Dr Matthew Reason
Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Head of Programme: MA Studies
in Creative Practice
Dr Matthew Reason is a Senior Lecturer in
Theatre, Teaching Fellow and Head of Programme for MA Studies in
Creative Practice at York St John University.
Matthew Reason is a researcher and theatre ethnographer, whose
work explores audiences, liveness, performance representation and
documentation and reflection. He is also interested in cultural
policy, children's theatre, dance, live art and new
playwriting.
He is currently working on a major three year AHRC funded
project titled ‘Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy’. This project
explores dance audiences through the use of neuroscience and
qualitative audience research and is a collaboration between the
universities of Manchester, York St John, Glasgow and Imperial
College London. See http://www.watchingdance.org/.
Other activity includes ongoing explorations into how children
watch live theatre, partly run in collaboration with Imaginate and
due to be published in a new book, The Young Audience:
Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experience of Theatre
(Trentham Books), in 2010.
His first book, Documentation, Disappearance and the
Representation of Live Performance, was published by Palgrave
Macmillan in September 2006. He has also published in journals such
as New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research, Dance Research
Journal, Studies in Theatre and Performance and elsewhere. He has
received research funding the AHRC, Scottish Executive Education
Department and the Society for Theatre Research.