Maria Kapsali

Profile

In the last 5 years I have been leading on the development of wearable technology for sound and movement interaction, supported by an ESRC Healthy Ageing Award, a Catalyst Award from the Cultural Institute, and a Michael Beverley Innovation Fellowship. echome is a wearable system for sound and movement interaction and a pedagogy that enables the use of the technology in artistic, creative and community contexts. The system consists of a wearable sensor and a custom made software that includes a visual interface, an in-built sound library as well as the option to input and compose pre-recorded sounds. The system was developed with Kingsley Ash and Dr Nikos Stavropoulos in collaboration with dance artist Sophie Alder and Sandrne Monin and a range of different end users.

My monograph Performer Training and Technology: Preparing Our Selves (Routledge, 2021) explores the interesections between performer training and technology from the eighteenth century onwards and asks whether performer training practice may offer a productive space in which alternative relations to technology can be tested. The book is part of the Routledge Series Perspectives on Performer Training, which I co-edit with Rebecca Loukes, and was shortlisted for the David Bradby Monograph Award.

My latest publication explores the use of echome in the installation Inside Yellow Sound, which explored in collaboration with theatre director Maria Oshodi the staging of Wassily Kandinsky’s text Yellow Sound in an interactive immersive environment for sighted and non sighted audiences.

Between 2014 and 2019 I developed with technologist Simon East Sonolope, a movement sonification system utilising mobile phones and smart watches. Sonolope was used in the event Sonic Bodies (Being Human Festival, Leeds Art Gallery, November 2018), which aimed to offer opportunities to sighted and non-sighted audiences to engage in a multisensory engagement with sculpture. Sonolope is discussed in a recent publication in International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.

In 2017–2018 , I shared a LITE Fellowship with Dr Scott Palmer on Mobile Phones and Digital Creativity. The project produced a number of outputs that can be viewed on SignalSpace. An article discussing the use of mobile phones in performer training was published in the Digital Training special issue of the Theatre Dance and Performance Training Journal.

Alongside Dr Freya Bailes and Pr Anna Madill, I convened the Sadler Seminar Series ‘Sensory Storytelling, Imagination and Wellbeing’. In 2016, I also convened, alongside Dr Scott McLaughlin and Dr Joslin McKinney, a series of research events on New Materialism and Artistic Practice, as part of the Sadler Series Seminars.

As part of my ongoing interest in yoga and somatic practices, I explored yoga as the basis for interdisciplinary forms of creative expression in a project witth dancer and Ashtanga Yoga teacher Marie Hallager Andersen, entilted 'Two Trainers Prepare'. The project consisted of task-based explorations that Andersen and I set for each other on alternate weeks. The whole project was hosted on the Theatre Dance and Performance Training Blog.

I am currently serving as a co-convenor of the TaPRA Sound Voice and Music Working Group and a co-lead of the Reimagine Ageing Interdisciplinary Network.

Research interests

• Philosophy of technology, the use and making of tools in performer training and somatic practice.
• Sound and movement interaction.
• 20^th and 21^st c performer training regimes, processes and practitioners, in particular the use of psychophysical disciplines.
• Yoga and somatics.
• Aesthetic Education.
• The historical, ideological and economic contexts of psychophysical practices, such as discourses of health, fitness and self-development .
• Knowledge production in practice-based research and the use of digital technologies as a means of documentation and dissemination.

• echome: a wearable technology for sound and movement interaction [please note echome is all low fonts]

Professional memberships

• TaPRA
• IFTR
• Drama HE

Research groups and institutes

• Bodies & Performance
• Performance, Training, Preparation & Pedagogy

Current postgraduate researchers

• Mark Shields
• Kate Morton