Wednesday 27 November, 5:30-7pm
Talk: 5:30-6:30
Social: 6:30 onwards, all welcome
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Professor Ralph Yarrow
University of East Anglia
Title: Transactions and transformations: moving bodies and minds (‘western’, Indian and South African theatre post-1960)
The lecture will examine the ways in which we look at performance as an anthropological and behavioural category; as a site of articulation, celebration, contestation, resistance, discovery; and as communication, dialogue and interaction.The lecture will briefly situate historically the main lines of engagement and ask why it happened at that time in that way and what those practitioners were seeking.
Though this is definitely a two-way street (many ‘non-western’ playwrights, directors and theorists received parts of their training/education and theoretical models from the ‘west’), we could say that ‘acquisitions’ or extensions for ‘western’ theatre have occurred principally in the following areas:
- embodied practice and training methodologies
- alternative dramaturgies
- multigeneric performance practices
- reconfiguration of performance space and relationship with audience
- aesthetic theory, reception theory, modelling of psychophysiological processes and consciousness
- interrogation of historical and cultural positionalites
Biography
Professor Yarrow is a Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature. He is a teacher, theatre director, performer, actor trainer, writer, editor, translator, project leader.
His career spans an engagement with language and cultural production from Europe to India, from comparative criticism to postcolonial theory, from teaching innovations to directing practice; theatre and performance in France, Germany, Poland, the UK, India and Asia, South Africa.
He made a founding international contribution to research into consciousness and the arts; developed further specializations in improvisation, Indian and Asian theatre; and in theatre in and as development, which comes out of theatre practice as training for personal and communal creativity, but also opens out into democracy as practice. He work currently in many of these areas as well as on performance and ecology; including close co-operation with India’s leading Forum Theatre/Theatre of the Oppressed organisation, Jana Sanskriti.
His books include Improvisation in Drama, Indian Theatre, and Sacred Theatre and a translation (from German) of Birgit Fritz’s InExactArt: the Autopoietic Theatre of Augusto Boal.
Wednesday 4 December, 5-7pm
Talk: 5:00-6:00
Social: 6:00 onwards, all welcome
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Dr Grzegorz Cielniak
University of Lincoln
Title: The Creativity of Music Programming
Computer technology is ubiquitous in modern music-making and is used by musicians to aid all aspects of music creation and production such as composing, scoring or recording. Current music software features intuitive user interfaces enabling natural interaction with the computer equipment even for technology-shy individuals. This was not always the case, however, and early computers used for making music were limited to a narrow group of both technically- and artistically-able. Nowadays, computer programming is becoming one of the basic skills taught at primary schools bringing more opportunities for employing coding for artistic purpose.
In this talk, I will explore the concept of programming as a creative method for expressing musical ideas. I will provide intriguing examples of music programmers and their work such as chiptune composers of the previous century as well as contemporary real-time programming performers. These should help to highlight the constraints and to analyse the unique artistic qualities stemming from such an approach to musical creativity.
Biography
Dr Grzegorz Cielniak is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of Lincoln, UK. His research interests include mobile robotics, machine perception, AI and in particular applications in agricultural robotics. He considers programming as a creative process and is interested in the artistic implications of his discipline.
Wednesday 26 February, 5-7pm
Talk: 5:00-6:00
Social: 6:00 onwards, all welcome
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Dr E. Christin Essin
Associate Professor of Theatre, 2019 Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow, Vanderbilt University
Title: Dramaturgies of Backstage Labour
The work of backstage technicians—stagehands, electricians, wardrobe crews—is vital to producing theatre artistry, yet theatre history and criticism largely remains silent about these contributions. This talk shines light on backstage spaces and reflects on the historical and cultural significance of the backstage labour through a strategic analysis of metatheatrical texts. By turning to the theatrical stage as the fictional setting for their stories, dramatists create characters that both document and inform perceptions of backstage workers, prompting us to consider how the entertainment industry divides workers by hierarchies of class and gender. Within metatheatrical narratives, backstage work becomes visible, understandable, and accessible to the historian or critic who pulls together the threads of experiences between those who move and those who stand in front of scenery, between those who wear and those who clean costumes.
Biography
Christin Essin is an Associate Professor of Theatre History and a 2019 Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She has published numerous essays on theatre design artistry, technology, and backstage labor in publications such as Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and Theatre History Studies. Her first book, Stage Designers in Early Twentieth Century America (2012), won a Golden Pen award from the United States Institute for Theatre Technology. She is a co-editor of Theatre Artisans and their Craft (2019) and is currently finishing her second book, Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography, an examination of the work identities and experiences of unionized technicians in New York City’s commercial theatre industry.
Wednesday 18 March, 5-7pm
Talk: 5:00-6:00
Social: 6:00 onwards, all welcome
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Dr Kirsten McKenzie
Biography
Dr McKenzie’s research interests are varied, but generally fall within the theme of body representation. She is particularly interested in the multi-sensory processes underlying body representation and spatial awareness in healthy individuals, and the cognitive and perceptual processes leading to somatic misperception and pain. She uses a variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques including MIRAGE virtual/augmented reality, fMRI, EEG and other psychophysical measures, structured patient interviews, physiological assessment & eye-tracking.