This centre aims to research and to advocate the development of ‘expanded’ dramaturgies.*

In using it, we imply both the diversity of emerging performance forms and structures and contemporary dramaturgical practices.

CRED members are committed to seeking innovative ways to expand the notion of performance in contemporary culture, and are particularly concerned with contemporary, interdisciplinary devised performance in the live art and post-dramatic theatre tradition.

CRED is based in the Faculty of Arts, at the University of Winchester.

CRED researchers share a common commitment to:

• The exploration of relationship in contemporary performance –which means that we are interested in the human activity of relating to art, artists, and creativity in the performance context, and in the live, vibrant, affect-filled human bodies that do this relating.
• A notion of place – in the sense that we are interested in how performance moves out of traditional venues and traditional dissemination networks into community, environmental and non-traditional settings, as well as the fact that location and site become part of the compositional and theoretical frameworks that underpin our work.
• Defining, furthering and expanding the role of the artist, and within this the role of what Costin Miereanu of the Sorbonne calls the ‘artistic sciences’ – the exploration of innovative ways that artists can become social interveners, cultural critics and actors, and dialectic educators; and the ways in which artistic processes postulate logics that are outside of the old Cartesian notions of ‘science’. This includes exploration of the role of the artist in academic settings, and the ways that academic settings might actually help advocate for and help develop and support creative work.
• Audience – the ways in which performers and audiences might expand how they relate with and to one another in vibrant artistic relationships, and the ways in which performance ‘acts’ with and on audiences
• Articulation – the notion of demystifying artistic processes and products through finding ways to communicate their ‘research’ content and results to wide varieties of audiences, be these academic, creative and/or popular. This moves beyond the tired debate about practice-integrated, practice-led and ‘pure’ theoretical research to create worlds where creative practice, popular intercourse and academic reflection form a whole, and in which researchers can articulate the results of creative processes and intellectual discourses using a variety of means
• Research/Teaching – undoing the notion that research and teaching practice somehow don’t inform one another. As we teach contemporary performance, we must keep our teaching fresh and informed by involvement in the artistic and academic worlds, and students and faculty alike profit from this networking

*We would like to acknowledge that we have adopted this term from Peter Eckersall’s article,‘Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on the Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project’, Theatre Research International, 31.3., pp.283-297.