Performance Research Centre

The Performance Research Centre focuses predominantly on practice-led research activities. Our specialist areas are Comedy, Scriptwriting, Digital Performance, Live Art and Applied Performance. Our members are working with leading organisations, including some of the UK’s most progressive companies Blast Theory, Triangle Theatre and Ridiculusmus. Members are regularly contracted to write and perform work for TV and Radio and all our members actively create and present new work.

Linked to the Performance Research Centre are a number of international research projects including the ‘As Yet Impossible’ research project which is exploring the intersection of Digital Performance and Science, Ugly Scenes a clownesque online adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis and Studio Matejka, an international interdisciplinary project based at Studio Matejka, (Grotowski Centre) in Wroklaw, Poland.

The research resources at our disposal include traditional studio-based devising spaces, two dance studios, a studio theatre and a 300-seat proscenium arch theatre. We have also recently opened a new Digital Performance Research Laboratory at our MediaCity UK Campus, a state of the art flexible fully connected performance space. We work in partnership with a number of local theatre organisations and art centres which gives us access to high quality performance spaces across the region.

Our external networks locally include -The Library Theatre and Royal Exchange Studio, Manchester, the Flare Festival, 24.7 Festival, The Children’s Television Workshop, The Hive in the Cliff, Plane Performance, Let’s Go Global, the Blue Room Project, Islington Mill, Ordsall Hall, the Lowry Studio, and the Media City Cultural Consortium.

The PRC international networks include Waag Society Amsterdam, BBC, Emily Carr University, Canada, The Grotowski Institute, Wroklaw, Trinity College, Dublin, Tampere University, Finland and the Entertainment Technology Centre, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg.

The PhD supervision areas that we cover include: Interdisciplinary performance: sound theatre; Theatre and new technologies; Devising; Directing; Comedy and “the North”; Women and Stand-Up; Intertextuality; Applied Performance Practice; Live Art; Contemporary Performance Practice; Script-writing for film; TV and radio; Performance and Gender; Performance and Science: Digital Performance.

For information about the centre’s activities and initial PhD enquiries contact Mary Oliver.