The Faculty of Arts & Society's Rebekka Kill has fought off fierce competition and been granted an AHRC Small Grant.

The research project, which is in collaboration with Alice Bayliss from The University of Leeds, will last from April 2010 for 18 months. It involves an exploration of relational performance within contemporary music festivals as an emergent genre of creative communication. Whilst bands booked for festivals such as Glastonbury, Big Chill and Bestival often grab the headlines and attract large audiences, the presence of unscripted, un-programmed and unpredictable performances circulating around these sites provide opportunities for interactions that are rarely recorded, notated or analysed. These performances are highly visual, overtly playful and prioritise conversation between performer and participant.

During the 18 months of the project Rebekka Kill and Alice Bayliss will work with Urban Angels performance company to make a piece of interactive performance. This will then be toured around various diverse, music festivals and they will also work with a filmmaker to produce a documentary film. The entire project is being funded by the AHRC and represents support in excess of £100, 000.

Rebekka said, "I'm so excited and pleased about this opportunity; I found out that there were 120 proposals submitted to the AHRC and only ten awards were made so we've done really well to get through." She continued, "This project develops the work from our AHRC research network and also feeds into the curriculum development work and partnership work I have done over the last few years. Music festivals are such a fascinating area and no-one else is researching them as a site of production for contemporary performance."