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Birkbeck Theatre Alumni Lecture: Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal and Néka Da Costa

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Birkbeck alumni Néka Da Costa and Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal reflect on their creative projects, research, career paths, and how the MA Text and Performance at Birkbeck prepared them for their current endeavours, research and collaborative theatre work.  


Néka Da Costa (she/her) is a disabled, queer theatre-maker, collaborator and academic at the Theatre and Performance department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has an MA in Text and Performance from Birkbeck University of London and RADA, during which she honed both her creative practice as a director/theatre maker and her research trajectory in the field of Performance Studies in the global South. She is currently studying towards a PhD at the Wits School of Arts in which she intends to design and mobilise a radical pedagogy in Theatre and Performance which prioritises disabled students and centralises difference to create inclusive access in the university space. As a creative researcher, Néka is interested in the dynamics of theatre and access in all its permutations: economic access, physical access, linguistic access and access in terms intersectional representation, politics and power dynamics. She is also currently part of the core conference committee for the Performance Studies International Conference, which will be hosted at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg in 2023. As a professional theatre director, Néka’s recent creative work centres around staging original South African narratives for children such as 'Tiny the Tokoloshe and Other African Tales' which won a Naledi Theatre Award for Best Production for Young Audiences in 2019. She is currently working on a South African adaptation of 'Alice in Wonderland' to be staged in February next year. 

 

Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal (she/her) is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She completed the MA Text and Performance in 2015, and has a BA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on performance and work, with a particular interest in questions of emotional labour, theatrical production and actor training. She completed her doctorate at Birkbeck, with the thesis ‘Serving the Self: authenticity, performance and emotional labour’ in 2022, which used primary data gathered from British workplaces to expand and develop an understanding of the theatrical and performative influence in contemporary service and hospitality work. This research builds upon the foundational definition of emotional labour offered by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, by understanding it as work which requires the performance of specific traits and characteristics before an audience (usually customers). Most recently she has published a chapter in the edited collection 'Feelings and Work in Modern History,' with Bloomsbury’s History of Emotions series, which explores the application of Stanislavski and actor training within theorisations of emotional labour. As a playwright, she has worked with Old Vic New Voices and Kali Theatre and her work has been performed at the Old Red Lion, Brighton Fringe, RADA and VAULT festivals. 

 

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