Richard Doust

Dr. Richard Doust (UK/FR), an Englishman living in Strasbourg, is an actor, musician (piano, trumpet, singing), composer and “flow pedagogue”. He has a broad artistic education, ranging from music to theatre.

He completed his main artistic training at the Strasbourg Conservatoire National. He studied at the Roy Hart Theatre and briefly at the Psycho-Artistic Institute in Paris with Robert Wilson.
He has been working at the Courant d’Art (Strasbourg) since 1999. Richard Doust is co-founder of the cross-border multilingual theatre BAAL novo, which has existed since 2005 and is funded by the EU.

Thanks to the “Roy Hart voice work” and his musical and emotional passion for languages, he has been given very special roles in various stage productions.

He speaks fluent English, French and German, and good Italian and Russian. This linguistic skill and creativity together with his work on “inner voices” (inspired by Nathalie Goldberg, whose bestseller “Writing down the Bones” he translated into French) have deepened and sharpened his sense of human processes.

Richard Doust has a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science and has been scientifically researching the structures of narrative processes in text, music and movement since 2008. In 2015 he received his PhD on “A domain-independent model of suspense in narrative processes” (Open University, UK). He has also been working as a multi-lingual actor coach and creativity consultant for several consulting companies since 2010. Here, too, he uses and trains the power of storytelling.

Since 2009, he has been developing “Social Harmony”, a creative gesture-based ‘social’ pedagogical approach to the creative learning of musical harmony, which he has used successfully several times, particularly as a lecturer for the Yiddish Summer Weimar improvisation workshops. He is now building on this approach to share and expand his insights and experiences about suspense, curiosity and surprise in narrative processes within improvisation.