This year, SELCS offered two Turing Summer Schools: one in Rome and one in Paris. In Paris, the course was hosted at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique, France’s most famous acting school. Students attended talks by playwrights and researchers about diversity and representation onstage, watched works-in-progress by the Conservatoire’s students, and attended plays at France’s national theatres.
They also had the opportunity to take part in a four-day collaborative writing workshop led by Nilüfer Gros, one of the Conservatoire’s doctoral students in practice-based research. Nilüfer’s work is a search for plural ways of telling stories that allow her to capture the experiences of women from Mesopotamian cultures while resisting the pull of individual or national identities.
In the first days of the workshop, Nilüfer led students in long sessions of meditation followed by bursts of free writing in response to questions about origins. The group used excerpts from what they had written to produce a series of soundscapes. At the end of day two, Nilüfer asked the students to come back the next afternoon with sounds from their childhood. She worked with each of them to combine these materials with the texts they had produced and then, with the extraordinary skill of someone who has learned to write with sound the way the rest of us write with words, in the space of an afternoon she edited together everything the class had produced into a 23-minute-long work of art, which was presented the following week to the staff and students of the Conservatoire.
Discover the soundscape that the students produced:
This audio is a cut-down version of what the class presented in Paris, with most of the music removed – unfortunate as it turned out everyone in the Summer School had an incredible voice. While these excerpts don’t capture the full range of talents the students displayed, they do capture the linguistic and cultural diversity of SELCS at UCL. Over the course of the full recording, one can hear English, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Mandarin, Turkish, Greek, and Polish.
Students expressed appreciation for the fact that the workshop enabled them to share personal stories with one another. One student noted that, rather than getting to know each other by “gradually peeling back layers and pushing past superficialities”, the group was invited to dive straight into “very personal perspectives, which made for fascinating relationships!”
The Paris Summer School fits alongside the growing emphasis on Performance in SELCS teaching and research. The Performance Research Cluster was launched last year and in November 2024, the department hosted Caroline Guiela Nguyen, the artistic director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. A new second-year class on Acting in French will be offered in Term 2 2025/26, and the new practice-based Creative Critical PhD will welcome its first cohort of students in the autumn.
For more about Nilüfer Gros’s work, see https://cnsad.psl.eu/eleves/nilufer-gros