Theme: The Next Stage

TEDxRoyalCentralSchool: The Next Stage. A Day of original talks surrounding the theme of The Next Stage. The event will take place on September 1st 2017 in the Embassy Theatre, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. This event will explore ideas worth sharing from a small and specialised conservatoire community. We firmly believe its about time to delve deep into the world of theatre to examine its impact on the world and the world's impact on theatre. What does The Next Stage mean to you?

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TED Talks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.

Embassy Theatre
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
62-64 Eton Ave
London, London, City of, NW3 3HY
United Kingdom

Ali Godfrey

Artistic Director

For a number of years Ali was Head of Drama in London secondary schools in the top 1% of deprivation where she significantly raised the profile of Drama, increasing GCSE results from 53% to 96% A*-C in two years. She has worked as a GCSE and A’ Level Drama examiner, and leads consultancy and Drama INSET training programmes at The London Palladium, and designs the educational workshops to accompany The Railway Children at Kings Cross Theatre, and The Scoop free theatre season. She managed the social inclusion programmes at the National Youth Theatre for two years.

Ann Akin

Actress

"Ann Akin, is a professional actress, producer and workshop facilitator. Some of Ann’s television appearances include: Law and Order UK (ITV), EastEnders (BBC1), Humans (C4), The Javone Prince Show (BBC2), The Delivery Man (ITV) and The Unforgotten (ITV) From November 2010 till July 2013 she was Artistic Director and co founder of Vintage Star Productions, an award winning theatre company. She wrote, choreographed, directed and co produced their first production, Conversations with Love, which won Best Theatre Production and Best Writer at the 2011 BEFFTA awards. The success of Vintage Star propelled Ann's creative vision further into looking at theatre within an educational setting. This led to her setting up HARTS. Ann Akin launched the LOST Young Company in September 2012. At launch, there were 7 children attending. Now called LOST HARTS Young Company, run by Harts Theatre Company (HTC) and funded by Young Lambeth Coop."

Eastman Presser

Practice as Research

Eastman Presser is a musicker (sic) from Ohio, USA. After studying music technology and composition at Oberlin Conservatory, Eastman is now based in London studying Practice as Research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. His practice takes interaction between sound and the body as a starting point for creating situations that humorously problematize ideas of listening, genre, and mediation. His practice synthesizes percussion, electro-acoustic music, media theory, and performance theory. He has performed internationally in the US, UK, and Germany.

Jessica Hartley

Accidental Academic

Dr. Jessica Hartley is an accidental academic. A love of learning, a fascination with people's unique voices and an intense desire to listen to them brought her from a career in secondary education to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (via the circus - but that is another story).

Jon Davison

Clown Performer

Jon Davison is a clown performer, teacher, director and researcher, with 35 years’ experience. He was formerly Research Fellow at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and is the author of two books, Clown Readings in Theatre Practice and Clown Training, a practical guide and is currently preparing three new books for publication. He was co-founder of the Escola de Clown de Barcelona and previously taught at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona. He currently runs the London Clown School. He is artistic director of the clown companies Stupididity and Citizens of Nowhere. www.jondavison.net

Liz Atkin

Visual Artist

Liz Atkin is an internationally acclaimed visual artist and advocate based in London. Compulsive Skin Picking dominated her life for more than 20 years, but art has become her greatest tool for recovery. Liz reimagines the body-focused repetitive behaviour of skin picking into photographic artworks, charcoal drawings and performances. Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Australia, Singapore, USA and Japan. She has given public talks for TEDx Youth, Wellcome Collection, Southbank Centre, and at a range of UK and international conferences and health events. She has featured on BBC Breakfast, BBC Woman's Hour, BBC World Service and BBC Radio London, Aljazeera TV, the INewspaper and BBC Arabic.

Mohamad Shaifulbahri

Creative producer and Arts Educator

Mohamad Shaifulbahri (Shai) is a creative producer and arts educator from Singapore who is currently based in London. He holds an MA in Creative Producing from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He founded and was the Artistic Director of Yellow Chair Productions and recently started Bhumi Collective, a Singapore-UK company telling stories about the lesser seen, lesser heard, and the lesser talked about, which staged its debut production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2016. He now serves as Joint Artistic Director. In the UK, his credits include: PIAF (Charing Cross Theatre), everything that rises must dance (Resolution 2016), bhumi (Edinburgh Fringe), Bunker Without Borders (Bunker Theatre) In Singapore, his credits include: Every Brilliant Thing, Ikan Girl (Bhumi Collective), The Last Five Years, Off Centre, Those Who Can't, Teach (Yellow Chair Productions), Lord of the Flies, Everything but the Brain (Sight Lines Productions)

Paula Kiel

PhD Candidate

Paula Kiel is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her PhD project explores practices of preparing for post-mortem online communication. Her research interests include: death online, the internet and computer-mediated communication, visual media, media and everyday life and technological innovation. Her paper “The Emerging Practices of the Collective Afterlife: Multimodal Analysis of Websites for Post-mortem Digital Interaction” won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2017 Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference.

Phoenix Thomas

Costume Designer

Phoenix Thomas is a Queer costume artist, researcher, and performance maker specialising in issues of gender, identity and representation. Having completed their PhD in Queering Costume Design at RCSSD in 2016, Phoenix recently undertook further Post-Doctoral Research into Costume Research Methodologies as part of the Costume in Focus Research Group at Aalto University. Phoenix has been working as a costume designer and maker for many years, and through their doctoral Practice has developed an exploratory mode of costume-centered performance as an independent performance maker in both dance and interactive performance installations - most recently 'My Sex' - a solo piece designed performed and produced for the Trans Pride Brighton Arts Programme at the Marlborough Theatre Brighton.

Rachel Vogler

BA in Drama, Applied Theatre & Education

Rachel Vogler is an undergraduate student at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her main areas of interest include the use of theatre for conflict resolution, feminist theatre, and body-conscious theatre practice. Rachel is currently on the student union as Women's Officer, and works part time in Jewish Education and youth-work. In her TEDx talk at Royal Central School, Rachel explores how diverse-bodied women navigate taking up space in the world. As women are consistently reminded that smaller is better, how can big bodies exist comfortably in space, and how can we lay rightful claim to the space our bodies take up?

Sally Mackey

Professor of Applied Theatre & Performance

Sally Mackey is Professor of Applied Theatre and Performance at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London where she founded the first UK undergraduate degree in applied theatre. On the editorial board of RiDE: the Journal of Applied Performance and Theatre and advisory board of Applied Theatre Research, she is a key figure in the Applied and Social Theatre field. Reflecting a related interest in theatre ecology, she was a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioning panel for the major themes of ‘Landscape and Environment’ and ‘Living with Environmental Change’ and the cross RCUK panel ‘Valuing Nature: Health and Wellbeing’. Publishing on performance, place, community and the environment, she has co-edited themed editions in RiDE - ‘On Site and Place’ and ‘Environmentalism’ - and has completed outputs from three AHRC grants in the last few years: Challenging Place, Performing Local Places and Performing Abergavenny

Sally White

Actress

Sally White is an Actress, Singer, Dancer, Teacher and Entrepreneur. She is the founder and creative director of Sally White Creative, a London based Communications Agency specialising in storytelling through Digital Marketing, Public Relations and Creative Videography. Originally from Australia, she spent the early part of her twenties working full-time in a variety of Corporate Communications & I.T. Project Management roles. During this time she also worked as a Performer and in 2013 quit her job and moved to London to pursue acting. In 2015 she co-founded a Software Development company and also graduated from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama with a Masters in Music Theatre. Working as an actress, living abroad, and running her own business has sparked her curiosity in helping others integrate their interests and passions to create fulfilling and momentous careers.

Samantha Unwin

MA in Actor Training and Coaching

Sam is studying her MA in Actor Training and Coaching at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and is due to hand in her final project - on the same topic as her talk - in September. Previously, she studied her BA in Music and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a director, composer and video game enthusiast.

Sara Hirsch

Performance Poet

Sara Hirsch is a London grown performance poet, graduating from RCSSD in 2011 from the BA Acting course, specialising in collaborative and devised theatre. Sara recently completed her Master’s degree in Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths University and is one of a handful of trained spoken word educators working in schools and communities across the world. In 2014 Sara won the UK Poetry Slam Championships and subsequently went on to represent the UK in various international competitions. She ranked third in the World Slam Championships in 2014, won the European Slam in Madrid in 2016 and was a finalist in the BBC Slam in 2017. Sara has performed at Glastonbury, has toured extensively both in the UK and internationally and has had two full length poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books.

Sylvan Baker

Applied Theatre Researcher

Sylvan is an Applied Theatre researcher and practitioner with experience in a range of applied arts contexts. He's an Associate Artist at People's Palace Projects and an Artist Fellow at QMUL. He holds an MA from Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and practice PhD from QMUL. His current research, the Verbatim Formula, uses verbatim practice with care experienced young people and is a recent winner of the QMUL Public Engagement award 2017 and has been awarded 3-year AHRC funding to extend its practice to several other university partners including Goldsmiths College and UEL.

Tim Crouch

Theatre Maker & Performer

Tim is an Obie-award winning UK-based theatre-maker. He was an actor for many years before starting to write – and he still performs in much of his work. His plays include My Arm, ENGLAND (a play for galleries), An Oak Tree, The Author, Adler & Gibb and (with Andy Smith) what happens to the hope at the end of the evening. Tim tours his work nationally and internationally. He also writes for younger audiences. A series of plays inspired by Shakespeare’s lesser characters includes I, Malvolio and I, Peaseblossom. For the RSC Tim has directed The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear and I, Cinna (the poet) – all for young audiences. Other directing credits include Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore for the Unicorn Theatre, London, and The Complete Deaths for Spymonkey. His next play, Beginners, opens at the Unicorn Theatre in March 2018. Awards for Tim’s work include an Edinburgh Fringe First, a Herald Archangel, two Total Theatre awards, the Brian Way award for best children’s play and the