A Festival of Contemporary Theatre and Performance 

Students shouting back at the world!   

Last week the Performance Hub hosted a festival of Contemporary Theatre created and performed by third year students from the BA (Hons) Acting and Theatre department. The performances explored alternative dramaturgical approaches, rejecting narrative and character, to create experiential events for the audience that were viscerally affective and moving. Dr Demetris Zavros, a lecturer on the contemporary performance module, said ‘students worked really hard to create a wide variety of performances; some were politically challenging while others were poignant and moving. It’s been very rewarding to support them on their creative journeys’.  

Dance and Drama student Dais Leach created an ‘exhibit’ that brought the audience into an encounter with the realities faced by orca whales in captivity. Dais translated facts and statistics into a durational performance that involved constant movement inside a tank designed to match the proportions of those that hold orca whales. The audience were invited to peer at Dais through the sides of the tank, whilst selecting their own soundscapes from pre-prepared ipods which included applause and whale song.  Dais said ‘the approach to performance making used by Lone Twin really inspired me to experiment with translating research about whales into the spacio-temporal structure of a performance experience’. 

Drama student, Chloe Millward used a presentational style performance: listing things she could have created as a contemporary performance, ranging from the mundane to the macabre to the impossible! Form mirrored content in an interesting way in this performance about performance- making. Chloe said ‘Forced Entertainment' really inspired the presentational style of my performance, whilst performance artists like Marina Abramović provided a stimulus for the ‘impossible’ ideas. Exploring postdramatic theatre and contemporary performance making has been a very interesting and challenging experience and I feel like I have really grown as a person and performer’.  

Drama student, Nicole Gard created an immersive video installation as a response to the recent horrific murders of Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard and the broader context of violence and misogyny against women. The video, filmed on a mobile phone by Nicole as she walked home from work, forces the viewer into the position of a lone female navigating the city at night. Nicole said ‘I wanted to find a way to make the audience really feel the sense of the all consuming anxiety that I (and other women) feel in the evening when I’m walking alone. The angle of the phone camera is pointed down because I walk with my head down to draw less attention. This angle created an embodied experience in the spectator, who was unable to look up, that really effectively encapsulated a disturbing sense of panic’.  

Programme leader, Dr Claire Hampton, described the festival as ‘a super example of the range of different things students have an opportunity to get involved in at the University of Wolverhampton’ she said ‘beyond teaching acting, our job is to provide a space for people to learn and explore things they didn’t even realise they were interested in. Performances like these give students a voice and a platform to say something about - and to - the world