Exchange Talks and Events

Catherine Lee | Interspecies collaborations with the Bombyx Mori (domestic silkworm moth)

Art & the Anthropocene 1

Alex South | Multispecies Sonic Socialities and the Sound of Stranding

Art & the Anthropocene 2

Alasdair Campbell and Ryan Gleave | Plug Festival Panel Discussion – Composition Now

Chaired by Oliver Searle

Performance Series

Lucy Allan | A Composer Walks into a Barre – creating a new work of electronic music for the RCS Modern Ballet showcase

Performance Series

Tawona Ganyamatopé Sitholé | Mutupo: circles of interflow

Art & Identity 1

Mercy Ojelade | Seeing Yourself in the Play: Whose Role is it Anyway?

Art & Identity 2

Maggie Bain | How Motion Capture and XR Are Redefining the Actor-Audience Relationship (19th January 2026)

Art and Virtual Reality Series

Discover the challenges and opportunities new extended reality (XR) and motion capture technologies present for actors, traditional acting techniques, and the future of storytelling. With Maggie Bain, chaired by Jazz Hutsby.

Robert Laidlaw | The Past, Present and Future of Actually Interesting Musical AI (26th January 2026)

Art and Virtual Reality Series

Find out more about using ‘AI’ in creatively useful and ethical ways through the long history of composing, performing and thinking surrounding music and intelligent machines. With Robert Laidlaw, chaired by Miriam Iorwerth.

Jazz Hutsby | Exploring the Creative Potential of the Unreal Engine; The Story So Far… (9th February 2026)

Art and Virtual Reality Series

Discover how digital technologies, such as the 3D games engine ‘Unreal Engine’, and motion capture, could be used by creatives to explore ideas and concepts, or create new media. With Jazz Hutsby MEd, chaired by Shilpa T-Hyland.

Pasquale Iannone | A Parisian Playground: Re-visiting Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (16th February 2026)

Performance Series

Ahead of our Musical Theatre production of Amélie in March, join Dr Pasquale Iannone to explore the artistic influences on the original 2001 film, and its impact on audiences.

Released in France in April 2001, Amélie was both a box office sensation and a critical success. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s vibrant, warm-hearted comedy stars Audrey Tautou as a shy young Parisian waitress who concocts various schemes to spread happiness to those around her.

Steeped in nostalgia for the post-war Paris of Jeunet’s childhood, the film draws on classic French painting, literature, music and above all, cinema. In this richly illustrated talk, Dr Pasquale Iannone will discuss Amélie’s many artistic influences and explore the reasons why both domestic and international audiences embraced the film’s charm.

Anselm Heinrich | Entertaining the Nation During War-Time: ENSA – a re-assessment (2nd March 2026)

Art, Time and Place Series

ENSA, The Entertainments Service Association which entertained the armed forces in war-time Britain has been both forgotten and belittled. Dr Heinrich offers a reassessment of ENSA as in fact operating counter to capitalist theatre principles, creating a truly National Theatre even if not by design. With Dr Anselm Heinrich, chaired by Alan Jones.

Annual Student Research Showcase (16th March 2026)

Find out what some of our research students are working on, in an evening of fast paced presentations. You’ll get a glimpse into the wide range of research at RCS from students at various stages of their projects.

• Connor Civatte – Scottish Traditional Music, Video Game Music, and Breaking Cultural Codes
• Gregory Ha – Resonance, Ritual, and Silence: Interpreting Contemporary Korean Piano Music
• Sholpan Sharbakova Miller  – Unravelling the Artistry of Nikolai Medtner through Contemporary Art Forms
• Kenneth Tay – Composing the Future: Sustaining the Ecology of Choral Creativity
• Mujie Yan – Folk Music and Patriotic Nostalgia: A comparative analysis of Leoš Janáček and Bohuslav Martinů’s keyboard music
• Jiaquan Yang – Growing up Under the Spotlight：The Hidden Roots of Performance Anxiety

Robin Peoples | Design-for-Performance – Collaborators In and Beyond Theatre (20th October 2025)

Art in Collaboration Series

Robin Peoples draws on his extensive experience to compare and contrast design-for-performance in collaboration with theatre companies and venues, and with cultural and creative organisations such as museums and heritage agencies.

Kenneth Tay | Whose Music is it Anyway? Composition as Collective Practice (27th October 2025)

Art in Collaboration Series

Kenneth Tay draws on his experience as a composer working with performers and intercultural tradition to challenge images of the composer as a solitary figure, asking: Whose voices shape a piece of music? What does collaboration look like in practice? Can collaboration change the way music is written and heard?

Steve Halfyard & Nick Reyland | TV Sound Design is the New Score: Fresh Approaches to Audiovisual Analysis (3rd November 2025)

Art in Collaboration Series

Prof. Steve Halfyard and Prof. Nicholas Reyland reflect on their 2024 Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV. In two mini-talks they argue that in contemporary television, sound design often functions as dynamically as a traditional musical score, shaping narrative, character, and audience perception.

Larry Bogad | Tactical Performance: The role of Theatrics in Social Movement Organizing (17th November 2025)

Art and Protest Series

L.M. Bogad explores the history, ethics, aesthetics, and practical concerns of tactical performance and creative activism. First examining the powerful sociodramas created by the American Civil Rights Movement and the American Indian Movement, 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. 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.

Jessica Argo | Resonant networks: Feminist Improvisation across sites, identities, and technologies (24th November 2025)

Art and Protest Series

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 in multiple locations. By sharing a detailed account of how this piece was created and performed, she offers practice-based insight into the intersecting fields of improvisation, gender studies and socio-technologies. The potential of telematic collaboration as an emancipatory practice, particularly for marginalised groups, will be also discussed.

Leonor Estrada | Geographies of Political Performance in Times of Protest: Bodies-Territories-Stages
(1st December 2025)

Art and Protest Series

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. 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?

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.