From Gesture to Mutuality: Electra’s Alphabet as Embodied Research

​Dear doctoral colleagues, interdisciplinary colleagues, and peers,

I’d love to invite you to this term’s Play-in-Research Symposium at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, taking place on Monday 30th June in a lecture room in the Silk Street building (please ask at reception for directions).

This relaxed, end-of-year event celebrates the role of play in artistic research — from serious silliness to methodological mischief — and I’ll be sharing a brief sliver of my PhD work as part of the afternoon programme. It’s a chance to stretch my wings a little away from the writing-up desk, and I’d be thrilled if you were around to join me and the other presenters.

🕒 Presentation: 3:15pm as part of an all day event running 11am - 4pm
🥂 Drinks & Nibbles: from 4:00pm (a lovely chance to catch up!)
📍 Recital Room TBC, Guildhall School, Silk Street Building

The event is open to all — colleagues, students, friends, and guests are welcome but do confirm by RSVP with thanks.
If you’re able to come, I’d be delighted to see you there.
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(P.S. I'm working toward submitting next spring, so light feedback or reflections on how it reads across disciplines would be warmly appreciated!)

From Gesture to Mutuality: Electra’s Alphabet as Embodied Research
(From the PhD project: A Voice Lesson — Refunctioning Mutuality as Ethical Embodied Practice in the UK Laboratory Theatre Diaspora)

This presentation shares findings from an ongoing practice-as-research PhD that reconceptualises Mutuality — a performance method rooted in laboratory theatre — as a contemporary, ethical methodology foregrounding actor training as a site of epistemological enquiry and creative agency.

Grounded in the psychophysical tradition originating with Stanislavsky and later developed by companies like Gardzienice (where I trained and performed from 2000–2007), the research begins with a reflexive, embodied analysis of the title role I developed in Electra — a process I now call Electra’s Alphabet. These early gestural explorations became a departure point for critiquing coercive structures in lab culture and reimagining Mutuality as an inclusive, affective, and ethically-grounded method of embodied knowledge production.

This refunctioning grounds a new framework: Integrated Physiovocality (IPV) — a six-stage cycle shaped by diversity-led collaborations (2019–2025), interweaving lab tools such as spinal awareness, physiovocal listening, and conscious behaviour mapping, guided by values of presence, intentionality, embodiment, and transdisciplinary fluency.

The talk includes IPV demonstrations, archival Gardzienice footage, and excerpts from A Voice Lesson (Britten Pears Arts 2023) — a hybrid, split-stage film–music–theatre work spanning live, digital, and AI-generated dramaturgies. In one scene, two hands — one Black, one white — appear from a single body to revisit Electra’s Alphabet, rendered through AI-animated cosmos imagery. These dislocated sequences amplify touch as affect and articulate a collective, more-than-human identity — consciously resisting what Haraway (1988) calls the ‘God trick’.

The presentation closes with two generative questions:

• What if play is our primary site of knowledge?
• How might Mutuality — as a practice, not a theory — transform how we train, perform, and co-create across difference?

Still from a film by Liv Penny during A Voice Lesson in the Britten Pear Studio at Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh September 2023
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