Drama & Performance Seminar series

 

The Drama & Performance Seminar series

aims to explore questions of performance

within theatrical contexts both contemporary and historical,

with a special emphasis on ideas of the dramatic

and performance in practice

 

Judith E Wilson Drama Studio

Faculty of English

9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP

 

Thursday 9 May from 5-6.30pm

Dr Dana Mills (Political Theory, Oxford) – ‘Protesting Bodies: Dance, Politics and Performance’

Dana Mills is an Oxford based writer and activist. She received her DPhil in politics from Mansfield College, Oxford. She has held fellowships in Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, among others. Her first book: Dance and politics: Moving beyond Boundaries was published by Manchester University Press. She is currently working on a biography and critical study of Rosa Luxemburg for Reaktion Press. 

 

 

Thursday 23 May from 5-6.30pm 

Professor Tina Chanter (Philosophy and Gender, Kingston) –  ‘Frames of Perception and Racial Imaginaries’

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, this performance seminar has now been cancelled.

An abstract from Claudia Rankine on Serena Williams:

‘This talk will explore the relationship between identification, perception and gendered and racial imaginaries to questions of visibility and invisibility. How are we embedded in worlds that are constituted through habitual and often unconscious assumptions, and how might these assumptions be disrupted and reworked? Professor Chanter will discuss Claudia Rankine’s consideration of micro-aggression in relation to Serena Williams, drawing connections between Rankine’s poetry/essays and Rancière’s understanding of dissensus and disidentification.’

 

Thursday 6 June from 5-6.30pm

Dr Ella Parry-Davies (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal Central School of Speech & Drama)

Dr Ella Parry-Davies (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Royal Central School of Speech & Drama) on ‘The Theatre whose Stage is the Home: Brecht, Ethnography and Migrant Domestic Work’ and Dr. Lynne Kendrick (Reader at Royal Central School of Speech & Drama) on ‘Theatre and Aurality’.

Dr Ella Parry-Davies is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. She holds a PhD jointly funded by King’s College London and the National University of Singapore, and researches theatre and performance in contexts of transnational migration. She has recently been named a 2019 New Generation Thinker, selected by BBC Radio 3, BBC Arts and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Dr Ella Parry-Davies’ talk will focus on methodological and ethical questions arising during her postdoctoral project ‘Home-Makers: Urban Expertise in the Philippine Diaspora’, specifically looking at relationships between ethnography and theatre-making. She will explore what tools political theatre might have to challenge the ethnographic gaze, and what the implications for this are for the agency of research participants. She will reflect on these questions in relation to ideas set out in Bertolt Brecht’s exilic poems on ‘the theatre whose stage is the street’.

Dr Lynne Kendrick is a Reader in New Theatre Practices at CSSD, specialising in ways of making contemporary theatre and performance, with a particular focus on forms that draw on sound and noise, listening and radical forms of audience. She has taught across a number of courses at Central and is now a part of the MA Advanced Theatre Practice team. Prior to this she worked as a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths College and Royal Holloway, University of London, teaching practical and theoretical courses in directing, as well administrating the British Centre of the International Theatre Institute. In 1994 she co-founded Camden People’s Theatre (CPT).

There will be drinks available after in the English Faculty social area.