Dr Sarah Levinsky
Lecturer in Theatre and Performance
I am a theatre, dance, and digital performance maker, as well as researcher, consultant arts strategist/fundraiser, and lecturer (teaching across BA Theatre and Performance, BA Dance and Choreography, BA Acting and BA Technical Theatre Arts). I believe strongly in the power of co-creation to develop people’s sense of their own agency, and this underlies my work across all its varied manifestations. As a maker I am particularly interested in co-creating imaginative, challenging, and surprising performance works with community participants. I am also a forum theatre practitioner and work sensitively to devise theatre from people’s stories and experiences, having developed elements of my practice through long-term collaboration with Cardboard Citizens, working with people with lived experience of homelessness, refugees, and asylum seekers to create absurd, grotesque, beautiful, celebratory, gritty, and hard-hitting performance works. In 2024 I was commissioned by Wildworks Theatre Company as part of their Hello Stranger programme to develop a project, Seen/Heard, with people experiencing homelessness in Cornwall, working in partnership with St Petrocs. I am now continuing this work under a new company Seen Heard Theatre run in collaboration with choir leader Vicky Abbott and radio journalist Karen Pirie.
I joined Falmouth University at the start of my practice-based PhD project within the AHRC-funded 3D3 Centre for Doctoral Training. My PhD project, Encounters Between Dance and Digital Meaning: Discovering Potential in the Question of Movement, centred on an interactive choreographic improvisation system, Tools that Propel (TTP), co-developed with Adam Russell. The thesis investigated how TTP develops new choreographic thought-action in interacting dancers; examines how a new movement language emerges between the dancer and the system; and explores how it is entangled with the interactor in a process of becoming, asking them to dialogue with new ways of experiencing themselves in relation to the non-human world. My interests in digital performance have also seen me co-lead the R&D for a digital interactive storytelling tablecloth and tea-set for tea dances, commissioned through Kneehigh’s Coastal Communities programme, working in collaboration with Jasmine Cox from BBC R&D and I have an interest in how hidden technologies can catalyse extraordinary, unexpected performative encounters and also change people’s understanding of their relationship with the world in embodied ways. These interests build on earlier performance work prior to my PhD in which I focussed on creating environmental theatre that challenged audience/performer relations or explored how dramaturgy emerges through the entanglement of performers, objects, site, media, and spectatorship.
Across a wide-ranging work history, other companies/organisations with whom I have worked include, amongst others, Studio Wayne McGregor, Theatre Royal Plymouth, London Symphony Orchestra, Dance United, Spitalfields Music, Company of Angels, Oval House, Chisenhale Dance Space, Centre 151, Pimlott Foundation, and The Reading Agency. I also co-founded and was co-artistic director of Mapping4D and created work as an independent artist.
External Links
Qualifications
Qualifications
| Year | Qualification | Awarding body |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | PhD | UAL |
| 2000 | MA in Theatre Studies | Leeds University |
| 1998 | MA (Cantab) English | University of Cambridge |
Membership of external committees
Governor Penryn CollegeResearch Interests
Research interests and expertise
Co-creating theatre and performance with vulnerable, disenfranchised and marginalised communities - researching how genuine co-creative processes and challenging our own tendencies towards artistic and aesthetic 'gatekeeping' can enable people to have agency and empowerment and improve mental health.
The role of creativity to empower communities to develop resilience in the face of climate crisis (focussing on co-creation methodologies). I am particularly interesting in working with communities to co-create interactive installations in public/transitional spaces which generate renewable energy and engage people in behaviour change as a result of their embodied interactions.
How entanglement as a philosophical and theoretical paradigm can inform the development, ethics, potential and role of digital artworks and applications.
Forum Theatre as a way of supporting the development of greater embodied understanding of research problems across disciplinary boundaries. I am interested in using to it to enable researchers to gain new embodied understanding of their research from different perspectives. (I have facilitated this in Germany for PhD and postdoc researchers investigating ethical, legal, and social questions concerning digitalisation, health and ageing.)
How embedding (hidden) digital technologies within live physical events/ public artworks can engage people with cultural activity, create connections, tell stories, ignite imagination and catalyse change-making.
I am interested in developing interdisciplinary teaching approaches that empower students to integrate theory and practice and take agency over their learning.
Research topics
Currently researching the impact of co-creative performance making with people experiencing homelessness in Cornwall.
Policy engagement within Cornwall
Engagement with organisations which contribute to the development of educational, cultural or socio-economic policies in Cornwall
Governor for Penryn College
Business Engagement
Business start ups
Seen Heard Theatre - co-founder of this collective of theatre makers and storytellers which aims to unlock the extraordinary stories of ordinary people to co-create powerful, moving and entertaining performances and events which challenge public perceptions.
Professional Engagement
Independent professional practice
Please see www.sarahlevinsky.co.uk for examples of my independent professional practice.
Social, community and cultural engagement
Please see https://wildworks.org.uk/projects/seen-heard/ to hear the stories of some of the participants who co-created Seen Heard in 2024.
Engagement with professional associations and societies
I am frequently engaging with professional organisations in the theatre and dance sector as part of my independent practice and creating partnerships to develop projects.
I am a member of EQUITY, a union for professional performers and creative practitioners.
As a consultant arts strategist and fundraiser I am engaged with organisations developing socially-engaged projects as well as trusts, foundations and public funding bodies.
