Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Heroes, villains and pro golfers to be explored in research-based performance
Funded by the European Social Research Council as part of their Festival of Social Sciences, themes of heroes, villains, desire and strength will be explored during the event at 7pm on Friday 8 November.
Organised by Dr Douglas, a lecturer in Sport at Leeds Met, the show will see a team of researchers highlighting their work through contemporary theatre interpretation, with the help of students from Liverpool John Moores University's Department of Drama.
'Revised Reshaped Reclaimed: One golfer's story', written by and starring Dr Douglas, tells the story of her 17-year-old self who, after having a golf lesson dropped, out of to school with the ambition of becoming a pro golfer. With a backdrop of newspaper cuttings and TV footage from the time, the story addresses how her rise to fame was captured by the UK Press and how she was portrayed and perceived.
Dr Douglas, who left the women's tour in 1996, gaining a sport science degree and then her PhD studying the motivation of some of the world's top female golfers, said: "It's a poetic and lyrical tale which questions what you think you know about the road to success and what an individual has to do in order to perform."
Her research over the past decade has shown some of the reasons why athletes cheat, take drugs and struggle to cope when their sporting days are over.
Other performances include performance, 'Heroes and Villains' and 'Something between us', both based on research and written by Dr David Carless, a Reader in narrative psychology at Leeds Met. The latter performance explores same-sex attraction and the differences between the cultures of sport and dance.