The Performance Research Hub has small pots of up to £500 available to fund participatory events which explore co-creative and collaborative work in theatre and performance.
The Hub provides an arena for researchers and practitioners with shared interests within this field to come together to discuss the theory of performance and to cross-fertilise ideas and practice across a wide range of academic disciplines and communities. This programme of events links directly with the initiatives of the Performance Research Hub, enabling external artists and partners to work with academics to co-create, collaborate and share their research and work in new ways and with new and wider audiences.
For the Trinity Term round, the successful projects are:
Beyond Borders: Ukrainian Voices in Performance
Lead applicant: Daria Nepochatova (DPhil student, MML)
A one-day participatory event centered around Cappy and the Whale, a children’s theatre adaptation of an award-winning writer, screenwriter, and playwright from Ukraine Kateryna Babkina’s acclaimed book. By bringing together artists, researchers, and members of the community, the project explores how literature can transform into embodied experience and shared emotional knowledge through performance.
Intervening Re-enactments: Milo Rau’s Investigative Anthropology and Political Activism
Lead applicant: Dr Sophia Buck (MML)
A two-day workshop in May 2026, including a masterclass and public screening with Milo Rau. Starting from Rau’s work, this workshop investigates artistic research methods of contemporary, intercultural theatre to determine their interventionist potential for (re)imagining global justice. The prize-winning Swiss director Rau is internationally renowned for developing a new brand of political theatre with his International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM): reenactments, conflict zone productions, judicial performances, autoethnographic theatre.
Mixing Sound and Vision: Exploring technology, music production and visual art interaction
Lead applicant: Professor Kathryn Eccles (OII)
The pilot workshop of a planned multi-part series exploring technology, music production, and the visual arts. Bringing together researchers from digital cultural studies, students from across multiple disciplines, and Oxford-based artist Rawz, our ultimate goal is to produce an interactive performance, exploring music production and visual art interaction through hands-on activities.
Mousikē Technē: The Art of the Muses in Thought, Word, Sound, and Stage
Lead applicant: Professor Armand D'Angour (Classics)
A seminar organised by Ancient Music at Oxford with Dr John Franklin from the University of Vermont. This event will be built around the theme of music theory, composition, philosophy, performance, and aesthetics in the ancient world. The focus of the seminar is the variety of methodologies which can be applied to ancient performance genres. Many of these allow for reconstructions of ancient music to be adapted for the modern stage.
New approaches to theatrical form: Radical Realisms in Contemporary British Theatre and Modernism after the Ballet Russes book conversation
Lead applicant: Professor Sos Eltis (English)
This event will introduce two new books by recent Oxford DPhil graduates, Dr Hannah Greenstreet and Dr Gabriela Minden, who were active members of the TORCH theatre and performance research network. They were both awarded the Swapna Dev Memorial Book Prize for outstanding DPhil theses submitted to the Faculty of English. Hannah and Gabriela will be in conversation with Professor Sos Eltis about their work and her research in Victorian theatre, particularly around their complementary approaches to theatrical form.
Read Between The Lines!
Lead applicant: Professor Philomen Probert
Read Between The Lines is a community festival hosted by the Rumble Museum at Cheney School, which celebrates ancient and modern inventions for textual engagement such as emojis, scare quotes, highlight, cartouches in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and many more. A centrepiece for the event will be a new sketch (which this funding contributes to), drawing lightheartedly but informatively on the underlying research. The main character will be an emoji, on a quest to prove that emojis have existed for centuries. No easy answers will emerge, but there will be fun conversations and food for thought.
‘Sensitivity Reading’ as Dramaturgy – a workshop
Lead applicant: Nicholas McInerny, Conted
How do we build a theory of performance around the questions of sensitivity reading, and what would that look like? Playwright Nicholas McInerny and BAFTA award-winning actor Rakie Ayola present a workshop in which they present scenes from each draft of new play Common People to illustrate the journey they have gone on to identify stereotypes, racist tropes and challenge unconscious bias. Ayola will present a historical context for this journey in her lived experience as a black actor – as together they propose a model for sensitivity reading that enables the induvial writer to create characters and stories with greater confidence and genuine daring.
