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.

Our Sounding Moves/Moving Sounds Research Group for Trinity Laban staff and students is led by Professor Sam Hayden. 

Sounding Moves/Moving Sounds event

Thursday 12 December 2024
09:00-18:00
Blackheath Halls 

We’re delighted to host this annual cross-disciplinary event for staff and students to investigate the relationship between music and dance at Trinity Laban. It will be a day of panels, presentations, conversations and exchange, with refreshments provided throughout the day.  

Find out more from the Sounding Moves/Moving Sounds team

The group usually meets online once each term, led by Professor Sam Hayden. The SM|MS Research Forum was set-up to enable and encourage cross-disciplinary contact and collaboration within Trinity Laban at Research level. It is primarily intended to be an informal and open context for the sharing of work by Postgraduate students, RDP students, and staff alike at Trinity Laban, across Music and Dance, 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 next forum (date tbc), please contact Professor Sam Hayden. Volunteers (from current Trinity Laban PGs, RDPs and staff) are invited to give short presentations/sharings (ca. 15-20′) of current projects, which can be works-in-progress or finished works. Co-presentations are also welcome. Each presenter(s) will get a 30-minute slot to include their presentation and discussion.

This term’s SM|MS Research Forum for staff and students takes place on Wednesday 14 May 16:00-17:30 on Teams, led by Professor Sam Hayden, featuring the following presentations:

Leo Geyer – London Portraits
London Portraits is a new opera-ballet work with music by Dr Leo Geyer and choreography by Tiara Foo, that was recently premiered by Constella Music at Sadlers Wells. London Portraits seeks to explore how song and dance can be employed equally to deliver narrative.

Zjana Muraro – Somatic Circuit
Somatic Circuit is an interdisciplinary research project that blends dance, technology and activism. Created by dancer and choreographer Zjana Muraro, the research features the experimental performance Augmented Self — a live show where dancers use biofeedback to create sound with a modular synth, with real-time Augmented Reality (AR) visuals also generated by the dancers and shared through social media projected into the performance space. The performance explores how we experience and express identity in digital spaces, and how people might find creative ways to use online platforms for connection, visibility, and freedom. With dance, immersive sound, and visuals, Somatic Circuit invites audiences to reflect on what it means to be present and human in an increasingly digital world.

Stephanie Schober – Micro Rainbow
In my presentation, I will share some of the work I have been doing as part of a dance artist collective of 13 dance artists based in London, Birmingham, and Wales. We have been delivering regular creative dance sessions and intensive creative projects for Micro Rainbow’s beneficiaries, a charity supporting LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers through the provision of safe housing, legal advice and a social inclusion programme (https://microrainbow.org/).

Starting in London in 2016, funding by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation enabled our dance project to expand its reach to beneficiaries nationally. My presentation will include reflections from Micro Rainbow support workers and volunteers to share insights about the impact of our dance activities on the beneficiaries’ well-being and sense of community belonging. I will also talk about how we have been working within a collective structure and how the collaborative creative and pedagogic practice has influenced our own growth as dance artists professionally and personally.

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

5 Feb 2025
Dr Lucia Piquero
Experience, perception, emotion: (fighting against the “I didn’t get it!” In contemporary dance)

This seminar discusses the spectator’s and choreographer’s experiences of emotion in Euro-American contemporary theatre dance, arguing that these experiences can only be understood in full through a perspective of embodied affective cognition based on the interaction between the perceptual properties of the work and its symbolic elements. As a way to argue the pressure to “understand” the work, and what this might mean, the seminar will analyse works and the potential for embodied affective cognition as a framework to guide both choreographic work and audience experience.

12 Feb 2025
Dr. Žak Ozmo
Towards a Global Performance Practice

This seminar explores global performance practice, a framework that redefines early and classical music performance, scholarship, and pedagogy by integrating global influences and transcending Eurocentric perspectives. Since the concept of “the West” emerged only in the 19th century, music before 1800 is best understood through a global lens, acknowledging the profound intercultural exchanges between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

A case study on modinhas and villancicos negros—17th- and 18th-century Portuguese song genres shaped by Afro-Brazilian traditions—illustrates how African musical influences transformed Portuguese music. These works reveal how composers like António da Silva Leite and José Maurício integrated Afro-Brazilian elements, providing valuable insights into cultural exchange and appropriation in the Atlantic world.

By adopting global performance practice, we can advance early and classical music education and uncover the rich, interconnected history of global musical traditions.

12 Mar 2025
Professor Jonathan Clark
Looping effects in somatic practices

This talk intends to interface topics in the philosophy and phenomenology of movement with ‘looping effects in human kinds’, a term that was brought into the humanities by the philosopher Ian Hacking. The talk draws on many years of conversations with practitioners and doctoral students in dance and somatic practice, and shows how similar ‘looping effects’ exist in many of these practices. I discuss how these disciplines utilise loops or feedback effects between embodied experience and certain types of mental imagery. The talk concludes with some remarks about ‘practice-as-research’ paradigms within movement practices.

19 Mar 2025
Dr Peter Nagle
Here Comes Everybody: Strategies for transdisciplinary collaboration

In this seminar I will discuss my doctoral research project which explores the roles of identity and ambiguity in my practice: identities of drone as object and event in musical and sound-art contexts; identities of specialist technique in collaboration across disciplines; and the creative possibilities afforded by the ambiguities that arise as we move between all these for a fully transdisciplinary mode of collaboration.

7 May 2025
Dr Tomas Challenger
Listening with Improvisation

Dr Tomas Challenger discusses the role of listening within an improvised musical practice: As improvisers, we listen. Although the given is true of myself, there is a need to answer the question – ‘how do improvisers actually listen?’ This talk aims to tackle some of the problematic terrain that surrounds this question, specifically the way we use language, education and process to describe, inform and develop this aspect of an individual, and shared creative practice.

11 June 2025 
Visiting Lecturer: Dr. Giselle Wyers, Professor and Chair of Voice and Choral Music at the University of Washington-Seattle
The Dancing Conductor: The Application of Laban Movement in Conducting and Beyond

Rudolf von Laban’s influence is well established in the field of dance, where he codified a flexible and comprehensive system that enables choreographers and dancers to discover, classify, and notate every imaginable facet of movement. What is less widely known, however, is that the universality of Laban’s approach makes it highly adaptable to other creative disciplines—especially conducting, as well as theatre, architecture, and animation.

Dr. Giselle Wyers, Professor and Chair of Voice and Choral Music at the University of Washington–Seattle, specializes in applying Laban movement principles to the field of choral conducting. She will offer a lecture and interactive session on Laban’s movement approach, featuring exercises specifically designed for musicians seeking to cultivate greater expressivity in their performances.