Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Exeter
The Idiot Colony Project
Description and Rationale
This is a Practice-as-Research project exploring approaches to contemporary physical theatre training and performance through the creation, realisation and interdisciplinary reflection upon a piece of ensemble theatre The Idiot Colony.
Approaches and Strategies
Loukes co-created and performed The Idiot Colony with RedCape Theatre (premiered at Edinburgh Festival, August 2008), which drew together a diverse combination of training approaches from Gindler work and Asian martial-meditation arts (Loukes) to the physical theatre of Jacques Lecoq (Coaché and Friend).
The project asked the following research questions:
• How can specific practices and histories of performer training disciplines both inform and problematize each other? (addressed and evidenced in Output 1 and 2)
• What strategies can be utilised to draw together such practices to create new ensemble languages? (addressed in Output 1, 2, 3 and 4)
• What interdisciplinary, theoretical perspectives might be useful in furthering our understanding of training and performance? (addressed and evidenced in Output 2 and 3)
Outcomes and Evidence
In line with Exeter’s policy of interweaving practice and scholarship, the outcomes of this project are both performance-based and articulated through conventional scholarly media. The project has generated 92 public performances across the UK, two book chapters, one/two conference papers and an online Educational Resource Pack.
Output 1: 92 public performances at significant venues across the UK
Output 2: ‘Towards a Syncretic Ensemble? RedCape Theatre’s The Idiot Colony’ 6,000 word chapter in John Britton (ed.) (2013) Encountering Ensemble, London: Bloomsbury.
Output 3: ‘Beyond the Psychophysical? The ‘Situated’, ‘Enactive’ Bodymind in Performance’, 12,000 word chapter in Phillip Zarrilli, Jerri Daboo and Rebecca Loukes (2013) Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and Process – Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Output 4: Conference Paper: The Idiot Colony: Principles, Processes and Practices, invited talk, University of Exeter, September 2011.
