Overspill: Presences, Processes & Perspectives

Overspill is a new interdisciplinary research seminar series convened by Acting & Performance Lecturer Dr Sophie Swoffer. It consists of in-conversation evenings and practice sharing events with artists and individuals working across the creative industries. This research series focuses on celebrating the practice of artists who are making important work that also pushes against and explodes beyond the understood boundaries of creative work. Presence and agency will be considered as central themes throughout Overspill and how the artist might use their practice to respond to and/or challenge ideas around self and identity. 

The launch event will feature first guest speaker Dr Funmi Adewole Elliott, Senior Lecturer in Dance at De Montfort University. She holds an MA in Postcolonial studies and PhD in Dance Studies. Her present research interests include dance as a profession, storytelling as performance, the Dance of Africa and the diaspora in the cultural and creative industries and postcolonial inquiry in practice as research. She is also a performer, dramaturge, and writer. She is intrigued by folktales, archetypes, and shared narratives. Her solo performances explore the relationship between movement and story, whether linear or non-linear, and the idea of structure and agency. One of the characters she has created and performs is Debora (2016) a woman who has house but wanders the streets, pulling a trolley, sifting through the objects in it, each as story that did not finish in the way it should, seeking sense in seeing and being seen. 

Dr Sophie Swoffer is a Lecturer in Performance at Sheffield Hallam University. Sophie’s work in interdisciplinary and draws on both Performance and Film Studies in order to re-envisage, challenge and deconstruct the male gaze. Sophie was the conference committee chair for the M4C-funded and De Montfort University-supported 2019 practice-based conference, Cracking the Established Order: Practice-Based Research in Academia. She has guest edited The International Journal of Creative Media Research’s special edition of Exploring Creative Methodologies (June 2020) and has also published to the international Body, Space, Technology journal (2021) and Makings journal (2022).

Find out more and sign up on Eventbrite, or register here.