Dr David Linton

Performance Vocabularies and Methods

This module introduces students to significant skills, vocabularies and methods associated with creating performance and explores ways in which these may be applied within a range of dramatic and theatrical contexts. My teaching focuses on the work of theatre practitioner Joan Littlewood and allows students to explore the practitioner's practice through student-led, staff-supervised performances.

The Play Today  

The Play Today focuses on new writing and its pre-eminent place in contemporary British theatre culture.  The module is designed to allow students both to study key plays in depth and also to develop an understanding of the historical conditions that led to the primacy of the 'new play' in British theatre of the post war period. My teaching focuses on black British theatre and performance and its aesthetic, political and social resonance in the creation of alternative narratives.  

Popular Performance I: Mask and Clown

This module runs throughout the academic year and introduces students to a range of European popular performance traditions.  Commedia dell' arte, pierrot, pantomime and clown are typical examples of these forms.   The origins and histories of these modes of performance are examined and used as a foundation for the exploration of theory associated with academics and practitioners such as Jacques Lecoq, John Rudlin, Dario Fo and John Wright. 

Popular Performance II: Cabaret and Variety

I lead the module Popular Performance II: Cabaret and Variety which surveys the cultural impact of music hall, variety theatre and cabaret since the latter half of the nineteenth century and the legacies which these traditions continue to have on a wide range of current performance practice. This Module provides an opportunity to study a range of popular performance forms from historical, theoretical and practical perspectives.  

Special Study: Applied Theatre

I lead Applied Theatre which is a placement-learning module, which investigates the process of making drama and theatre in communities and non-traditional performance spaces, both practically and critically. The module is taught through seminars and practical workshops, exploring case studies, key concepts and techniques, critical questions, ethics, aesthetics, and project design. The main emphasis of the module is on developing the practical skills and contextual understanding needed to facilitate theatre processes and/or performances in partnership with a local community group or organisation. 

An Actor Prepares  

This module provides an opportunity to explore in detail the key facets of Modernism, as it manifested in theatre and especially in relation on how it impacted on the role of the actor. My teaching explores the gravitation away from Naturalism towards the ‘Anti-Realist' modes of the early twentieth century Avant-Garde, including on Symbolism, Surrealism, Expressionism and Epic theatre. The conventions, themes and principles of these movements are explored in terms of their social, cultural and political concerns. Selected texts from key dramatists are fully interrogated within the workshop/classroom and their influence on the work of the actor today examined.

My research explores:

• World theatres,
• The politics of resistance/agency,
• Adaptation and transnational exchange,
• Black British Performance 
• Participatory arts practice,
• Theatre history/ historiography, 
• National and cultural identities,
• Popular performance forms and their contemporary applications specifically mask/minstrelsy, music hall, pantomime, burlesque/ neo burlesque, pierrot, hip hop theatre and revue.  

I am a core scholar of the Musical Theatre and All That Jazz network funded from the Arts and Humanities Research Council which brings together an international group of scholars to exchange ideas about connections between musical theatre and jazz in dialogue with practitioners and industry workers, developing new approaches and practices at the intersection of forms and understandings. I was an integral researcher/collaborator on a three-year comparative study of popular theatre in London and Berlin, 1890-1939 a joint research project between Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Freie Universitat Berlin.

Publications