From 16 - 18 July 2025 a crowd of researchers, artists, tech developers and more gathered at the Royal Shakespeare Company's venue The Other Place for the Festival of Ideas. This was space for this year's cohort of IF Fellows to demonstrate their work in the field of artistic research, for collaborating organisations to share their practice, and for the RSC's wider collaborations to join the discussion.
Oxford's two 2024-25 fellows, Amahra Spence and Stephen Bailey, were part of the Festival alongside Professor Wes Williams (MML), who has been a member of this collaboration since it launched.
Amahra Spence: Exploring Black imagination in response to architectures
Amahra took part in a conversation with Kordae Henry (one of the 2025-26 Fellows) about her practice, and about the work she looked at in Oxford through conversations with Professor Gascia Ouzounian (Music) and during her April 2025 event, the Community Developers Dinner.
Amahra discussed how a childhood fascination with maps and building her own cities in games and on paper led to her work on building in the real world. She situates real experiences in the design of places, and has worked on a project using generative A.I. and hip-hop poetics to create responsive architecture with young people. She seeks to shape futures rooted in dignity, not in extraction. She is currently creating a new anti-disciplinary space in her home city of Birmingham, a 'cultural centre of the future' called Abuelos.
Stephen Bailey: Adaptation, translation and new forms
Stephen discussed his work on a new translation of Calderon's Life Is A Dream. At Oxford he worked with Wes, Professor Johnathan Thacker (MML) and Dr Minna Jeffery (English) to explore the process of translating a text. He discussed the process, and how every new production of an existing play is an adaptation, to some extent.
His adaptation of Life Is a Dream imagines the character of Prince Segismundo as a disabled character. Stephen looked at disability in the 17th Century: would people at that time have considered themselves to be 'disabled', when 'normality' was a concept which emerged in the 19th Century? He thought about disability as a translation of the human experience. Onstage, he and Wes discussed the fact that translation does not only look back at the play itself, but also looks back at the other points in time which have influenced the text.
Wes Williams: Higher Education and culture in times of turmoil
Wes was part of a panel with Sarah Wolozin (MIT), Ellen Oh (Stanford) and Kat Cizek (MIT), moderated by the RSC's Jacqui O'Hanlon. The panel thought about universities as places that can enable collaborations and create safe spaces for artistic research - but also acknowledged that there can be dangers in this too, in the current moment. They thought about the role of 'criticality' and the ability to explore new ideas and technologies away from the corporate world. They thought about the expanding notion of research in practice, and how artists are the people who can think differently in times of crisis.
All agreed that interdisciplinarity is key, and that process has a value, as well as product. As Wes said: "You can have great facilities, but you need to facilitate access."
RSC IF | Performance Research Hub
