Fully-funded PhD: Uncovering Taxonomical Scores for Performance: An investigation into the reanimation of archival, training and compositional practices through the work of Reckless Sleepers.

Reckless Sleepers is an internationally-renowned performance company, situated between the Northwest of England and East Flanders, Belgium. They have been making critically-acclaimed contemporary performance work that draws on dance, theatre, and visual art since 1988. Situated in the fields of scored performance, performer training and performing archives, this PhD will examine how engagement with an archive enables performance histories to be taxonomised and reanimated, using Reckless Sleepers’ body of work as a case study. The candidate will develop a practice-based methodology to analyse, critique and respond to the living history of the company, resulting in the creation of taxonomical scores that allow historical performance phenomena and training practices to be re-animated in the present moment in the form of a ‘live archive’. 

Reckless Sleepers have extensive experience of archiving their creative processes and making these publicly available. Working closely with the company, the PhD will actively engage with and add to this archival material, allowing this body of work to expand further. The candidate will have access to training via the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (NWCDTP) and Manchester Met’s Postgraduate Arts and Humanities Centre (PAHC). 

Project aims and objectives

Using Reckless Sleepers’ extensive body of work as a case study, this PhD will contribute new knowledge to the fields of archival and performance research, generating a model of practice that can be utilised by other artists. Structured over three overlapping phases, the project asks how taxonomies of practice, or scores, can be developed through engagement with a material archive (video and photographic documentation, digitised director notebooks, workshop plans, performance reviews, funding applications, etc.), attendance at live performance events, workshops, residencies and interviews. It investigates how these taxonomies can capture and categorise the interconnected strands (eg, devising strategies, training approaches and physical languages) of the company’s performance repertoire, facilitating the creation of a ‘live archive’.