The Greek Play
Classical drama has been performed at King's since the late nineteenth century, with The Greek Play running in its present form since 1953. Led by the Department of Classics, the play is overseen by Actors of Dionysus, a national theatre company with extensive experience in interpreting and performing ancient Greek drama. King's is the only university in the UK that still performs a piece of Greek drama in the original language, wholly or partially, every year.
Language Acts and Worldmaking
Professor Catherine Boyle is Director of Language Acts and Worldmaking, a flagship project funded by the AHRC Open World Research Initiative aiming to regenerate and transform modern language learning by foregrounding language's power to shape how we live and make our worlds. She also delivered Out of the Wings, a three-year AHRC collaboration between King's College London, Queen's University Belfast and the University of Oxford which made the riches of the theatres of Spain and Spanish America accessible to English-speaking researchers and theatre professionals.
The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016
Theatre and Performance is equally bound to the field of history by the work of King’s researchers. Prof. Paul Readman is Director of the major Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016’. This project has published articles and essays on pageants, and a multi-million-word database with details of over 650 pageants; it has also been responsible for a number of successful exhibitions on pageantry, in Carlisle, Bury St Edmunds and Scarborough.
Activities
Present in the Act blog
Discover articles from PhD students on the themes of performance, taken from the former Performance@King's blog.
A colaboradora, a workshop commons: inaugural research practice series
The global pandemic felt like a moment of suspense, a temporal torque in world-time where concerns for personal health and financial-state recovery have met reflection, remorse, grief and loss, and a deeply reflective sense of movement into the unknown. In line with this sense of cultural suspension, this talking point series is framed as a set of workshops where PhD students can gather, learn about and put into practice collaboration-based methodologies of transformation and knowledge-sharing. The series draws its methodology from a colaboradora: a community and arts-based practice of Instituto Procomum in Santos, Brazil. We will offer PhD students the chance to shape their own collaborative grouping within the Performance@ assemblage. Facilitators are international and interdisciplinary practitioners and scholars, reflecting the moment of suspense across timely themes of care, embodiment, stillness, medicine, public and private health/space and decolonization.
Events
Kininso@King’s
Lagos-based, socially engaged arts organisation Kininso Koncepts comes to King’s for an interactive creative workshop and a research-led panel and networking...
Please note: this event has passed.
Related courses
Theatre, Performance & Critical Culture MA
Immerse yourself in studying theatre, performance and critical culture in the heart of London's Theatreland.
Shakespeare Studies MA
Discover new perspectives on the work of Shakespeare on this Master's jointly delivered by King's College London and Shakespeare’s Globe.
People
Lecturer in Performing Arts
Professor of Performance and the Humanities
Senior Lecturer in Performance and Medical Humanities Education
D'Oyly Carte Senior Lecturer in Arts and Health
Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory
Professor of Theatre
Projects
The Greek Play
Classical drama has been performed at King's since the late nineteenth century, with The Greek Play running in its present form since 1953. Led by the Department of Classics, the play is overseen by Actors of Dionysus, a national theatre company with extensive experience in interpreting and performing ancient Greek drama. King's is the only university in the UK that still performs a piece of Greek drama in the original language, wholly or partially, every year.
Language Acts and Worldmaking
Professor Catherine Boyle is Director of Language Acts and Worldmaking, a flagship project funded by the AHRC Open World Research Initiative aiming to regenerate and transform modern language learning by foregrounding language's power to shape how we live and make our worlds. She also delivered Out of the Wings, a three-year AHRC collaboration between King's College London, Queen's University Belfast and the University of Oxford which made the riches of the theatres of Spain and Spanish America accessible to English-speaking researchers and theatre professionals.
The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016
Theatre and Performance is equally bound to the field of history by the work of King’s researchers. Prof. Paul Readman is Director of the major Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016’. This project has published articles and essays on pageants, and a multi-million-word database with details of over 650 pageants; it has also been responsible for a number of successful exhibitions on pageantry, in Carlisle, Bury St Edmunds and Scarborough.
Activities
Present in the Act blog
Discover articles from PhD students on the themes of performance, taken from the former Performance@King's blog.
A colaboradora, a workshop commons: inaugural research practice series
The global pandemic felt like a moment of suspense, a temporal torque in world-time where concerns for personal health and financial-state recovery have met reflection, remorse, grief and loss, and a deeply reflective sense of movement into the unknown. In line with this sense of cultural suspension, this talking point series is framed as a set of workshops where PhD students can gather, learn about and put into practice collaboration-based methodologies of transformation and knowledge-sharing. The series draws its methodology from a colaboradora: a community and arts-based practice of Instituto Procomum in Santos, Brazil. We will offer PhD students the chance to shape their own collaborative grouping within the Performance@ assemblage. Facilitators are international and interdisciplinary practitioners and scholars, reflecting the moment of suspense across timely themes of care, embodiment, stillness, medicine, public and private health/space and decolonization.
Events
Kininso@King’s
Lagos-based, socially engaged arts organisation Kininso Koncepts comes to King’s for an interactive creative workshop and a research-led panel and networking...
Please note: this event has passed.
Related courses
Theatre, Performance & Critical Culture MA
Immerse yourself in studying theatre, performance and critical culture in the heart of London's Theatreland.
Shakespeare Studies MA
Discover new perspectives on the work of Shakespeare on this Master's jointly delivered by King's College London and Shakespeare’s Globe.
Contact us
Get in touch with us via Professor Kélina Gotman on kelina.gotman@kcl.ac.uk.
To subscribe to our mailing list, please email performance-mailing-subscribe@mailman.kcl.ac.uk.