Part-time home (based London) Staging and Citing Gendered Meanings : a Practice-Based Study of Representational Strategies in Live and Mediated Performance Anna Birch is a well known theatre director with a long career of directing first productions of plays written by women playwrights for the London stage including Royal Court Theatre, London and regional theatres U.K. Since 1996 she has produced a body of devised site-specific work for this degree, and has based a part of her emerging theory of screen and live presence of women, in a frame-by-frame analysis, on her own productions, particularly that of 'Di's Midsummer Night's Party'. This year's work focused on two aspects of further development: pulling out the binding theoretical and practical threads based on the author's experience as a director and situated in a wider cultural and theoretical context; and reproducing a number of works while offering very detailed gestural readings and frame analyses thereof. She plans to submit her PhD thesis and accompanying practice-based research on CD by September 2003. Her thesis will map her work in creating a matrix for reading gender roles on stage and screen. She continues as Artistic Director of Fragments and Monuments. Her recent work using keystroke for live and mediated performance has been seen at Mediatheque 2002, and screened for the Cochrane Theatre Summer 2003 and the recent LUX open 2003 (4 days of New British Artists Film and Video) at the Royal College of Art. She is developing a new live and mediated performance Mary Wollstonecraft Lives Here ! at Newington Green, London N16 for summer 2004.
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