| 11 May 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm | Room SG1, Alison Richard Building | |
- Description
Description
Theatricality
Sophie Nield (Drama and Theatre, RHUL)
Clare Foster (Classical Reception/Film, UCL)
Abstract
Sophie Nield will address theatricality as a political concept, and its value in helping us analyse and think through political events, for example, protest history, the performance of the self in public space, commemoration etc – and how it might be distinct from ‘performativity’. Clare Foster will add some images from first century Roman wallpainting, an art form which characteristically and self-reflexively plays with the metaphoric potentials of ‘theatre’, then a hugely expanded concept in comparison to modern ways of thinking.
Dr Sophie Nield, Senior Lecturer in Drama at Royal Holloway University of London, works on questions of space, theatricality and representation in political life and the law, and on the performance of ‘borders’ of various kinds. Recent publications include Tahrir Square EC4M: the Occupy movement and the dramaturgy of public order (2015) in The Grammar of Politics and Performance. Rai, S. M. & Reinelt, J. (eds.), 'Speeches that draw tears': theatricality, commemoration and social history in the journal Social History (2014), and Siting the people: power, protest and public space in Performing Site-Specific Theatre Birch, A. & Tompkins, J. (eds.) (2012) (See http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/sophie-nield%2811a6b73a-f7cb-46d5-a903-b8001169f43d%29/publications.html).
Clare Foster is a founding co-convenor of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network. A screenwriter and playwright with a background in Classics and Classical Reception, she teaches creative writing for the Institute of Continuing Education and the Faculty of Education and for the past two years has been director of the MA course ‘Ancient Rome on Film’ at UCL. Her research in general supports a paradigm shift from seeing works as discrete objects to seeing them in terms of the various audiences they imply.
Open to all. No registration required
Part of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN), series
