At the University of Leeds, I have been leading practical sessions for postgraduates and early-career researchers across schools and faculties, using performance techniques to explore matters relevant to their academic research.
Each workshop is bespoke and has been conceived in response to topics suggested by the research community. Here is a list of some of the workshops I have run lately.
Developing your Presentation Skills using Performance Techniques
Presenting your research is part of being an academic. Whether at small meetings, university symposia, or international conferences, speaking about your work in front of an audience is a performative act that some find exciting and rewarding. Others don’t.
How do you calm your nerves before you step on stage? How do you use your voice during a presentation? How can you speak in a way that will keep your listeners captivated?
Building on your personal experience, in this workshop you will learn effective performance exercises to help you sharpen your presentation skills. Focussing on voice, posture, breath and text delivery, the workshop equips you with a set of tools that will allow you to present your paper confidently and engagingly, to keep your audience glued to your lips.
Articulating your Research through Performance Techniques
Many researchers dread the question “What is your research about?”. How do we summarise our work? How do we describe the complexity of our project? How can we make clear what it means to us? Communicating our research to others can be especially difficult when we ourselves struggle to make sense of what we do.
This workshop offers a space to explore your research story using performance techniques. Through practical exercises from the world of theatre you will investigate your relationship with your topic (positionality) and venture on individual research questions, enabling you to better articulate your research to experts, colleagues, and friends.
Applying Performance Techniques to your Research Practice
Is my research going anywhere? Nobody will be interested in reading my work. Is this making sense to anyone? What am I even doing? As researchers, we have to learn to manage our inner critic. Sometimes a useful friend who keeps us on track, it can also block progress leaving us frustrated and demotivated. This practical workshop offers playful performance techniques straight from the rehearsal room enabling you to protect yourself from being bullied by your inner critic.
Building on the previous session Voicing the Text, the final workshop in this series also provides performance methods for exploring text, broadening your skills of incorporating creative approaches into your research practice.
