The Drama and Performance Seminar explores questions of performance within theatrical and historical contexts. To complement the new Interdisciplinary Performance Seminar at CRASSH, which all graduates are encouraged to attend, this year we will be focussing on the relationship(s) between ideas of the dramatic and performance in practice.

• Monday 5 May 2014, 5pm: Sidelong Glance presents Wild Laughter
  This performance and the following Q&A will take place in the English Faculty Board Room

Wild Laughter is an original performance piece devised by Sidelong Glance. This one-woman show is the biography of the D’Oyly Carte stage clown Albert James, told through the stories of several other clowns: from Shakespeare’s Feste to Justin Butcher’s Scaramouche Jones, via Joseph Grimaldi, Sarah Bernhardt, Charlie Chaplin, and the Mikado’s Koko. Wild Laughter fuses biography and cultural history. Refracted through the family experience of its creators, it is a performance about performance which is deeply conscious of the personal, social, literary, and popular pasts which underpin it.

Sidelong Glance is a production company managed by Ellie and Rosie Lavan. It is committed to delivering innovative performance through live theatre, documentary film and other forms.

Ellie Lavan, co-director
Ellie studied English at King’s College London before moving to New York, where she was a Fulbright scholar at NYU. After a year as a spokeswoman for the British Bankers’ Association, she now lives in Cambridge where she is a PhD student at Girton College, writing a cultural history of the circus in Ireland. Ellie is an actress and producer of theatre and film. She has published both journalism and creative writing.

Rosie Lavan, co-director
Rosie studied English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and subsequently worked for two years at The Times. She has also worked for a London MEP, House of Lords Hansard, and as a freelance writer. She returned to Oxford in 2010 and is now in the final year of a PhD on Seamus Heaney. She was co-founder of Oxford Student PEN. With Ellie she is working on a number of academic and creative projects.

http://sidelongproductions.com/ | sidelongglanceproductions@gmail.com