Embodied Emotions

This practice-led research project will offer historical and contemporary perspectives on the idea that bodily gesture and facial expression are languages of emotion. Reading Emotion goes 'beyond text' in two ways. First, it investigates how emotions might be mediated in embodied, non-verbal ways (and how these relate to verbal and textual mediations). Secondly, it is centred primarily on practice and performance (while also making use of and producing academic texts). The project will renew and expand the community-based applied performance practice developed by Ali Campbell and his colleagues over several years.

The historical context framing the practice will be from the seventeenth century to the present, with the primary focus on the history, expression and performance of passions and emotions in European and British contexts. Central to the project will be a three-way dialogue between historians, performers, and educators, conducted with the aim of understanding what 'emotional literacy' might be, how and why it might be encouraged among schoolchildren today, and what historical processes have shaped our ideas about how to read emotions.

The project aims to deliver:

An intensive interdisciplinary seminar series organised by the QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions in the autumn of 2009

A parallel pedagogical programme/practice-led intervention in local schools from autumn 2009 to autumn 2010

Undergraduate teaching in the Department of Drama at QMUL during Semester 1, 2009

A journal article on emotional literacy, performance and pedagogy

A conference in the summer of 2010 to communicate the results of the project to a wide audience of academics, performers, educators, and policy-makers.

Woven with these aims are a projected portfolio of outputs, the precise nature of which depends on the initial collaborative tranche of work with children and Applied Performance students. The media in which these are articulated and the means whereby they are published and disseminated will be child-centred, and - in accordance with the ethos of the enquiry - child-led as appropriate. In partnership with Osmani Primary School and Loud Minority films, these are expected to include a series of short films, presentations, and installations of objects in mixed media, each of which evidences the development of a non-verbal language in collaboration with a group of children and connects its development to the over-arching research questions.