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

 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 event will be held 10-14 March.  

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 Tom Challenger
Listening with Improvisation

4 June 2025
Visiting Lecturer Dr. Giselle Wyers
The Dancing Conductor – The Application of Laban movement in Rehearsal and Performance

Using Laban movement with choristers in rehearsal to enliven expression and interpretation.