Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Anna Furse - BA PGCE PhD

Dr Anna Furse (Reader) is Head of Department of Theatre and Performance, and leads the MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths – an international laboratory programme in performer-driven theatre/dance/live art making. She convenes Space-Body-Spectator and supervises undergraduate Dissertations and practice-led PhD students. She is the curator of the Performance Research Forum - currently in its 16^th programme -  for which she received a Peake Teaching Award in 2005, and is a Principal Academic Staff member of Goldsmiths Digital Studios, Department of Computing.

Anna was one of the handful of the first generation of women directors in the UK, uniquely combining feminist concerns with Laboratory theatre research from the late 1970’s. Originally a classically trained dancer (The Royal Ballet) she has developed her own movement training methodology based in a range of influences from her studies with Peter Brook at the CIRT in Paris, ‘paratheatre’ with Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium in Poland, post-modern dance (e.g. Contact Improvisation) and martial arts  (e.g. Tai 'Chi, Capoeira and Aikido) in particular. This has been archived for digital dissemination via her research with the Arts Council England funded Choreographic Lab at the University of Northampton (www.choreographiclab.org/) and with a CELT Fellowship from Goldsmiths (see Graphic Body on the Department VLE web pages).

An award-winning professional theatre director and published writer, staging modern and new plays, classics and a range of devised works as well as her own commissioned writing and creations, she has worked in a range of contexts from repertory theatres to applied theatre, ‘sci-art’ to experimental laboratory environments. She has received many Arts Council Writers Awards, Bursaries and Grants over the years, her Artistic Directorships including the pioneering international-touring Bloodgroup 1979 - 1986, the new writing company Paines Plough 1990 - 1995, and her current company Athletes of the Heart. These have toured festivals in Western and Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Poland, Serbia and Russia) as well as in Asia, the Middle East and the USA. She has taught freelance for over thirty years in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Poland and the USA and held numerous teaching posts including Head of Movement at Rose Bruford College (1980 - 84) and Drama Studio (1987 - 1990). Prior to Goldsmiths she was Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at London Metropolitan University. She is Visiting Professor to the Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton University, USA, and Guest Tutor for the new Academy of Visual Arts, Ljubljana.

In 2007 her GLASS BODY: REFLECTING ON BECOMING TRANSPARENT (Wellcome Trust People Award) toured the UK on an Arts Council grant, and her radio debut as writer/director MY GLASS BODY with Sweet Talk Productions was commissioned and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. In 2008  her co-production DON JUAN.WHO?/DON JUAN.KDO? with Mladinsko Gledalisce in Ljubljana  (funded by Arts Council England, The British Council, the AHRC and the British Academy and previewed at the SHUNT VAULTS in 2007) premiered as part of FeEAST Festival at Riverside Studios.  She created an installation GLASS BODY FRAGMENTS for The Gathering at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, and her play THE PEACH CHILD was performed in regional theatres and at the Cottesloe Theatre (NT) as part of the National Theatre’s NEW CONNECTIONS programme (published by Faber), whilst DON JUAN.WHO? was performed in Ljubljana. In 2009 her play GORGEOUS completed its 4^th year in the repertory of the New Conservatory Theater, San Francisco and she launched the Athletes of the Heart Laboratory – a research company of graduates from the MA in Performance Making, premiering SICK OF LOVE in November as part of the Little Angel’s Suspense Festival of adult puppetry (www.pleasance.co.uk/islington/suspense). This research continued with a lecture-performance BEING TOUCHED at Goldsmiths and Stratford Circus in October 2010. Her new production SEA/WOMAN with Maja Mitic of DAH Teatar (www.dahteatarcentar.com) and Antonella Diana of Teatret OM, Denmark (www.teatretom.dk/), is part of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing Fractured Narratives project, funded by the AHRC (www.gold.ac.uk/pinter-centre/). This premiered in Belgrade in December 2010 and toured in the UK in 2011, including a British Council sponsored residency with Zoukak in Beirut, Lebanon, in January 2011. The performance was part of Stratford Circus’ Experimental Weekend in October 2011. The project also received a grant from Arts Council England. Recent publication includes editing a new anthology for Methuen Theatre in Pieces: Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration in 2011; guest editing an issue on Gender and Performance for GenderForum, University of Köln (www.GenderForum.uni-köln); ‘Being Touched’ for A Life of Ethics and Performance edited by John Matthews, Cambridge Scholars Press, ‘In Every Litre of Sea Water There Are Two Tablespoons of Salt… On Making SEA/WOMAN’ in Women: A Cultural Review. 22.4 (ed Helen Carr) 2011, and ‘Making a Spectacle of Herself: Charcot’s Augustine and the Hysteric Dance’ in Dance and ChoreoMania, edited by Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger, Henschel, Leipzig. Some of her key productions are currently being digitally published by ArtsArchives, Exeter (www.arts-archives.org/).

Anna is a regular speaker and workshop leader at international conferences, e.g. PsI New York University 2007, The Womens Writing for Performance Project University of Lancaster 2005/6, Arts and Health, Kings College 2006 and Contemporary Women’s Writing: New Texts, Approaches and Technologies San Diego State University 2010. She has been External Examiner of several universities including, currently, the MA in Scenography and Practice at Central, St Martins, University of the Arts. She is a member of several professional artist networks and The Directors Guild UK. In 2007 she was awarded an ArtsAdmin Roaming Bursary with which she travelled to India and Poland to research with Grotowski performers Jola Cynkutis and Khalid Tyabjj. She is recipient of two Goldsmiths Learning, Teaching and Assessment Fellowships (2007/8 and 2008/9), looking at Assessing Ephemeral Practice and the Research/Teaching Nexus respectively.

Aside from the press media, her work is cited/critiqued in numerous books including HYSTERIA, TRAUMA AND MELANCHOLIA Contemporary Anglophone drama, Wald, Christina. Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, PERFORMANCE RESEARCH Journal, On Memory – ‘Re-membering the Performing Body: Hysteria, Memory and Performance in Portrait of Dora and Augustine (Big Hysteria)’, By Joanna Townsend: Volume 5.3, Winter 2000 ISBN: 0415241049, Routledge 2000. HYSTORIES: hysterical epidemics and modern culture, Elaine Showalter.  London: Picador 1997.WOMEN IN DRAMATIC PLACE AND TIME: Contemporary Female Characters on Stage, Geraldine Cousins, Routledge 1996. FEMINIST THEATRE PRACTICE: a handbook, Elaine Aston London, Routledge 1999. YES? NO! MAYBE! : seductive ambiguity in dance, Emilyn Claid, New York Routledge 2006. THEATRE AND MOTHERHOOD by Jozefina Komporaly, Palgrave Macmillian 2006. DEVISING PERFORMANCE: a critical history, Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005. The STAGED ENCOUNTER, CONTEMPORARY FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S DRAMA by Sozala Ozden, Ibidem 2007. In November 2006 GLASSBODY was the subject of a paper by Erin Striff, Assistant Professor of English, Hartford, Connecticut University USA for ‘Theatre and Medicine: Body, Interdisciplinarity, and Performance’, American Society for Theatre Research  Conference USA www.astr.org/conference2006/Seminar2006_TheatreMedicine.html

Forthcoming work includes Chairing a talk for Stratford Circus with contributors to her book Theatre in Pieces, 14 October 2011, and the Wapping Project Bookshop on 18 November 2011. She is a guest panelist for the Freud Museum’s conference Adult Love and Its Roots in Infancy on 3 December 2011, chaired by Lisa Appignanesi. She is also developing a new research project with dancer Esther Linley, video artist Lucy Cash, scenographer Antonella Diana and composer Graeme Miller, OUR INFORMED HEARTS. This project investigates memory, trauma and dance through the perspective of a Bruno Bettleheim story and will involve the collaboration of a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst.

Research interests

include art and feminism, dance theatre, physical theatre,poetic/expressionistic devised theatre, new writing for new theatre, technology and performance and issues of the body (with sci-art overlaps). Her practice-based research concentrates - though not exclusively - on 'writing the body': themes and issues pertaining to the woman's body (e.g. hysteria: eating disorders, infertility and prostitution). Her 2 years research in the Arts Council Funded Choreographic Lab at Northampton University GRAPHIC BODY explored the body as a scenographic tool in a range of media, including studying with her long-term collaborator, scenographer Sally Jacobs. Her several works on infertility/reproductive technologies include THE PEACH CHILD (Little Angel/Japan Festival 2001) YERMA'S EGGS (Impact Award, The Wellcome Trust ) at Riverside Studios/Explore@Bristol (2003),GLASS BODY, a performance installation for the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital (People Award , The Wellcome Trust and the Arts Council) touring the UK in 2006/7 and GLASS BODY FRAGMENTS (2008). As a consequence of her work in bio-medicine and ‘sci-art’, in 2009 Anna was invited to join an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Oxford University – medical anthropologists, art historians, scientists and artists.

Selected publications

‘Making A Spectacle of Herself: Charcot’s Augustine and the Hysteric Dance’, Dance & ChoreoMania. (eds Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger (Hg.)) Henschel, 2011

Performance and Gender GenderForum (editor and contributor) www.GenderForum.uni-köln 2011