Research includes issues of the body: hysterias and trauma, touch practices, death and dying, performance and medicine
Professor Anna Furse directs the MA in Performance Making, supervises practice PhDs, Co-Directs the interdisciplinary Centre of the Body, Department Research, serves on the Editorial Committee of Goldsmiths Press, Academic Board and Council. An award-winning director and published author of theoretical and creative works, her many productions have been commissioned and performed internationally in a 40-year career funded by ACE, AHRC, British Academy, British Council, the EU Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme and Awards from the Wellcome Trust for her research that braids medicine and performance. She is currently on the Advisory Board of Digital Theatre Plus, External Examiner at Rose Bruford College, co-Director of the Performance Studies Laboratory PeARL, Art and Design School, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, and Artistic Director of her company Athletes of the Heart: www.athletesoftheheart.org; www.https://www.gold.acuk/theatre-performance/staff/a-furse/
Academic qualifications
BA in Drama and French, University of Bristol 1976
PGCE Drama, Goldsmiths 1978
PhD in Performance and Medical Imagery, Leeds Met 2011
Teaching and supervision
Anna supervises practice research in a broad range of body-related issues including costume, maternity, storytelling, medicine, choreography and performance methodologies.
Anna teaches performance making and performance analysis and an MA theory option she recently launched in Performance and Medicine, drawing on her research into a range of medical topics including infertility, hysterias, death and the status of the cadaver, with specific interest in public perceptions of anatomical/psychological interiority. Her academic work draws on her professional career: one of a handful of women directors in the UK in the early 1980’s, she pioneered the fusion of European physical theatres and feminist issues with her company BloodGroup, touring internationally with a London home at the ICA. Artistic Director of the new writing company Paines Plough 1990 - 1995, she directed international touring productions and pioneered the now accepted practice of writers collaborating across disciplines and in site specific contexts with her School Without Walls and Pre-Text Laboratories. Bi-lingual in French, she created a major production to inaugurate a new venue in Chalon Sur Saone in 1992, worked as Consultant at the Comédie de Caen, and presented her productions at the Théâtre de La Métaphore, Lille and the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Paris. A director of over fifty-five new works and published playwright, she was among the first of her generation to straddle dance and theatre, from her early training at the Royal Ballet School and subsequent involvement with new dance as performer, founder member of Chisenhale Dance Space, activist, writer and editor with New Dance Magazine; as chosen participant in Grotowski's 'paratheatre' experiments in the 1970s; as apprentice/translator at Peter Brook's ICTR in Paris in 1971. She continues to produce new performance projects, recently a 3-year Residency with CREATE Ireland's EU-funded Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP), Live Collision Festival, Dublin. A frequent keynote speaker at international conferences, Anna publishes widely and is an invited consultant with external HEIs and organisations.
Featured publications
Theatre in Pieces, Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Methuen, 2011
Performing Nerves, Four Plays, Four Essays, Routledge, 2020
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2021. Hysteria in Pictures. In: Johanna Braun, ed. Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, Rising in Revolt. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 73-104. ISBN 9783030663599
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2020. Jorge Crecis. In: Jo Butterworth and Lorna Sanders, eds. Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780367376789
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2020. Foreword. In: Maryclare Foá; Jane Grisewood; Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall, eds. Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, viii-ix. ISBN 9781788313841
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2020. Foreword. In: Maryclare Foá; Jane Grisewood; Brigitta Hosea and Carali McCall, eds. Performance Drawing, New Practices Since 1945. London: Bloomsbury, viii-ix. ISBN 9781788313841
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2016. Yerma's Eggs 2003. In: Lena Šimić and Emily Underwood-Lee, eds. Live Art and Motherhood: A Study Room Guide on Live Art and the Maternal. London: Live Art Development Agency, pp. 9-11.
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2016. Yerma's Eggs / Subfertility. In: Lena Simic and Emily Underwood-Lee, eds. Live Art & Motherhood: A Study Room Guide on Live Art and the Maternal. Live Art Development Agency, pp. 9-10.
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2011. Being touched. In: John Matthews, ed. A life of ethics and performance. Cambridge: Cambridge scholars press, pp. 45-68. ISBN 978-1443828710
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2008. The Peach Child. In: , ed. NT Connections 2008: New Plays for Young People. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 377-415. ISBN 978-0571244898
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2002. Those Who Can Do Teach. In: Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich, eds. Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century. Manchester; New York: University of Manchester Press, pp. 64-73. ISBN 978-0719062919
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2000. A Spectacle of Suffering. In: Graham Coulter-Smith; James A. Walker and Maurice Owen, eds. The Visual-Narrative Matrix: Interdisciplinary Collisions and Collusions. Southampton: Southampton Institute of Higher Education, pp. 73-77. ISBN 978-1874011095
Furse, Anna F. D.. 2014. 'Artist Talk on collaboration'. In: Success and failure in collaborative project and how they are measured from an artist, critics and participants perspective. Dublin, Ireland 1 December 2014.
