Robert Vesty (he/they)

Longer bio:

I’m a queer person from a working-class background now living in East London with my spouse. I grew up half in Lancashire and half in Essex through the 70s and 80s. I was the eldest of three boys and a first-generation University student. I originally trained as an actor (University of Birmingham and Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama) in the 90s, but I’ve maintained an interdisciplinary performance practice over many years. I have also had extensive experience working in Higher Education. Until May 2024, I was Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University where I taught on the BA Theatre programme, led the MA in Professional Arts Practice and co-chaired the LGBT+ Staff Network. I was a long-term visiting lecturer at Central School of Speech and Drama, teaching movement (through the Feldenkrais Method) on the Collaborative Devised Theatre course between 2016 and 2021. In 2020, I completed my PhD thesis entitled Material Words for Voicing Dancers (Royal Holloway University of London) based on practice-led research that investigated the use of voice in some dance improvisatory performance practices. I graduated from the London II training as a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method® in 2015. The thing that brings all this together is a specialism in movement for actors within the field of consent-based performance in both practice and research.