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Since 2005, Dr Quick has created a series of practice-as-research projects and educational workshops to increase understanding of how new media-based performance is created and understood. Key beneficiaries have been young people, teachers, theatre practitioners, mixed media artists, and cultural organisations. Five new works have impacted through the introduction of innovative practice performance to new audiences, nationally and internationally (including central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Brazil and Taiwan); pioneering new uses of digital technology as creative practice, and sharing such innovation with both established and new theatres and groups.
This case study focuses on the impact of Professor Adrian Heathfield's research. Heathfield curated numerous multi-form research exchanges with his Performance Matters Co-Directors over a four-year period, expanding non-academic beneficiaries of performance research, influencing prevailing professional discourses as well as creative and curatorial practices across the arts sector. Workshops, collaborative dialogues, symposia, talks, films, screenings and performances were conceived, realised and hosted by major cultural sector partners, involving an international array of leading academics, artists, activists and curators. Direct impacts for the non-academic partner-organisation — Live Art Development Agency (LADA) — were the expansion of its educational, archival and media activities, and user community. Specific professional development effects were delivered for a culturally diverse group of participating established and early-career artists.
Studio for Electronic Theatre (SET) is a group of researchers examining the relationship between technological advance and creative practice. They examine how technology can change the nature of performance environments in specific spaces and address social and political issues in distinct places. Specific performances have:
Additionally, the work being carried out engages directly with non HEI partners and has resulted in members of the group being invited to communicate with a range of interested partners beyond the academy: Greenwich Theatre, Albany Deptford, Kids Company.
Professor Lois Weaver joined QMUL Drama in 1997. Her research-led practice as artist, curator and activist has had substantial impact within two areas. First, within the cultural world of live art she has influenced the practice of both emerging and established artists, and the programming and curation of performance. She has facilitated, mentored and directed a range of artists; opened up new spaces for performance's production and presentation; and actively supported other curators in the expansion of live art programming, especially in London. Second, Weaver's research into forms of public dialogue — her `Public Address Systems' — has had impact in the wider social field, leading to events and projects around the world in which citizens of diverse perspectives and backgrounds, often excluded from public discourse on grounds of age, class, gender and sexuality, have been able to contribute meaningfully to discussions of urgent social issues, including human rights, sexuality, aging and new technologies.
This case study focuses on impact derived from Ildiko Rippel's practice-based research in contemporary performance, resulting in the presentation of Blueprint (2012), a performance involving interaction of performers with their mothers, who are present within the work via real-time video links. Blueprint continues to be performed at festivals and in venues in the UK. Impact, to date, has comprised: opportunities for public engagement with contemporary performance practice and furtherance of public understanding of it; the work's contribution to public performance programming in the UK; its contribution to development of contemporary theatre practices through experience and discussion of it amongst theatre/performance practitioners, promoters and critics; contribution to the vibrancy of publicly available contemporary arts culture in the UK.
Two strands of research were developed within the Performing the Archive portfolio of projects, focusing on conservation, accessibility and the creative use of culturally significant and unique archives of live art and performance. These have impacted on professional artists, curators and producers working in live art and contemporary performance, on archivists and conservators and on the general public. Through a range of events, workshops, exhibitions and performances held between 2008 and 2013, partner arts organizations have also benefited, including Arnolfini, Bristol Old Vic Theatre (BOVT), In Between Time Productions (IBT) and the National Review of Live Art (NRLA). The influence of the research has been felt regionally, nationally and internationally.
What's Welsh for Performance? (WsWfP)'s research into the history of performance art in Wales has achieved its most significant and sustained impact through informing the professional practices of Welsh arts practitioners. These fall into two groups: artists engaged in live art, past and present; and art curators and policy makers who have responsibility for the presentation, conservation and funding of contemporary art in Wales. In uncovering, documenting and making publicly accessible Wales's rich but underappreciated heritage of performance art, WsWfP has given the first generation of performance artists a renewed stake in its history; inspired younger artists in the creation of new work; and helped to raise the public profile of the artform to the extent that performance work is now routinely included in exhibitions, publications and media coverage devoted to Welsh contemporary art. Three partnerships with major organisations allow WsWfP to inform directly how performance art in Wales is funded, administered, exhibited and conserved.
The research led by Professor Sita Popat with Scott Palmer enabled digital arts small-medium enterprise (SME) KMA Ltd to develop ground-breaking visual/kinetic ideas and permanently shift their creative product (and hence their income stream) from web design and popular music show projection to theatre and the cultural industries. Subsequent collaborative research and development workshops catalysed the design of a progressive digital projection for an international theatre company's production, influencing how audiences around the world received the work's political message.
A participatory public artwork commissioned as a part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, The Boat Project's impact reaches to a national audience of 440,698 while a global audience of many millions encountered the work via print and broadcast media. Outreach activity engaged over 100 schools while some thirty public artworks were commissioned in response to the project, underlining its impact on local authority cultural provision and the professional fields of contemporary performance, theatre and public art. The project created 22 paid positions, 80 volunteer positions and an on-going commercial venture.
The Music Walk project has brought contemporary art music to new audiences and enriched the public's experience of public spaces. The impact of Hopkins' research arises from this project commissioned by the BBC Proms for its John Cage Centenary on 17 August 2012, with the involvement of Transport for London. The project had direct impact upon 600 members of the public who took part in a performance event around the Albert Hall using mobile media devices, and a further 5,961 people who accessed the project website. The project also had impact upon the policy-thinking of the BBC in relation to using mobile media to reach and engage new audiences, on Transport for London in relation to its strategy for pedestrians, and on new music promoter Sound and Music, which has commissioned further iterations of the project for London and beyond.