Over the past few years the Department of Drama Oriental Ballet and Contemporary Dance, University of the Visual and Performing Arts (UVPA hereafter) has produced various theatre productions supervised by a set of academics and written and produced by the fourth year undergraduates for their final year performance project. The Department has produced more than 10 major theatre productions ranging from adaptations, originals and translations. Among these theatre productions namely, Promethius Pemvathiya (Prometheus Love) and Mr W. or Last Days of Attanayake have drawn attention of the critiques and theatregoers claiming that supervisors shadows are highly prominent in students’ productions. Some critiques also claimed that these productions are not students’ productions but supervisors’ interventions are highly visible in the way they have produced those plays. In this paper I will discuss how the production titled Mr W. or Last Days of Mr Attenayake was conceived, developed and performed for the final year graduation production and how new form of learning and teaching had been implemented in the process of theatre making and supervision. In this paper, I will discuss how ‘embodied learning’ approaches have been applied in the learning process of this production. Further, this research emphasizes the importance of embodied supervision and learning in practice-led research works. Furthermore, I will apply Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of embodiment as the locus of student-supervisor relationship and discuss how embodied supervision can shed a light to enhance the contemporary practice-led-research or research-led-practice developed by the University undergraduates’ education.

Author Profile(s)
Saumya Liyanage has been working as an actor over a two decades in Sri Lankan creative industry. He has received his Masters of Creative Arts degree from the Flinders University, South Australia and has received his PhD from La Trobe University, Australia in 2015. Saumya has published books and has presented research papers at various National and International conferences including Australasian Theatre Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) and International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). Saumya’s research interests include performer training, philosophy and embodied learning and teaching in creative arts. He is currently working as the Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UVPA, Colombo, Sri Lanka.