Documentary theatre performance: modes of listening

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A Talk by Dr. Tom Cantrell, University of York, UK
2022 scholar-in-residence at Concordia’s Acts of Listening Lab

In this talk, Dr. Cantrell will discuss how actors approach listening across a range of documentary theatre forms. He will identify ‘documentary theatre’ as an umbrella term which includes a wide range of working methods, each calling on the actor to listen in different ways. Examples drawn from British theatre will include headphone verbatim theatre, tribunal theatre and verbatim musicals. 

BIO

Dr Tom Cantrell is Reader in Theatre and Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning & Students in the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media at the University of York, UK. As Associate Dean he leads on the management, strategic initiatives and development of learning and teaching across the faculty. Within the TFTI Department, he teaches on the BA in Theatre: Writing, Directing and Performance and the MA in Theatre-Making as well as supervising doctoral research students.

His research addresses questions of performance and, in particular, acting processes. To date, he has published four books on acting, including Acting in British Television (Palgrave, 2017) and an edited collection, Exploring Television Acting, for Bloomsbury (2018). He co-edited Playing for Real with Mary Luckhurst (Palgrave, 2010), and wrote Acting in Documentary Theatre, which was published by Palgrave in 2013. He is currently co-editing The Theatre-Maker’s R&D Sourcebook for Methuen Drama.