A full circle moment: from student to part of the curriculum
Flavia D’Avila (PhD 2022) is an award-winning theatre director and researcher. She discusses her PhD workshops, making your own St Andrews traditions and the creation of Placeholder – a poignant solo show that illuminates little-known characters and facts from Caribbean history.
Although I technically never attended the University of St Andrews in the traditional sense, I proudly graduated from it. My doctoral studies were undertaken at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), but the programme was delivered in partnership with St Andrews. So, while my day-to-day PhD life was rooted in rehearsal rooms and practice-based research within RCS, my degree bears the St Andrews crest, and I consider myself part of its community.
I first moved to Scotland from Brazil in 2006 to pursue a degree in Drama and Theatre Arts at Queen Margaret University, which I completed in 2010. I fell utterly in love with Scotland and decided to stay. After many years spent working as a freelance theatre director and producer, I decided to undertake a PhD exploring syncretic and transcultural theatre practices: how different cultural traditions merge within performance. I wanted to interrogate theatre not just as an artistic output, but as a site of cultural exchange, power dynamics and identity. The St Andrews and RCS partnership felt like the perfect fit; rigorous academic thinking rooted in practical artistry.
A meeting of the minds
Undoubtedly, our annual research residency in St Andrews was a highlight of the academic calendar. For most of the year, our research cohort spanning music, dance, theatre, music education and beyond were isolated in our individual studies. Once a year, we’d gather in St Andrews for an intensive two-day retreat. In my final couple of years, these took place in the Byre Theatre, which felt very fitting; researchers of performance assembled in a performance space not to present finished work, but to strengthen the foundations of our inquiry.
Those trips were brilliant. Not only did we receive workshops on research methodologies and skills, but we got to be in the same room to share frustrations, breakthroughs, doubts and discoveries. There were people researching choral singing, bagpiping, how Western music is taught in India, the songs of whales, dyspraxic dancing and making music with AI, to name a few. Those cross-disciplinary exchanges often sparked the most unexpected sense of clarity for us all. I didn’t take part in any of the classic St Andrews traditions, no Pier Walks or Raisin Weekend for me, but we established our own with trips to Jannettas for an afternoon pick-me-up and –ahem – messy nights at The Old Vic.
A creative spark
My PhD research sharpened my ability to synthesise complex information, collaborate across specialisms and hold space for competing truths. However, one of the best things to come out of it was actually a bit of a side effect. Sometime between 2019 and 2020, Professor Julia Prest from the School of Modern Languages at St Andrews got in touch with Professor Stephen Broad, our Director of Research at RCS, to say she was looking for early-career researchers who may be interested in joining a network she was putting together. This was very niche; a network of academics researching theatre and opera in the Caribbean during Colonial times! Professor Broad thought this may be of interest to me and forwarded Professor Prest’s email so that I could contact her directly.
As a researcher, I did not think my work was suited to the network because I was looking into postcolonialism. As a director, however, I was inspired to pitch a collaboration to Professor Prest, offering to make a play using the network’s papers as source material. I had done something similar not long before, collaborating with researchers from the University of Edinburgh on the Alice Thornton books project, which resulted in the play The Remarkable Deliverances of Alice Thornton. Thus, Professor Prest and I secured funding, and I engaged Scottish-Jamaican writer and performer Catherine Bisset. From here, Placeholder was born.
Placeholder – from Edinburgh to Milan
Placeholder is a poignant solo show based on the research shared by the CECTON network, illuminating some little-known characters and facts of Caribbean history. It’s set one year and one day before the Haitian Revolution, when Creole opera singer Minette Ferrand is confronted by the ghost of her enslaved mother, and a debate about race, responsibility and resistance ensues.The play opened at the Being Human Festival at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh in November 2021 and was well received. It went on to be performed at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews, the Edinburgh Multicultural Festival, Dundee Fringe and Alphabetti Theatre in Newcastle.
Placeholder was shortlisted for several awards and was published by Salamander Street in 2023 with a follow-up bilingual edition in French Creole in 2025. In 2024, we won the Dundee Fringe Award, which led to us taking the play to Milan in October 2025. Bisset and I also collaborated with our dramaturg, Jaïrus Obayomi, in co-authoring a chapter about creating the play in the volume Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre: Issues in Research, Writing, and Methodology, edited by Professor Prest. The cherry on top: Placeholder has been added to the curriculum as part of the Political Theatre module at St Andrews!
Nowadays, alongside my creative practice, I’ve been gradually trying to move into strategic and operational roles within arts organisations. I have served as a Non-Executive Director of the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh since 2022, where I became acutely aware of the financial challenges facing our industry.
On that same note, despite achievements like Placeholder, I still need a job outside the arts to provide for myself, so I have worked in events and hospitality recruitment and staffing operations across the UK, which has given me a steady income alongside administrative and managerial skills that will no doubt come in handy if and when I manage to transition to one of those roles within the arts. Looking forward, I would love to upscale my directing work and, ultimately, run a venue.