Gordon Ramsay
Lecturer in Drama and Performance, Faculty of Arts
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Expertise Summary
BA (Loughborough) MA (University of East Anglia) PhD (Loughborough)
Areas of expertise - 20th-century theatre, including Futurist performance; playwriting; performance robotics. Dr Ramsay was awarded a Lord Dearing Teaching Award by the University in 2008 In my teaching I hope to share some of the passion and excitement I have for theatre, to stretch ideas about what performance is and can be, and to encourage consideration of the cultural and political context in which it emerges. I am fascinated by the fact that we can all attend the same event and yet come away having seen very different plays. These 'different audiences at the same time' were clearly evident with the Futurists, whose performances were frequently intended to irritate and annoy one section of the audience to the delight of another. At this point the performance might move off the stage altogether and to the auditorium itself, the spectators fighting and hurling abuse, the actors the new audience to a performance they had started but whose narrative had now slipped (however temporarily) beyond their control. This dynamic quality, the sense that the relationship between auditorium and stage, audience and actor, is unstable, reminds us that theatre is live, and that the performance text is incomplete without the performance context itself. In discovering/translating long-buried plays, one is discovering fragments, whose meanings only fully emerge when matched to their makers and their worlds. In practice-based research, in writing for and making performance, the relationship between fragment, maker and maker's world is harder to divine, complicated as it is by issues of subjectivity and critical distance. I am interested in both forms of research and am happy to work across disciplines.
UG Modules taught First year modules - Introduction to Drama Second year modules - Analysing Performance Final year modules - Playwriting and Performance
PG modules taught Issues in Theatre Research and Performance Practice and Analysis
Areas of Research Supervision Modernist Theatre, Playwriting, Practice-Based Research
Recent and Current Research Students To be confirmed
Research Summary
I am currently working on a book on Italian Futurist theatre, that includes a number of newly translated short plays (sintesi) and in particular am concentrating on the means by which these might be… read more
Recent Publications
2012. Staging Futurism: Time, Space, Place, Pace and the performance of Futurist sintesi. In: One Hundred Years of Futurism Intellect. (In Press.)
2012. The Three Christs Project: evidence box: completed playscript, drafts, archival materials, videos of devising and script development process, and of performed reading of final script (In Press.)
, 2011. “Simultaneity and Compenetration in sintesi of the Italian Futurists,”. In: Futurist Dramaturgy and Performance Ottowa:Legas. 45-56
Current Research
I am currently working on a book on Italian Futurist theatre, that includes a number of newly translated short plays (sintesi) and in particular am concentrating on the means by which these might be categorised, given their sheer variety and stylistic range. I am also researching the Futurists' perception of the crowd/audience in their theatrical events and the degree to which it is governed by crowd theory of the time.
Past Research
My PhD thesis considered the place of the machine in performance and in particular its use in early Italian Futurist drama. Published articles that have stemmed from this have examined the human-object relations on the Futurist stage and the robot as programmable actor. This has led to membership of the Performance Robotics Research Group with academics and practitioners from the Universities of Kent and Leeds and has involved workshops with the Shadow Robot Company, investigating the parameters and potential for robotic performance. As a playwright, I have had professional readings, workshops and performances of a number of plays, including Pas De Deux (White Bear, London), The Woman Who Turned Into A Clock (The Gate, London) and 1X/X1 (Lion and Unicorn, London).
Future Research
I am interested in travel and performance and in particular the moving vehicle as a site for audience, performer and the renegotiation of text. The Futurist preoccupation with speed gives primacy to destination over journey and I have devised a series of three distinct types of vehicular performance in order to intervene in this acceleration and engender moments of stillness, hesitation and reflection. The first performance is scheduled for August 2009.