Sophia New is the new lecturer and tutor at the MA program Performing Arts as Critical Practice at Malmö Theatre Academy. Previous to her role here, Sophia has been the course Leader for MA programmes at Wimbledon College of the Arts, UAL. We took the opportunity to ask Sophia New a few questions to get to know her better.
Hi Sophia! Please tell us how you found your calling in the theatre, and your journey to being here with us today?
As a child I was not really involved in theatre at school but spent my holidays organising performances with my sisters and another family that we would always go on holiday with. We had songs, dances and bits of text. We made performance spaces in barns, front rooms and any other space that we could get access to. As a teenager in London, I volunteered at Battersea Arts Centre and this allowed me to see lots of different work regularly for free. At that time in the 1990s there was lots of experimental theatre works going on and the Live Art scene was also very vibrant in the UK .
Whilst studying for a BA in Philosophy at Sussex University, I joined societies that allowed me to perform in plays and films. Then I saw that there was an MA in Feminist Performance in Bristol and that appealed to me so much that I moved there. After my MA, I got commissions as a solo maker and joined an experimental theatre company called Reckless Sleepers and I toured with them for a couple for years.
In 2002 I started the company plan b with my partner Daniel Belasco Rogers and we have made a wide variety of works that are for specific sites and festivals as well as for theatre spaces and exhibition spaces. More recently as a course leader of 2 new MAs at the University of the Arts London I become aware of the course here in Malmö especially as one of the courses I was leading was called Performance: Politics and Social Justice, so I saw that there could well be an overlap in interests.
Since 2002 you’ve been monitoring your movements with a GPS, in the work The Drawing Of Our Lives. From where did that idea originate?
The idea for this came with the move from London to Berlin (where we have been based since 2001) and becoming a parent, which changed my mobility. It allowed us to reflect on how we were getting to know a new city through the places we went to and how that knowledge built up over time. It has also been a record of how spaces change over time - as access opens up and sometimes closes as new areas that were wasteland got built on.
Does The Drawing of Our Lives comment on contemporary surveillance culture?
The politics of this on-going practice is also to keep control of one's own data rather than sharing it with private companies that make more profit from private data. In that way we appreciate the term 'sousveillance' that Steve Mann from MIT uses to talk about creating data 'from below' - in our case walking , biking and moving in the city above ground (a GPS needs a clear view of the satellites) - rather than 'from above' in the way a company or state might survey private citizens.
You’ve acted as course leader for the MA program at Wimbledon College of Arts before. What did you take away from that experience that you can share with us at Malmö Theatre Academy?
Wimbledon had just invested a lot in refurbishing their site and focussed more on performance. It has a state-of-the-art theatre space and studios. It has 700 students, so it is a much busier campus than Malmö, but still I got to know a lot of the staff within that first year. It was very friendly. I was able to bring in a wide variety of teachers to show the diversity of approaches to making performance and I was able to partake in international co-operations in Prague and in the International Federation of Theatre Research in Ghana. The discourse in the UK around Intersectional Pedagogies has been a priority for quite a while and it is therefore important to consider how to decolonise curricula, have teacher training that is anti racist and to address ableism. That is helpful in the conversations we are having with MAs in Norway and Iceland, specifically addressing Intersectional Pedagogies.
In previous interviews you have mentioned how theatre and performance is inherently political. Would you elaborate on that?
Theatre and performance often examine lived experiences of injustice. I see this as a valuable public arena in which to address and reflect on how society could be different. Personally, I do still see the relevance of the feminist maxim, 'the personal is political'. The question is how do we stage these experiences in ways that audiences feel invited to consider the societal issues that are at stake?
The MA programme at Malmö Theatre Academy is about Performing Arts as Critical Practice. In what ways is Performing Arts a strong framework and scholarly field for critical practices?
Ultimately performance needs an audience. It gathers people together to witness and address the issues the performance work is presenting. In this gathering there can be a diversity of responses due to the complex sets of cultural and personal frameworks that individuals bring. Performance is an ideal critical practice as it does not only engage with theoretical and philosophical positions and discourse but also requires the performance maker to embody those positions and try other forms that make political issues tangible.
Can you give us any glimpse or insight into what you will be teaching the MA students during this school year?
I began with a workshop on "Endings", which sounds counterintuitive as the students are embarking on their final pieces, but my motivation was to consider what they might want to leave their audiences with. How do I want to engage with the multiple endings that we are entangled with, be that climate catastrophe or societal prejudice and injustice? I should point out that at MA level, with such experienced mature students, it is less about me imparting knowledge, but rather investigating and holding space for the multiple positions and knowledge that are already in the room. That is what makes the job so attractive. I also get to learn through supporting and accompanying these critical performative practices the students bring.
Read more about Sophia New’s academic and artistic background here