Research Events & Seminars

We offer our research students and staff an extensive programme of professional development events throughout the year. Events take place between January and June and are announced in the autumn term.

SMMS Research Forum: The SM|MS Research Forum meets termly on Wednesdays at 4pm online, led by Professor Sam Hayden. The forum was set-up to enable and encourage cross-disciplinary contact and collaboration within Trinity Laban at a research level. It is primarily intended to be an informal and open context for the sharing of work, whether practice-based, text-based, visual arts or any other media. Cross-disciplinary projects that specifically engage with interfaces between Music and Dance (or Sound and Movement more broadly understood) are of particular interest. If you would like to present at the forum, please contact Professor Sam Hayden.

Jazz Research Group: The Jazz Research Group meets fortnightly, led by Dr Tomas Challenger. Lift The Bandstand, Trinity Laban’s Inaugural Jazz and Improvisation Research Symposium took place on Thu 23 Oct 2025 at the Laban Building with a busy day of performance, seminars and discussion.

2025 Lift the Bandstand Programme

Dance and Performance Studies Reading Group: This group meets twice per term on Wednesdays in the Laban Building at 5.15pm, led by Dr Rebecca Stancliffe, please contact her for more information about the sessions.

Fidelio Trio Composition Project: In 2026 the Research and Composition Departments are collaborating with the Fidelio Trio as part of a mini-residency, led by Professor Sam Hayden. Seven Trinity Laban composers will have their new works recorded by the Fidelio Trio on Fri 13 Mar 2026, followed by a lecture-recital, featuring ‘interlace’, a new work for piano trio, specially composed for the Fidelio Trio by Professor Sam Hayden. The project culminates in a public performance of selected new student works alongside Hayden’s ‘interlace’ on Mon 22 Jun 2026 during Trinity Laban’s New Lights Festival. This initiative is supported by the Vaughan Williams and Hinrichsen Foundations.

Sounding Moves | Moving Sound is an annual symposium exploring the relationship between music and dance at Trinity Laban. Past presentations have included jazz as dancing, dancers using technology to manipulate sound, how artforms combine in musical theatre, musicians working with circus performers, how musicians and dancers understand rhythm, community projects, games as performance, sound and movement in education, performances and installations.

2025 Sounding Moves | Moving Sound Programme
2024 Sounding Moves | Moving Sound Programme

For more information, contact: SoundingMoves@edutrinitylabanac.onmicrosoft.com

We offer a week of online and in-person events for our research students during which they share their project progress with their colleagues in a supportive environment.

Our 2025 RDP presentations took place on 12-13 March and included the following topics:

• Teal Darkenwald: Mapping Sound to Movement to Create a Novel Retraining Method for Dancers
• Jui-Ying Huang: The Next Step: Intersection and Reimagination of Marching and Minimalism Music
• Morad Kashef: Integrating Azerbaijani Mugham techniques with 20th-century European orchestral traditions, particularly aleatoric and chance music
• Felice Pomeranz: Findings from interviews, surveys, and a musical vignette, developed from the research topic ‘The Patriarchy of Jazz: The Emergence of Women and Unusual Instruments in a Male-Dominated Art Form’
• Davood Jafari: Polyphonic composition based on Persian music
• Charlotte Eaton: Embodying tactile-kinaesthetic imagery: reimagining bodily/fleshly experience through Somatic Improvisation & expanding its contributions to dance practice, process and product
• Byron Wallen: The Confluence of Melody, Rhythm and Harmony: Investigating Circular and Linear concepts within large scale composition
• Maya Rosenwasser: Reflections on the research topic: Queer(ing) Sounds: An exploration of London’s LGBTQIA+ community through electroacoustic music practices
• Ying Chen: The changing styles in Robert Schumann’s piano music, according to his different compositional periods
• Xinyu Liu: Exploring Strategies for Integrating Classical and Contemporary Elements into Participatory Music Performances
• Filippo Ieraci: Polyphonic and Contrapuntal Techniques in M. Giuliani and M. Carcassi: Composing Two Guitar Etudes
• Gloria Yehilevsky: un/intentional improvisational-compositional realisations exploring cognitive sources
• Graham Devine: Reflections on the research topic: J S Bach complete lute works: performance guide to new transcriptions and complete work recordings for the ten-string guitar

The Research Seminar Series 2025-26 is busy programme of presentations by the Trinity Laban research community presenting current research to staff and students across the institution.

When: Wednesdays 17:15-18:15

Booking: No booking required. Please contact Research Administrator Sara Pay S.Pay@trinitylaban.ac.uk with any questions.

Autumn 2025

Wed 5 Nov 2025 17:15-18:15 Laban Lecture Theatre

Dr David Leahy: Underscoring a personal and group practice for improvising musicians and dancers

The Underscore was devised as a group-based dance practice by Contact Improviser, Nancy Stark Smith. Providing both a clear framework to follow and a rich vocabulary, the Underscore is used by many as a personal research tool  to support the development of the dancer’s practice. As part of my MA at Laban in 2014, I translated the practice to make it applicable to an improvising musician’s practice. I have since continued to use both of these practices as integral parts of my research and performative practice. This seminar will report on an ongoing practice that I have been running at Laban since October 2024, which draws heavily on the Underscore and Music-based Underscore practices. These open, fortnightly practices have been attended by an ever-growing number of colleagues and also collaborators from outside the institution. This presentation will delve into the structure of the shared practice and how it has been supporting our performative practice. It will also touch on how the process gives space for connections to naturally emerge between the two sets of participants. I will be joined by some of the participants from both within and from outside the institution to share their experiences and the presentation will be accompanied by a selection of images captured during the practices.

Wed 12 Nov 2025 17:15-18:15 Mackerras Room

Dr Bruno Heinen: Folk Melodies through Polytonality and Rhythmic Counterpoint

Drawing on my Eastern European heritage, as well as the jazz tradition, I will be playing and illustrating some of my compositions which draw on Hungarian/Romanian folk melodies and the work of Béla Bartók and György Ligeti. Specifically, how Bartók’s musical language have inspired works from my recent and forthcoming albums; applying and reflecting on his fascination with symmetry in music and nature, his polytonal application of the eight Hungarian peasant songs that form the basis of his work Improvisations and outlining my reimagining of cells and ideas derived from the final book of Mikrokosmos. I will be demonstrating how a polytonal application of folk melodies alongside triadic inversions can be a basis of improvisation. In addition, I will present how Ligeti’s rhythmically contrapuntal approach has influenced my recent works, which have been described by the Guardian as eclectic, eccentric and unobtrusively erudite.

Wed 26 Nov 2025 17:15-18:15 Laban Studio 8

Professor Dominic Murcott: Tales of Cumbia

An album that has taken three years from instigation to completion featuring angular contemporary classical music, six jazz musicians and folkloric dance music from Colombia. The project has been an experiment in combining disparate art forms into something coherent while allowing everyone to work within their own languages. The talk will describe the process, play examples from different stages of the writing and recording and we may well do some singing and dancing too!

Wed 3 Dec 2025 17:15-18:15 Peacock Room, King Charles Court

Dr Leo Geyer: Restoring the Lost Music of Auschwitz

Since 2015, Dr Leo Geyer has been leading a major project to restore and perform long-forgotten music written, arranged, and performed by prisoners in Auschwitz. This work has involved extensive archival research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, piecing together overlooked fragments of musical manuscripts and bringing this lost music back to life. To mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Geyer and his company, Constella Music, have presented this music in a range of formats, including an opera-ballet production, a radio programme, and a documentary film, resulting in worldwide media coverage. In this talk, Geyer will share some of this music and discuss the musicological and ethical questions raised by the project.

Future Research Seminar dates:

Wed 28 Jan 2026 17:15-18:15, Laban Lecture Theatre

Catherine Haber: Measuring Dance Performance: Methodological approaches to enhance validity in dance biomechanics

Dance performance sits at the intersection of artistic expression and athletic execution, yet empirical research often struggles to capture its aesthetic, experiential, and multifaceted nature. Despite a growing body of biomechanical research—motivated in part by high injury rates among dancers—dominant deductive and reductionist approaches may overlook dimensions of performance that are central to dancers’ experience. Therefore, this doctoral research aimed (1) to utilize mixed and multimethod approaches to evaluate the validity of existing empirical definitions and measures of dance performance and (2) to propose the application of multilevel modelling as an optimized framework for concurrently examining the multiple factors impacting dance performance. As series of four studies were conducted, demonstrating the value of integrated methodological frameworks in dance biomechanics. By combining practitioner perspectives, biomechanical measurement, and advanced statistical modelling, the work contributes to more valid, ecologically grounded understandings of dance performance and offers tools applicable to other complex movement domains.

Wed 4 Feb 2026 17:15-18:15, Theatre Studio, King Charles Court

Alex Paxton: Approaches to solo and jazz improvisation within composed large ensemble notated music

Orchestras, children, electronics and strawberries.

Wed 4 Mar 2026 17:15-18:15, Laban Lecture Theatre

Dr Christina Guillaumier & Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia (KCL): Marion Scott Reconsidered: Visualising Women’s Creative Leadership in Early 20th-Century London

What does mapping women’s creative leadership mean for researchers when the archive resists it? This collaborative research brings together musicology, archival studies, and feminist digital humanities to re-examine the professional networks of British violinist and musicologist Marion Scott (1877–1953). Scott has long been relegated to the margins of British music history while her role in British musical modernism has consistently been minimised and belittled. The archival traces of her, preserved at the Royal College of Music, remain scattered and fragmentary. Yet digital humanities methods offer promising avenues for reconstructing this uneven record and recovering her centrality within early twentieth-century musical life.

This seminar explores how social network analysis might reconstruct Scott’s influence while confronting its limits: the partiality of ego-centred networks, the gendered silences of institutional archives, and the risk of imposing coherence where the record resists it. More broadly, we ask how we might rethink what counts as evidence of cultural leadership and how musicology and cultural practice might seek to redefine this concept.

Wed 6 May 2026 Laban Lecture Theatre

Heidi Rustgaard: Title to be announced

Wed 20 May 2026 Laban Lecture Theatre

Dr Tom Challenger: Vee Music/Fluid Orchestration + Collaboration (working title)