June 7, 2008: Bodies in Flight
I heard an interesting talk this week by Simon Jones and Sara Giddens- he’s from Bristol where he teaches drama at the University and she’s from Nottingham. They have been collaborating on drama/theatre performance projects since 1990 with a group they call Bodies in Flight. Simon gave a lecture on practice based research in performance within the academy. He defined their methodologies as part of Professor Baz Kershaw’s larger 2001- 2006 PARIP: Practice as Research in Performance research project out of the University of Bristol, funded by the Arts and the Humanities Research Board which looks like the British equivalent to Canada’s SSHRC. The project is a good example of a well documented university research project in practice based performance research. Listening to them talk I kept thinking how much Susan would enjoy their research- in particular Sara’s interest in choreography derived from normal body movements.
The AHRB website is also a good place to look for the kinds of research that are receiving funding and to get a better understanding of some of their terminology like knowledge transfer.