Anna Furse was the Head of the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths until recently. During her leadership, she expanded the department by 20% and introduced innovations like refurbishing practice spaces. She directed over 50 productions internationally and remains actively involved in the field through workshops, lectures, and mentoring younger artists. Her extensive career spans dance, theatre, writing, artistic direction and academic work promoting interdisciplinary collaboration.

1. ProfessorAnna Furse B.A, P.G.C.E, PhD,F.R.S.A
A brief biography
Anna Furse was Head of the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths until
this academic year. During her 4-year leadership she expanded the Department by 20%
and introduced several innovations, including investment in the on going refurbishment of
the Department’s practice spaces and workshops, a restructure of staffing and new
academic appointments, building the Department’s work in intercultural and
interdisciplinary study, Applied practices (work in and with communities) and Practice as
Research. She is the Director of the international laboratory MA in Performance Making,
co-Director of The Centre of the Body and member of several College Committees and
Working Groups, notably the Practice Research Group, the International Group and the
Learning and Teaching Committee. She is leading the Goldsmiths Mediterranean project,
curating and directing a first Summer Intensive Laboratory for Performance Practices in
Palermo, July 2015. Currently on sabbatical, she is giving a presentation on her practice
this term as part of the Performance Research Forum (Dis-Play) programme that she
founded, curates and chairs, to bring to the attention of all students and share the practice
research of their tutors.
Following early training with the Royal Ballet through the 1960’s, where she won 2
Choreographic prizes from Leonid Massine and Sir Frederick Ashton respectively, she quit
dance for theatre in 1971, when she assisted and translated at Peter Brook’s International
Centre for Theatrical Research (ICTR) Paris (preparing the African tour) and participated in
‘paratheatre’ with Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium. She then took a Drama Joint B.A in
Drama and French at University of Bristol followed by a P.G.C.E in Drama at Goldsmiths.
Her early professional career combined teaching internationally (she was Head of
Movement at Rose Bruford College for 4 years from the age of 28), founding her own
company BloodGroup (with 6 international touring productions and its London home at the
ICA), and freelance direction. In the 1980s she was a New Dance activist with X-6
collective, co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space, and co-editor of New Dance Magazine.
At this time she was one of 4 dancers (Transitional identity Co) to introduce Contact
Improvisation into the UK HE system. Her professional theatre career since has included:
30 years as an award-winning director, writer, scenographer, project leader, programmer,
artistic director, curator, consultant and educator.
Anna has directed over 50 productions from small scale to regional reps, theatre-in-
education, disabled theatre (GRAEAE), the RSC, for BBC radio, and touring internationally
to Europe, the USA, Asia and the Middle East. An internationally published/performed
writer, her puppetry play The Peach Child was selected for the National Theatre New
Connections 2008, staged in 13 Repertory Theatres all over the UK and at the Cottesloe
Theatre and produced internationally including in Cairo. Her innovative Methuen anthology
Theatre in Pieces, Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (2011) includes her
Don Juan.Who?/Don Juan.Kdo? co-production with Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana that
headlined the FeEAST Festival at Riverside Studios in 2008. This work was evolved in
cyberspace by a geographically dispersed company of 8, and invented fresh ways to
harness technology for collaborative creation. Among several more recent smaller scale
works, her solo When We Were Birds premiered at the Cantieri Culturali Zisa, in Palermo in
2013 and was presented at Live Collision Festival as well as GIFT in 2014.
Artistic Directorships include the pioneering feminist physical/visual company BloodGroup
that she co-funded in 1981 and Paines Plough (1990 - 1995), leading this new writing
company to ‘key strategic’ status with Arts Council England. Her then innovative mission
included introducing the highest quality production values: in scenography (Sally Jacobs)
and sound (Graeme Miller, Stephen Warbeck), bringing live artists to collaborate with

2. writers, and pioneering site specific dramaturgy, e.g. motivating Geraldine Pilgrim’s on
going work since in responding to specific buildings. Her School Without Walls extended
the possibilities for training and developing new writing. Her pioneering bi-lingual co-
production Down and Out in Paris and London involved 100 local supernumeries,
including homeless groups (France/UK, 1992) and double-billed for the first of two UK
programmes in France with The Wrestling School at the Theatre de Gennevilliers in Paris.
Her Time Out award-winning Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) toured to emerging post-
glasnost Russia and was featured in Channel 4 TV’s Are Women Mad? Founding
Athletes of the Heart in 2003 with a Wellcome Trust Impact Award, she directed a multi-
outcome 10-year project on infertility issues, The Art of A.R.T (Assisted Reproductive
Technologies) producing a range of works both live and on BBC radio. Athletes’
partnerships to date have included: 2 hospitals, 2 Assisted Conception Units, a museum,
schools, festivals and international venues, including co-productions in Serbia and
Slovenia and performances in Beirut, Palermo, Dublin and the UK. A video installation on
Augustine (Big Hysteria) was part of the Mad, Bad, Sad exhibition at the Freud Museum in
2013 -14, alongside works by Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Aside
from the media critics, her work is critiqued and cited in a range of academic books and
journals.
Anna is a regular speaker and workshop leader at conferences internationally. Most
recent international workshops and lectures include for The Beijing Dance Academy 2013;
The Charles University Department of Philosophy ‘The Ethics of Play’, Prague, 2015;
Ambdekar University, Delhi, 2015; Create Ireland, 2015 and Beijing Nanluoguxiang
Performing Arts Festival, 2015. In 2015 – 16 she has been invited to the University of the
Peloponnese (October 2015), Lasalle University, Singapore (November 2015); the Dance
Research Studio, London (December 2015); The Eric Bentley 100th
Anniversary Tribute,
New York (December 2015), (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota, Columbia in 2016,
and to direct Costume MA students at the University of the Arts (November 2015 to
January 2016). She is currently working on developing several new writing, talks series
and production projects as well as Research applications for projects in the UK and India..
As one of the earliest feminist and dance-theatre makers in the UK, among many academic
and artistic projects she has been invited into are to various Magdalena gatherings, the
University of Lancaster, AHRC Women’s Writing for Performance (2005); ACE Articulating
Dance Lab (Northampton University 2005 - 7); more recently, The Argument Room and
Charlotte Vincent’s Table project (with Tamara Rojo, Siobhan Davies, Jocelyn Pook (2013).
Supporting younger artists includes mentoring for Arts Council England (most recently Kerri
McLean’s Mermaid project with New Writing South) and consultancy (Zoukak, Beirut and
Academy of Visual Arts, Ljubljana).
http://www.gold.ac.uk/theatre-performance/staff/academic/a-furse/
http://www.athletesoftheheart.org