Rebecca McCutcheon

I am a director and practice-led researcher, working across site-based practice, feminist performance and feminist theatre history. I completed my practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway funded by the AHRC. My research experiments with models of site-specific practice and rarely performed texts, exploring the possibilities of divergent sites for marginalised texts and voices. My practice connects text-based contemporary theatre practice with forms and techniques relating to immersive theatre practice, installation and devised work. My research interests sit at the intersection of feminist performance histories, contemporary performance practice and cultural geography. My research has explored affective contagion in audience participation and the generative site. Outputs include articles for Dance and Theatre Performance Training Journal, Early Theatre, a chapter in Theatres of Contagion, and site-based performances at Dilston Grove in Southwark (A Testimony and a Silence), and The Hannah Barry Gallery, Peckham (Cary: The Mariam Cycles).

As a director I founded Lost Text/Found Space, dedicated to innovative site-based practice with unperformed texts by women, seeking to challenge and reimagine audience relationships to archival texts. LTFS created  Til We Meet in England, a full-scale production created for Safehouse in Peckham and funded by Arts Council England, and have new projects currently in development. I also co-founded angels in the architecture, a site-based company which made work in the House of St Barnabas in Soho, Kensington Palace (both Dido Queen of Carthage), the Aldwych tube station (Still Life) and the Roundhouse, Camden (The Round Dance), working in partnership with London Underground, Historic Royal Palaces, St Barnabas Refuge trust, and the Roundhouse trust.

Recent directing includes Mirabel for Chris Goode & Co (Ovalhouse), Vincent River by Philip Ridley (Trafalgar Studios) and I’m currently developing Town Hall by Caridad Svich for Camden People’s Theatre Calm Down Dear feminist theatre festival 2019 and tour.  I’ve also held roles at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre & Young Vic Theatre.

E-mail: Rebecca.McCutcheon@rhul.ac.uk