Matthew Rawcliffe

  Do you have one artwork or performance you saw that is like the one ? I have the National Theatre’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children (2009) . Fiona Shaw ascending the Olivier from below the stage bellowing out a rock anthem. Cheap and dirty Brechtian simplicity alongside these beautiful emotional performances. The scene where Katrin, who cannot speak, alerts the nearby town of the oncoming invasion and is subsequently killed for doing so. The sheer physicality of these intense emotions.   So - I’m visiting the National Theatre Archive, where you can look through their collections, and I’m going to sit back and enjoy a recording of this production. I’m curious to revisit it to understand why it was so important to me. I hope it will not spoil a special memory - let’s see. …. Okay firstly now that I’ve done it - what a strange thing to do. I had this crazy sensation of how close this thing from thirteen years ago feels. It wasn’t really a new experience - which wa...

Hi there friends, I’m going to do a few end of the year blogs - my other modes of reflection are 90% visual so I’m finding the blogs are a great system to ensure I continue with some textual reflections as well. People keep asking what I’m doing a masters in, and I always reply that I don’t know, that I haven’t decided yet. Which is kind of feeling very liberating, I’m not putting things in boxes, I’m letting them come to me. But I’m also putting the hard work off, of defining - not to say I think defining necessarily actually makes anything clearer - but because it needs to be done. For me. Institutionally. For me. This blog will be dedicated to that line of questioning: What is this? Where is the red thread?   I’m on the MAPP Dance (Specialisation) course - which means I will define what I specialise in.   It’s going to be a long blog. I will do some exercises to try and put names on things.   It’s something about the audience. It’s something about form. With reference...

On Thursday I visited campus for the first time which was a little surreal and it was so nice to do something in person. Saying that, I do feel that we have created a tangible sense of community in our digital realm, but there was something revelatory about being in actual space. It was also helpful to realise I don’t necessarily yearn for that space, Middlesex is a huge campus and there is that institutionalisation which somehow I can live slightly outside of in our flexible learning process. But I also realised how valuable it can be to have that space, being in the library and taking Helen’s class - it is everything we think about when we talk about embodiment, and I do experience that in distanced learning but when I can really be inside of it, it comes easier, and sometimes it is just nice to have it easy - otherwise everything seems so bloody difficult! the library I started off using the library - it is great to see shelves fully stocked on performing arts literature! I know I...

  Presentations and Zoom and Time and Artefacts! The final presentations from the lovely module three cohort - it was great to see the progression of where things are heading on this journey, thank you all for sharing! It brought up lots and lots of thoughts. I was a bit stressed on your behalf - I think thirty minutes is a very short amount of time. It was interesting the different approaches to packing in and presenting of information. It is also interesting what comes out when we speak, the language that we might fixate on for hours as we design our written work. When I hear you speak around your research sometimes there is a beautiful honesty where I really meet you, it’s not intellectualised or poetic it is just you and it is real - I also see the opposite when our fast brain runs ahead of us and we inadvertently slip up, we contradict or fall back in to old habits. How we can we differentiate this from intentionality and make exceptions in spoken presentations - should we? I ...