Doing Practice Research, like, For Real-Talk with Q&A by Katie Paterson

Vague, nebulous, un-rigorous and confusing; practice research, though increasingly prevalent, can still find itself in need of justification. What does it look like to do practice research, like, for real?

In this talk and Q&A DTA Alumna Katie Paterson will discuss doing practice research both in academia and the ‘real world’. Having miserably failed to grasp the concept during her time at Birmingham DTA, she now works almost exclusively within it. Katie will discuss the trajectory from graduation to Drama School to PhD research.

She developed her MA thesis on staging the queerness of childhood into solo show Minor Disruptions, which featured dead hamsters and a total failure to learn to juggle, despite the best efforts of many kind audience members. This was followed by Game Face, an intercultural gig-theatre collaboration about body image and beauty myths that toured to New Zealand at the beginning of 2020. The common thread of this work is a concern with experiences we think we know all about, and how performance might uniquely reveal their strangeness, richness and comic potential. For example, the first fruit of this PhD is a pink-propelled verbatim experiment co-starring a cardboard cutout of Edward Cullen.

Katie Paterson is a London based theatremaker and researcher, who uses comedy as a queer and feminist practice, with an ethos of positive, empowering audience participation. Originally trained as an actor at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, she is currently undertaking Doctoral study at Guildhall School of Music & Drama supported by the Inaugural Arts and Health Studentship. In her research, she is exploring the potential of performance as a methodology to unearth women’s experiences of hormone treatments. She has shared work at The Barbican Pit, Theatre503, The Pleasance, Tristan Bates, the Edinburgh Fringe and Q Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand.

Book your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/doing-practice-research-like-for-real-talk-with-qa-tickets-160177885367