Exchange Talks and Events
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Exchange Talks programme
The Exchange Talks are our weekly series of public events at RCS in which members of our staff, students, and invited speakers from academia and the professions share their research insights on art and broader issues that affect everyone in society. Exchange Talks are free and open to anyone who has an interest in the performing arts and wants to hear new ideas.
This term our talks fall under the themes of Art and Collaboration; Performance Series and Art and Protest.
To book a free place at any of our talks, online or in person, person please visit the RCS Box Office
RCS Staff and Students can access an archive of Exchange Talks on the portal.
If you are interested in sharing your work in an Exchange Talk, please email Research Development Officer.
Robin Peoples: Design-for-Performance – Collaborators in and Beyond Theatre
20 October 2025, Fyfe Lecture Theatre, 6-7pm
Robin Peoples will compare and contrast the processes of design-for-performance (and of directing) in the context of collaboration with theatre companies and venues, and in the context of collaboration with other cultural and creative organisations such as museums and heritage agencies. He will draw on his wide and long experience of diverse productions and projects, including past and current collaborations, and will consider the diverse range of creative aspirations and objectives aligned with the practical and pragmatic challenges and requirements to which each individual endeavour gives rise.
About the speaker:
Robin is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, the holder of the first SAC Director’s Bursary, the former Artistic Director of the Scottish Youth Theatre and of the Brunton Theatre, and is the Lecturer in Design at the RCS. He has devised workshop, community development and teaching materials, and has commissioned a wide range of new writing including plays and musical scores. He has served on national and international committees. He has directed and designed for companies including the Tron, the Lyric Belfast, Trafalgar Studios, 7:84, NTS, the Byre, Perth Rep., the Everyman Cork, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the Traverse, and many others, in work ranging from new writing to panto, small-scale touring and site-responsive to number one main house, and appearing on stages as diverse as Mull Little Theatre, London Palladium, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, American Folk Theatre NY, Glasgow Citizens, New Victory Theatre NY, and the SECC.
Kenneth Tay: Whose Music Is It Anyway? Composition as Collective Practice
27 October 2025, Online, 6-7pm
What does the work of a composer look like? We may picture a solitary figure writing music in isolation, but the reality is often more social and collaborative. This talk asks three questions: Whose voices shape a piece of music? What does collaboration look like in practice? Can collaboration change the way music is written and heard? Drawing on Kenneth’s experience as a composer working with performers and intercultural traditions, he shares stories from his creative practice that explore how a score is transformed into sound.
About the Speaker:
Kenneth Tay is a composer, conductor, and choral practitioner completing a PhD in Music Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. His research explores how Southeast Asian musical traditions and narratives can converse with Western sacred music, creating new possibilities for theological reflection and intercultural encounter. His works have been performed internationally by ensembles including The Marian Consort (2025), University of Delaware Chorale (2024), and Arcadian Singers (2023), and featured at the Singapore Choral Festival (2025), BBC Radio 3 (2024), and the World Symposium on Choral Music in Istanbul (2023).
Prof. Steve Halfyard and Prof. Nicholas Reyland: TV Sound Design is the New Score – Fresh Approaches to Audiovisual Analysis
3 November 2025, Fyfe Lecture Theatre, 6-7pm
This exchange talk showcases recent scholarship by Professors Steve Halfyard and Nicholas Reyland, expanding on their 2024 Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV. Their talks argue that in contemporary television, sound design often functions as dynamically as a traditional musical score, shaping narrative, character, and audience perception. Together, the talks demonstrate how close listening to television’s sonic environments reveals new dimensions of storytelling and redefines the role of music and sound in the Peak TV era.
Climate Change, Control, Denial, Catastrophe – and The Wire
Nicholas Reyland focuses on The Wire (2002–2008), highlighting how its subtle sonic “climates” deepen the show’s ethnographic portrait of Baltimore. Beyond dialogue and plot, shifting ambient textures mark power dynamics and character agency: some figures manipulate their acoustic surroundings, while others are overwhelmed by them, experiencing “climate change” or “climate catastrophe.” Reyland links this to the series’ emphasis on surveillance, urging a “reduced listening” that attends to sound in screen drama and characterization.
Severance through Convergence: The In(nie)s and Out(ie)s of Music, Sound, and a Fantastic Diegesis
Steve Halfyard turns to Severance (2022–), tracing how small, seemingly natural sounds—most notably a glitch accompanying the title card and the elevator’s distinctive “ding”—interweave with the main musical theme. These motifs blur boundaries between music and sound effect, symbolizing the psychological split between employees’ “Innie” and “Outie” identities and their search for self-knowledge.
About the Speakers:
Prof. Steve Halfyard is Head of BMus programmes at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. Their research is mainly focused on music in horror/supernatural and superhero films and TV, and publications include Danny Elfman’s Batman: A Film Score Guide (2004), Sounds of Fear and Wonder: Music in Cult TV (2016) and the edited collections Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2010), Music in Fantasy Cinema (2012), and The Palgrave Handbook to Music and Sound in Peak TV (2024). Other essays have appeared in journals and edited collections including The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, and the forthcoming volumes The Routledge Companion to the Superhero and The Oxford Handbook of Television Music. Steve is co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in TV Music and Sound.
Professor Nicholas Reyland is Head of Undergraduate Programmes at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. A musicologist with research expertise in screen scoring and music since 1900, his publications include Zbigniew Preisner’s “Three Colors” Trilogy: A Film Score Guide, Music and Narrative since 1900, Lutosławski’s Worlds, Music, Analysis, and the Body, a special issue of Music Analysis dedicated to film, and The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV. His work has appeared in Music Analysis, Music & Letters, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Twentieth-Century Music, The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, and The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound. He is a co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in TV Music and Sound and the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.
Dr Stephan Ehrig: Innocent Love and Escalating Violence –Heinrich von Kleist and the Human Fascination with Violent Conflict
10 November 2025, Fyfe Lecture Theatre, 6-7pm
Exploring similar themes to some of our drama performances this term (Let The Right One In, Blood Wedding, and Sweeney Todd), this talk will discuss the human fascination with ultra violent conflict in relation to love stories using the example of the early 19th Prussian author Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). Making use of two of his short stories, The Earthquake in Chile (1807) and The Betrothal of St. Domingo (1811), the talk will discuss how both texts deal with the limits of perception and human subjectivity, and violence of institutional authorities against minorities and outcasts. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and Colonialism (Haiti and Chile), both texts explore cultures of colonial violence and racism that feel strikingly modern and contemporary.
About the Speaker:
Stephan Ehrig is Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to East German cultural production pre- and post-1990, as well as on 19th to 21th Century literature, theatre and film. His latest book, Neubau Atmospheres: East German Cultural Remediations of Modernist Architecture, was published in October 2025.
Content warning: The talk will include a discussion of racism, suicide and violence against women and children.
L.M. Bogad: Tactical Performance – The Role of Theatrics in Social Movement Organizing
17 November 2025, Online, 6-7pm
In this talk/discussion, Bogad explores the history, ethics, aesthetics, and practical concerns of tactical performance and creative activism. The powerful sociodramas created by the American Civil Rights Movement and the American Indian Movement create a framework for the talk, followed by other groups such as the Yippies, the Wobblies and ACT-UP. The talk then examines these groups’ descendants such as Billionaires for Bush, Reclaim the Streets, The Clown Army, and the Yes Men, as well as grim and gripping actions by Iraq Veterans Against the War and 1000 Coffins. Finally, the author will discuss his recent work for election fairness with his troupe of dancing ballot boxes, Delivering Democracy, and with indigenous Mexican farmworkers in California, to create performance for climate justice and better, fairer pay and working conditions. Bogad draws on 25 years of experience as an artist-activist, having worked with most of the contemporary groups he discusses as a writer, performer and strategist.
About the Speaker:
L.M. Bogad is a Guggenheim Fellow, performance artist, and professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis. He creates playful, theatrical interventions for social movements worldwide, from Chile to Egypt, blending humor with activism. Author of Tactical Performance, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre, and Performing Truth, his performances include ECONOMUSIC, COINTELSHOW, and TAHRIR. Bogad founded Delivering Democracy, a troupe of dancing ballot boxes combating voter suppression, and hosts the podcast The Plague. A cofounder of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, he has collaborated with farmworkers and global movements for labor, climate, and social justice for over 25 years.
Content warning: Reference to racism and violence.
Jessica Argo: Resonant Networks – Feminist Improvisation across Sites, Identities and Technologies
24 November 2025, Fyfe Lecture Theatre, 6-7pm
Jessica Argo will share audio visual documentation and reflective insights from an article in press for Improfil Journal: Theory and Practice of Improvised Music, from the International Instititute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The article was written, pondered and collated across multiple geographies – from India to Scotland and England – and from diverse experiences of migration, travel and belonging. A piece, titled Unbound, inspired by the River Yamuna was created by Surbhi Mittal and performed by Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) and International Contemporary Ensemble at GlOfest XVI in November 2024, CCA Glasgow, and in Delhi with Synth Ensemble, February 2025. She will outline the processes of collaboration which informed Surbhi’s creation of Unbound. By sharing a detailed account of how this piece was created and performed, we offer practice-based insight into the intersecting fields of improvisation, gender studies and socio-technologies. Jessica draws on feminist creative practices which have improvisation as a central process (e.g. Krekels, 2019) as well as gender and identity expression with and through technology (e.g. Russell, 2020). The potential of telematic collaboration as an emancipatory practice, particularly for marginalised groups, will be also discussed (e.g. Sappho, 2022). From Surbhi Mittal, Delhi; Jessica Argo, Glasgow; Una MacGlone, Glasgow; Maria Sappho, Huddersfield
About the Speaker:
Dr. Jessica Argo is Programme Leader for BDes Sound for Moving Image at Glasgow School of Art, a composer for improvising ensembles and an experimental filmmaker/sound artist, drawn to music for community world-building – improvisation to bridge international distance and sustain intergenerational learning; improvising for queer affirmation; deep listening, emotional expression, mood regulation and liberation from patriarchal, ableist and economic oppression. Argo uses embodied synthesis (Moog Theremini, contact microphones, voice) to conjure alien sound, extended from her physical body or other acoustic bodies (cello). She has conducted neuroscience research, films in white cube galleries, dance clubs and hybrid room-and-ZOOM orchestra theatre performance.
Leonor Estrada Francke: Geographies of Political Performance in Times of Protest – Bodies-Territories-Stages
1 December 2025, Online, 6-7pm
In the face of authoritarian repression: How do social protests and performative political actions in the city intertwine to generate and regenerate spaces of hope through conviviality, carnivalization, and laughter?
In 2022, Peruvian police assassinated dozens of people. The streets of Lima became a stage of daily acts of resistance. Political performances by artists had a mutually intertwined relationship with the protest movements of which they were a part, creating symbolic and carnival-like spaces of conviviality on ephemeral stages that emerged and dissipated according to the collective presence of protesters/audiences and artists/performers. The presence of the artists’ bodies in playful and spectacular actions were important stimuli for the appearance of spatial focal points of resistance and a construction of political meaning that disrupted the control of public space by state actors. They intensified the performativity of surrounding bodies by inaugurating participatory rituals and representation games. Their expressive freedom existed in dramatic contrast to the police repression they faced, lending themselves to a symbolic carnivalization of power.
How do we use the frameworks of Performance Studies to consider the stages, actors and actions that emerge in political protests? How do actual performances by artists weave into these contexts?
About the Speaker:
Leonor Estrada Francke is an interdisciplinary artist from Lima, Peru. She works across genres, creating live-art that is political and visceral, documentary and surrealist. She is currently fixated on the brutality of contemporary western coloniality, the braid of power and the impossibility of forgiveness, while she attempts to constantly rebirth hope as an active verb. She is also interested in the rise of authoritarianism, anticolonialism, feminism and the city. Leonor is a founding member of Sonqo Ruro, a collective that makes anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial political performance and arts pedagogy on topics related to memory and the body-territory.