Capturing “The Spirit of Kneehigh”

This Research & Knowledge Exchange Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: Capturing “The Spirit of Kneehigh”: Archive, Body, Digitality and Legacy

We welcome all research degree applications aligned with and in response to this brief.

Kneehigh Theatre was a UK theatre company with a local, national and international profile. Founded in Cornwall in 1980, and based in breathtaking Barns in Gorran Haven, they created ensemble pieces of a highly physical and spectacular nature. Working with an ever-changing ensemble of performers, artists, technicians, administrators and makers, Kneehigh approached theatre with generosity, bravery and freedom. The company closed in 2021, but their legacies, and particularly approaches to performance making, are keenly felt across the theatre sector.

Falmouth University holds the Kneehigh Archive, but much of the company’s practice eludes traditional archival processes, embodied in performers, directors, and associates in Cornwall, nationally, and internationally in the work of Emma Rice, Carl Grose, Wildworks, and many others.

This project interrogates the boundaries of archival practice through those legacies and lineages, utilising emerging technologies—utilising Falmouth’s recent GWITHA success—to capture and preserve Kneehigh’s ways of working, discovering new approaches to the preservation of performance and the associated embryonic, fragile, and ephemeral processes of making. Yet these ways of working are not only tied to the bodies of the creative team, but also to site and space through Kneehigh’s Barns—which continue to be run as a home for artists and creativity by Kneehigh’s founder Mike Shepherd—where almost every show and idea was “sown and grown” for over 30 years.

Through engagement with the existing Kneehigh Archive, you will utilise cutting edge technologies and approaches to contribute new media to it, using Kneehigh’s Archive as a springboard to reimagine archival material and practices more broadly. While the company no longer exists, ‘the spirit of Kneehigh’—whatever that might be—lives on: this project’s challenge is to capture it several years after the company’s closure.

Projects deriving from this brief are expected to sit within the Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy and the following department.

All successful research degree project proposals must emphasise a clear alignment between the project idea and our Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy.