PhD Studentship: Greenroom Re-United: Revisiting and Revisioning the Archive of Greenroom to Map the Programming of Contemporary Performance Across Manchester

Greenroom was one of the most important venues for the promotion of live art in the North West from 1987 to 2011. It shaped the Manchester contemporary performance scene for 25 years and, alongside the ICA and Arnolfini, was one of the main centres for British contemporary performance in the seminal period of the late 1980s/early 1990s, seeing the birth of Queer Up North. Its legacy remains in the work and ethos of hÅb who programme Word of Warning, Emergency, Divergency etc. However, no public-facing or readily available archive of greenroom’s work exists, although there are disparate collections of recordings and data.

In 2009, greenroom united, an online archive of oral testimonies and a genealogy of performers and companies was created. It is now offline but the content remains available. Now 11 years after the venue closed, this project seeks to revisit and revision the archive to map the venue’s legacy, influence and impact.

The student will have access to training via North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (NWCDTP) and Manchester Met’s Postgraduate Arts and Humanities Centre (PAHC). The student will work closely with hÅb, Manchester School of Theatre and SODA, within Manchester School of Art, and the Special Collections Museum.

Aims and objectives

The project asks: What was greenroom’s impact on contemporary performance in the city and the UK? How has it influenced the city’s performance ecology? How can its archive be explored through re-enactment to mark the venue’s anniversaries?

The project involves three overlapping phases: curating the archive, narrating the archive and re-enacting the archive. The approach will be archival in terms of analysing and continuing the greenroom united project, ethnographical in terms of interviewing people connected to greenroom and its legacy, practice-as-research focused in terms of restaging or revisiting work from the archive and anniversarial in terms of staging exhibitions/performances that draw from the archive itself.

Specific requirements of the project 

Qualified candidates should have a good undergraduate degree in theatre, and desirably, a masters degree in a relevant subject. The ideal candidate will have a good practical knowledge of the contemporary performance landscape and greenroom’s history within it. A familiarity with the processes of documentation of live performance and the archiving of it would be useful. While the position is based in Manchester, the research will necessarily involve a small amount of travel to other live art archives in the UK. A modest travel budget will be made available to offset these costs, but the successful candidate should be available to travel.

Student eligibility  

Only open to home students.

Home fees (2022/23) included plus an annual stipend paid at the UKRI rate (£17,668 for 2022/23) plus £550pa. 

How to apply 

Interested applicants should contact Dr Michael Pinchbeck for an informal discussion. 

To apply you will need to complete the online application form for a full-time PhD or part time PhD (or download the PGR application form). You should also complete the PGR thesis proposal (supplementary information) form addressing the project’s aims and objectives, demonstrating how the skills you have maps to the area of research and why you see this area as being of importance and interest.  

If applying online, you will need to upload your statement in the supporting documents section, or email the application form and statement to PGRAdmissions@mmu.ac.uk. Closing date 23 January 2023. Expected start date October 2023.

Please quote the reference: ArtsHum-MP-2022-greenroom-reunited

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