Exchange Talks and Events

Exchange Talk | 10th March Rudy Kanyhe | What was, What is, & what might become, Archive as practice

The powerful use of art in re-telling complex stories; From archive to artwork: The Indian indentured immigration and Coolitude through the exhibition “Each body wakes up on a wave”

About the Speaker: Rudy Kanhye is a disabled artist and researcher from the global majority working between Mauritius, France and Scotland. His research interests include archives, memories, oral histories, extending this focus through Mauritius Island, the Global South and its neo-colonial relationship to the West. Born in Dijon, France, to a Portuguese mother and a Mauritian father, his childhood dual culture, mixed-race heritage and working class background influenced his practice. As a descendent of Indian indentured immigrants, he experiments with collaborative, interactive artworks which re-imagine archival research, delving deeper into the collective memories of migrant communities and the role of semiotics in relation to labour, migration and the environment within a colonial diasporic narratives. His work re-imagines archival research and delves deeper into the collective memories of migrant communities at the intersections between race, disability and the environment. His research explores mixed-race diaspora, and broader Indian oceanic perspectives, including the history of indentured immigration.

Exchange Talk, 17th March | Research Showcase

Our yearly Exchange Talk event showcasing research being undertaken by students in the Research and Knowledge Exchange department. The event consisted of short, fast-paced presentations focusing on each student’s field of work.

Exchange Talk, 14th April ’25 | Oscar Edelstein | The Musical Imagination Between Rivers & Crystals

This talk was a poetic journey through the principal ideas that founded the award-winning research program Teatro Acústico (Acoustic Theatre), at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Argentina). Founder Oscar Edelstein talked about developments and inventions on the program, from reflections in front of the Paraná River, to the creation of music-theatre performances that work with concepts of spatial modulation and acoustic perspective. Oscar was joined by collaborator Deborah Claire Procter who assisted with translation and supported with any questions that came up.

Composer, pianist and researcher, Oscar Edelstein, (Argentina) – known for his originality and inventiveness – is frequently considered as a leading voice in avant-garde music in Latin America. He has received many commissions for modern operas and non-conventional symphonic works from Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación, Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Argentina, London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Swedish percussion group Kroumata and Basel Sinfonietta, among many others. His performances with his group, Ensamble Nacional del Sur (ENS) have been considered by specialist critics as “a historic milestone in the cutting-edge production of Latin America.” His catalogued and published work is crucial to the map of contemporary Latin American music and performance.

Deborah Claire Procter is a singer and multimedia artist from Cardiff (with a degree in theatre at the University of Exeter and a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Wales, Cardiff). She has worked with Oscar Edelstein for many years. Oscar Edelstein will be performing with Deborah Claire Procter on tour throughout April and May.

Exchange Talk, 21st Apr ’25 | Jared Hutsby & Steve Macluskie | Virtual Reality as a Stage Design

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming more commonplace in the Entertainment Industry as a tool to visualise stage designs prior to the construction phase. The Production Department have been exploring using this tool as part of the production workflow by modelling stage designs in 3D and then viewing those models on a VR headset. In this Exchange Talk, Jared Hutsby and Steve Macluskie demonstrated examples from recent productions, explaining how this technology helped solve and identify technical challenges. They also explained how this technology improves their visual communication and understanding within the wider team.

Jared Hutsby is a Creative Technologist and Teaching Artist with 20 years of experience in entertainment and performance, specialising in lighting before extending his practice into CAD, visualisation and emerging technologies. Currently undertaking the position of Lighting Tutor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Jazz has a passion for learning and teaching in the Arts.

Steve Macluskie works at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow as the Lecturer in Stage Technology and Automation on the BA Production Technology and Management programme. In 2012 Steve won a JISC iTech award for his work creating an online wiki for archiving and documenting technical theatre solutions, which now has just over 7500 pages. Steve is a member of the ABTT Training and Education Committee and regularly trains working professionals on the ABTT’s Bronze Awards. He is also the winner of the ABTT 2024 “Idea of the Year” award for innovation and creativity. Steve is also the author of ‘Vectorworks for Theatre’, published by Entertainment Technology Press.

Exchange Talk, 28th April ’25 | Janet Sit | For Ties and Tides of Kinship

How can we engage with sound beyond passive listening? How might embodied listening reconnect us with histories that have been forgotten, erased, or assimilated? In this talk, Janet Sit investigated the theoretical and creative foundations of her sound installation practice, which assembles a multi-sensory, immersive environment shaped by acoustics, sound art, and embodied perception. She considered speculative care and repair across time, using sound to uncover alternative ways of knowing and engaging with histories that exist beyond dominant or available records.

Born in Hong Kong, Toronto-based Janet Sit (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of California San Diego Music Department with a background in zoology and music. Her cross-disciplinary research explores decentering terrestrial references to underwater/near-water perceptions and histories within ocean humanities frameworks and her scuba diving experiences. Her artistic practices include acoustic/electronic compositions, sound installations and scholarly writing. Parallel to exploring music and sound in her works, Janet seeks to engage diverse audiences to support dialogue and community-building on environmental and social matters.

Exchange Talk, 5th May ’25 | Dr. Jo Ronan in conversation with Fatima Rateb

This talk took the form of performance, lecture, and interview. Jo founded BloodWater Theatre (BWT) to challenge assumptions of economic and cultural ownership of theatre processes and products. BWT experiments with multiple identities of self, and staged self via character. They bring characters from different parts of the world into the rehearsal room, although their residential identities are localised to the UK. The motivation for this is to share multiple stories born out of different cultural and ethnic origins, in order to give voice to stories which might not usually be heard in this setting. Their rehearsal pedagogy is premised on Bial’s theory of double coding where “what works for one audience on a universal level works for another audience specifically”. While the ethics of representation is troubling, interrogations of the value of all life, necessitate an engagement with representation.

Content warning: This talk will contain references to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Jo Ronan is Head of Contemporary Performance Practice at the RCS as well as an artist and practice-based researcher. Her research published in Routledge, Intellect and Taylor & Francis proposes a new dialectical model for non-hierarchical collaborative performance-making and spectatorship. She is the originator of Dialectical Collaborative Theatre. She was Associate Director with 7:84 (Scotland) directing productions such as, Eclipse by Haresh Sharma and The Algebra of Freedom by Raman Mundair, based on the unlawful shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Jo pioneered new writing in Singapore, co-founding The Necessary Stage Theatre Company in 1987 and was its Associate Director till 1994 when she settled in Scotland.

Exchange Talk, 12th May ’25 | Nicola McCartney | Caring Scotland

Nicola McCartney, lead artist on Caring Scotland, a far-reaching listening and oral history project created by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), talked about the inspiration for and the methodology informing this work. The project documents the lives and experiences of at least 100 members of the care experienced community in Scotland and aims to raise their profile, celebrate their achievements and foster empowerment.

Caring Scotland is a National Theatre of Scotland project in partnership with Who Cares? Scotland and the National Library of Scotland, funded with an award from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Nicola McCartney is a playwright, director and dramaturg. She trained as a director with Citizens’ Theatre / G&J Productions and Charabanc Theatre Company Belfast. Nicola was Artistic Director of Lookout Theatre Company, Glasgow from 1992-2002, and has twice been an Associate Playwright of Playwrights Studio Scotland. She has worked for a host of organisations as a dramaturg including Vanishing Point and Stellar Quines / Edinburgh International Festival. She is also a social theatre practitioner and has worked with all sorts of groups including people within the criminal justice system in UK and USA, asylum seekers and refugees, drug users, survivors of domestic violence and childhood abuse. Nicola has worked with Traverse’s flagship outreach programme, Class Act, since 1997. She was a recipient of a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Olwen Wymark award for encouraging theatre in the UK, and is currently Reader in Writing for Performance at University of Edinburgh where she leads the Masters programme in Playwriting.

You can read further information on Caring Scotland here

Exchange Talks, 19th May ’25 | Celia Duffy | Three questions about the music conservatoire

Celia Duffy has been engaged in innovation in specialist higher music education for the past two decades or so. Recently she was part of the AEC’s Creative Europe-funded Artemis project on curriculum innovation. This talk was based on three fundamental questions

· what is our function in society?

· who are our students?

· what should be in our curriculum?

These questions (and quite a few follow-ups) were posed against the background of major shifts across the sector revealed by Artemis in the wake of the influential article Musicians as “Makers in Society”: A Conceptual Foundation for Contemporary Professional Higher Music Education, Gaunt, Duffy, et al (2021).

Professor Celia Duffy is the Senior Fellow in Knowledge Exchange at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. As the first Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the RCS she played a key role in the conservatoire’s development as a research institution and in the major reform of its undergraduate curriculum.

As a member of the recent European-funded Artemis project working group on capacity building for curricular innovation, one focus of her current work is the need for evolution and change in higher music education to respond to rapidly changing needs in society.