Theatre at Bristol Seminars (TaBS) are delighted to welcome two guest speakers for our final event of this academic year. In this special event, we welcome back recent postgraduates from the Department of Theatre to share their innovative and cutting-edge work in the areas of Performance Studies pedagogy and research. Dr Jayne Gold, who will be presenting her research, 'Accounts from the field (or forest, riverside, meadow): Drama-based pedagogy and nature', and Dr Harry R McCarthy, who will be presenting his research, ''Cattle of this Colour': Boy Actors and Early Modern Trans Studies'. Abstracts for both talks and biographies of both speakers can be found below.

This event will last from 4:30-6pm and will be followed by a drinks reception.

 

Accounts from the field (or forest, riverside, meadow): Drama-based pedagogy and nature

 

This presentation will explore practices of Drama-based pedagogy and its intersections with outdoor play and nature-based learning. I will draw upon my experiences setting up Stomping Space in the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park in mid-Wales UK, a space in nature for young people and their families to explore the outdoors and arts together. This rootedness informs my approach to drama and outdoor learning, creating a practice that is intimately connected to the local landscape and community. I draw comparisons with play-based outdoor learning and drama pedagogies: the drama circle becomes the campfire circle. I will discuss how developing these philosophies in my own practices has transferred into my role as an Assistant Professor of Theatre Education in the training of student teachers in Logan, Utah in the Rocky Mountains. Here too, as we work with local elementary schools, pedagogies are informed by our sense of place and specifically our connections to the local landscape.

 

Dr. Jayne Gold is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Education and Theatre Arts at Utah State University whose research, practice, and teaching spans academia and community engagement. With publications in the International Journal of Heritage Studies and a forthcoming chapter in Applied Theatre with Urban Youth, Witnessing Change, her work builds on a decade teaching Drama in London schools. Her academic roles include prestigious institutions like Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her doctoral research at the University of Bristol explored the theatrical history of Brecon, Wales, where she produced a Heritage Lottery-funded community theatre project. In 2025, her direction of ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ earned praise for its emotional resonance and inclusive, authentic approach. A passionate advocate for theatre as a tool for change, her applied theatre practice and research reaches from theatre for babies to older adults in memory care.

'Cattle of this Colour': Boy Actors and Early Modern Trans Studies

Boy actors and the so-called 'transvestite stage' have an uneasy relationship with early modern trans studies. In a field dominated by explorations of gendered clothing and tantalising moments of 'reveal,' the insights of trans studies, and trans people, are all too readily elided. This paper will consider whether there is a place for boy actors in early modern trans studies by offering a reading of characters like Rosalind in As You Like It which extends beyond the easy slippage from one set of clothes to another and centralises the intersecting production of gendered and racial categories to which trans studies writ large has always been trying to direct our attention. In the process, it will offer a consideration of what the mutually constitutive fields of premodern trans and critical race studies have to offer to theatre history.

Dr Harry R. McCarthy is the author of Boy Actors in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2022) and Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2020). He recently published a new critical introduction to Titus Andronicus for the Oxford World's Classics Series (2025). Currently a Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, in August he will take up the post of Assistant Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Southern California.

 

To book a free ticket, please visit: https://buytickets.at/universityofbristoldepartmentoftheatre/1681061