Public Research Seminar: Bodies of Punishment
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire - Workshop 2
200 Jennens Road, B4 7XR
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Bodies of Punishment: Movement, Mask and the Prison
Alexander Norton (Coventry University Centre for Dance Research)
This paper outlines the broad theoretical framing and rationale behind Alexander Norton's ongoing research into applied prison theatre. It is the foundation to his doctoral research which documents his work as a movement teacher and community theatre maker, in the England and Wales prison system. Applied theatre in prisons maintains a tension between practice that exists to develop ‘soft skills’ (Balfour 2009), desistance from offending (Davey, Day and Balfour 2015) and conversely, the desire for what applied theatre scholar Sarah Woodland terms ‘liberatory aesthetics’ (2021): creating theatre within prisons to reflect critical and aesthetics questions about the nature of punishment and imprisonment. Against this backdrop, embodiment is a growing area of discourse for penological scholars. Drawing upon Chamberlen’s Embodying Punishment (2018) and Carvalho and Chamberlen’s Questioning Punishment (2023), this project positions the embodied experience of participants in physical theatre training as co-creators rather than compliant subjects. Ultimately, he will argue that embodied theatre making practices within prison offer a novel critical insight into the nature of imprisonment and punishment - both in the UK and globally. Simultaneously, it offers new approaches into critical questions that frame physical performer training.
Alexander Norton is a theatre-maker, movement teacher and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. He studied with Lassaad Saidi at the École Internationale de Théâtre Lassaad in Brussels. He has worked, for many years as a teacher and performer between the UK, Europe and Australia. He is currently a Midlands4Cities Scholar based at Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University where he researches the intersection of Lecoq pedagogy and applied prison theatre and holds MAs in Arts Administration (RMIT) and Applied Theatre (Warwick).
Running time approx. 90 minutes