Theatre, Performance and Relational Repair
Symposium hosted by the Theatre & Performance Research group and The Chekhov Collective UK
Generously supported by the University of Kent research environment fund.
Monday 12 June, 9.30am-5.15pm
Jarman Studio 1, School of Arts, University of Kent
This one-day symposium explored how we might navigate trauma, relational repair and being-with each other in and through performance, research, and teaching.
The sessions approached the topic from various intersecting points of view, and the day aimed to facilitate an exchange of ideas, questions and practice between all participants.
Hosted by the Theatre and Performance Research Group at University of Kent and The Chekhov Collective UK.
Facilitated by Roanna Mitchell (UoK and The Chekhov Collective UK) and Jayne Thompson (UoK and Moving Memory Dance Theatre).
Symposium Programme:
9am Arrivals and coffee in Jarman Foyer
9.30-10am Introductions in Jarman Studio 1
10am-1pm ‘Brave Space: Supporting creative courage’. Workshop and Q&A with Polly Teale
Polly Teale explores ways to expand our capacity to step out of our comfort zone and encourage creative exploration. Our bodies and brains are hardwired to protect us from danger, but we often anticipate a threat that is no longer present. Polly explores the ways we carry our history in our body and how we might hold the resistant parts of ourselves with curiosity and compassion. She shares ways she works with drama students to encourage a culture of exploration and expand capacity to step out of the comfort zone.
Polly Teale was Artistic Director of theatre company Shared Experience, with productions she wrote and directed regularly transferring to the West End and touring internationally. These included the award winning trilogy: Bronte; Jane Eyre and After Mrs Rochester (winner Best Director Evening Standard Awards, and Time Out Best West End Production). She also wrote and directed Mine, Speechless and Mermaid as well as directing productions in the West End, at the Royal Court, National Theatre, Traverse and Young Vic. Her plays continue to be performed nationally and internationally and are available from Nick Hern books. Her work is on the school syllabus.
Polly has an MA in Arts Psychotherapy from the Institute for the Arts in Therapy and Education (Distinction). She works in drama schools and believes that psychological understanding can deeply enrich the student’s practice, as well as supporting creative freedom, personal growth, and resilience. Her work encourages students to value difference by becoming curious about how we are shaped by our own history, culture and by bigger systems. This empathic understanding is brought to the rehearsal process encouraging psychologically informed, deeply embodied character exploration.
Polly has worked within the NHS with survivors of sexual abuse, as well as with homeless groups, refugees and prisoners. She has a private practice, teaches at the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education, and is a trainer and supervisor for Trauma Informed Schools UK.
1-1.45pm Lunch in Jarman Foyer
1.45- 2.30 ‘Some Stranger Somewhere: Activated listening in participatory performance’. Presentation by Jessica Cerullo
US-based theatre-artist Jessica Cerullo discusses her approaches in the pandemic living archive project The Ships In The Night, which investigates isolation and the creative power of listening carefully to the voices of strangers.
The Ships in the Night is co-created with hundreds of community collaborators in what has become a collective re-imagining of a future ripe with opportunities for connection, creation, and collective meaning making.
To date it includes performances, community walks, writing and listening workshops, and the publication of a book documenting the project.
Jessica Cerullo is a theater-based, social practice artist and educator. Her interest in the intersection of art-making and community building is supported by a variety of somatic and contemplative practices. Her work seeks to create intimate experiences that court the unexpected and invite the revelation of poetry into our every day.
Her current project, The Ships in the Night, seeks to remember, reclaim, and frame pandemic experiences. Her book, Some Stranger Somewhere, documents the project. Jessica directed and co-created the first bi-lingual production of How To End Poverty In 90 Minutes (with 99 people you may or may not know) with Sojourn Theater. She co-founded the Colectivo de Arte Social, a branch of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition (WWIRC). With WWIRC and Whitman College she directed and devised the play Because You Are Here and the accompanying listening station Hear Here Walla Walla. She is the Artistic Director of MICHA, the Michael Chekhov Association, an organization that trains performers, directors and scholars while fostering cross-community collaboration and creative spaces. Jessica lives in Connecticut where she
is a designated facilitator for the state’s Office of the Arts and promotes cross-sector community conversations. JessicaCerullo.com
2.30 – 3.15 ‘Faith, Care and Performance’. Presentation by Sophie Quirk
This session presents early findings from a series of interviews with ministers and worship leaders in the Church of England, exploring the extent to which leading worship was, or had synergies with, performance. A key theme to emerge from these conversations was care: worship leaders were engaged in complex aesthetic and logistical decision-making in order to ensure that their forms of worship cared both for participants and their faith, and sometimes faced difficult negotiations around self-care. Their perspective raises important questions about the way that performers care for self and audience, both in worship settings and beyond.
Dr Sophie Quirk is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent. She is the author of the books Why Stand-up Matters: How Comedians Manipulate and Influence and The Politics of British Stand-up Comedy: The New Alternative.
3.15-3.30 Coffee break in Jarman Foyer
3.30-4.30 ‘Understanding Trauma: Teaching Psychodynamic Principles’. Presentation by Max Pickard
Can teaching basic psychological principles help those who work with trauma survivors? Every containing relationship helps trauma survivors recover. I will discuss our experience of training carers and go through some of the exercises and discussions we facilitate.
Dr Max Pickard is an NHS Consultant Psychiatrist of thirty years experience. His particular expertise is on the neuropsychiatry, neurodevelopmental psychiatry, and personality disorder. He is co-author of a training strategy for carers on personality disorder / trauma which is being rolled out nationally.
4.30-5.15 Roundup collective discussion
5.15-onwards Informal continuation of conversations on campus and/or down in town
*David Schulz is an artist, graphic designer and art teacher. This image appears in Jessica Cerullo’s book Some Stranger Somewhere, featured in this symposium. Schultz writes: “I made this image during the pandemic at the elementary school where I was the art teacher. It was during the pandemic that I first began teaching kids and was interested in how some of the things I learned from my professional background in photography and media related to social emotional learning. I started writing a little bit about it (https://davidschulzworks.com/Lessons-from-Photography). The school where I worked was a Title One school so the image has many different layers of meaning for me (escaping the pandemic, escaping poverty, escaping racism, escaping extremist media narratives of everything).
