A Leeds Met member of staff is looking forward to getting behind the camera as part of a performance company research project.

Laura Taylor, a course leader from the Northern Film School, has been selected to join Rebekka Kill from the Faculty of Arts and Society as filmmaker for a high profile research project.

During the 18 months of the project, Rebekka Kill and Alice Bayliss, from The University of Leeds, will work with Urban Angels performance company to make a piece of interactive performance, which will then be toured around various diverse music festivals. Laura will direct and shoot a film documenting the project. She said: "I'm very excited about making this film; it's a brilliant opportunity for any filmmaker, and working alongside Rebekka will be fantastic."
 
The project is funded by the AHRC Beyond Text scheme and represents support in excess of £100,000. It involves an exploration of relational performance within contemporary music festivals as an emergent genre of creative communication.

Bands booked for festivals such as Glastonbury, Big Chill and Bestival often grab the headlines and attract large audiences, but the presence of unscripted, un-programmed and unpredictable performances circulating around these sites provides opportunities for interaction that are rarely recorded, notated or analysed. These performances are highly visual, overtly playful and prioritise conversation between performer and participant.
 
Rebekka Kill and Laura Taylor are building a collaborative relationship and are also working together on the innovative Festival Republic partnership project. Laura manages the student volunteers and interns while they are filming the Unsigned and Lake stages, who then receive credit for their work-based learning module at the same time. The duo have also co-published and worked on curriculum development together. This film project is an opportunity for them to work together again but this time in the field of practice-based research.