This final chapter revisits all the issues discussed in the textbook in light of their applicability to the real classroom, that is, the relationship between research and practice. It argues for the importance of considering the usefulness of research if and when a researcher hopes to influence classroom teaching via their research. The chapter begins with a description as to how research in general is connected to our daily lives (e.g., medicine, engineering, education). It then overviews the research examining the impact of research on educational practices including second language teaching. Practical and epistemological obstacles to bridging the research–practice gap from practitioners’ and researchers’ sides are discussed. The chapter proposes a variety of actions that practitioners and researchers can take in order to foster a bidirectional, constructive, productive, equitable, and mutually beneficial relationship. The chapter ends with a series of activities designed to ensure the learning outcomes from the textbook.

‘How does one establish and maintain a metal band?’, ‘how does a metal band produce music?’ or ‘how does it feel to be on the stage, with hundreds of people you need to win over?’ are questions a musicologist cannot answer beyond generalisations based on secondary and/or tertiary accounts since they are usually without the means to maintain the proximity to observe, let alone experiencing first-hand. For most academics, making music is a recreational process that they need as a contrast to their research life. Thus, few have investigated the ‘private life’ of a small musical unit we call the band in general, or the metal band in particular. This chapter focuses on the joy and despair of metal musicianship, picking up new skills, and experiencing all kinds of professional and personal conflicts embedded within the metal scene of Istanbul, Turkey. The experience captured in the historiography of the metal band is handled to define the thematic context by articulating phases of metal music-making: formation, songwriting, recording, gigging, publishing and reception. The author intends to assume the stance of a film director rather than a camera to provide thick description and analysis using the habitual tools of social sciences.

Robert Eisenstein, director of the Folger Consort, was musical director for the 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre, a collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library and the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. In this interview with Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Eisenstein explains the role of music in the Restoration theatre and the particular musical demands of Restoration Shakespeare. Based on his experience at the Folger, he also reflects on the challenges and opportunities for musicians in performing Restoration Shakespeare today with Restoration-era music (some of which had been composed for the original productions) and offers suggestions for both musical and stage directors in bringing this unique historical repertoire to life on the contemporary stage.

Kate Eastwood Norris played Lady Macbeth in the Folger’s 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth, in collaboration with the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. Writing from her perspective as a professional actress, Eastwood Norris explains the parameters of the Folger’s production, both logistical and creative. She then recounts and reflects on the experience, both formal and informal, of working with the team of scholars attached to the production. In contrast to the chapter by actor Louis Butelli, this chapter move beyond its immediate production-based narrative to consider in a more general way the need for scholars to explain their insights in a way that is appropriate, useful, and valuable to professional theatre artists. This chapter argues that when scholarship is treated as an idea—a possibility—rather than as a fact—a fixed certainty—the creative aspects of both scholarship and performance can form the solid basis of scholar-artist collaboration.

In 2017, as part of the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, the editors led a research team of scholars and artists in discussing, workshopping, rehearsing, and performing scenes and songs from Thomas Shadwell’s 1674 operatic revision of Davenant and Dryden’s The Tempest at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. This chapter offers reflections on how scholar-artist collaboration in performing Restoration Shakespeare has functioned as sustained moments of what Rebecca Schneider (following Gertrude Stein) has called ‘syncopated time’ – in this instance, a collision of archival past and embodied present, in which each dimension punctured the other. Reflecting on their practice-based research, the authors propose that what can emerge through such syncopations are performance-generated insights that neither the recorded past nor the embodied present could fully apprehend on its own.

The Introduction takes as its starting point the desire expressed in James Wright's Historia Histrionica (1699) to 'guess at the action' of early modern players, arguing that the 'action' of boy performers is partially recoverable from the texts that have come down to us provided that we are willing to read with physical skill in mind. It surveys the past century's critical fascination with boy actors, suggesting that a great deal of pre-existing work has neglected the embodied stagecraft required of these young performers. It additionally makes a case for the value of practice-based research in the study of early modern drama's corporeal dynamics, and maps out the book's integration of this method into its analysis of a wide range of plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Introduction ends with an outline of the book's structure, which explains how the chapters cumulatively build a more physically and theatrically sensitive picture of the work of boy actors in this period.

This chapter discusses how the overlapping practices of sport and theatre contributed to early modern boy actors' performances, arguing that sport and exercise formed a crucial part of boy actors' training for the professional stage. The first half of the chapter takes as its focus the educational writings and theatrical activity of the educational theorist and practitioner Richard Mulcaster, tracing the influence of his physically minded pedagogical ideals on the robustly physical Elizabethan and Jacobean boy company repertories. The second half of the chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the staging of sport in John Marston's What You Will and John Day's The Isle of Gulls, drawing on practical experiments with staging these scenes in the present-day Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to consider the processes by which a boy actor may have come to perform precise and physically challenging aspects of dramaturgy. It demonstrates that a practical approach to critically neglected plays offers new perspectives on the dramatic possibilities afforded to the first and youngest interpreters of early modern drama which keep the skilled performing body as the rightful centre of attention.

This chapter considers how star roles such as Shakespeare's Cleopatra were sculpted and scored by precisely the kind of physical virtuosity that is demanded in the scenes of skill instruction and sporting display discussed elsewhere in the book. The chapter offers sustained, in-depth readings of a number of leading female roles, placing Cleopatra within a broad theatrical context of corporeally virtuosic leading women including the titular heroine of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, Pandora in John Lyly's The Woman in the Moon, and Lucretia in Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter. It also offers sustained, in-depth readings (partially informed by practice-based research) of particularly spectacular features of Cleopatra's stagecraft, demonstrating how specific acts of violence and physical collaboration redound widely across the early modern dramatic canon. These cross-repertorial readings create a complex network of physical feats and corporeal interactions between actors that centre on the dexterity of the leading boy player, further extending the concept of early modern theatrical culture’s shared investment in boys’ corporeal performances.

This chapter provides an overview and exploration of the methodological approaches employed by circus scholars in three edited collections published between 2016 and 2018. Reflecting the fact that the majority of published circus scholars have backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, the chapters and articles in these collections largely employ three methodological approaches, which currently dominate circus research: history/historiography, performance analysis, and ethnography. While much circus research relies on archival sources, scholars working on contemporary circus – many of whom started their careers as circus artists – supplement this research with viewing of live performances and the use of ethnographic tools such as interviews and their own professional experience in their data collection. Of emerging importance is the use of social science methodologies such as interviews, surveys, and demographic data to explore and critique circus education, institutions, and spectatorship. Heeding Halberstam and Nyong’o’s call for a ‘rewilding of theory’ (2018), we further take account of emerging circus scholarship which insists on circus as a live, experiential set of practices and on the viability of methods which centre embodiment and note the centering of ethics in scholars’ exploration of circus training and performances, and in circus research itself.