Tag Archives: School of Arts

On Going On: Sustaining Life in Theatre

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This post was contributed by Maria Patsou, PhD student, Birkbeck Department of English and Humanities who attended the One-day symposium, Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, 5 June 2015

Rosemary Lee discusses the intersections of work and life in her dance practice

Rosemary Lee discusses the intersections of work and life in her dance practice

This one-day symposium came at the end of a year’s exploration of desire in theatre at the Birkbeck Centre of Contemporary Performance. The intention of the symposium was to extend desire to ideas of support, wellbeing, welfare and overall sustainability of self and others from multiple angles.

The day was devised in the following sections:

It concluded with a Key Note Dialogue between Professor Alan Read and David Slater, on their community theatre work during the 80s at Rotherhithe.

Representing minority voices

Lobel’s and O’Brien’s autobiographical practice on physical illness highlighted the artist’s survival through presenting difficult material, utilising the audience’s negative and positive responses and voicing the unspoken.

D’Souza covered questions of empowerment and disempowerment, by narrating his relationship with theatre from an early age and focused on his experience of enabling others as a member of the RADA audition panel. In a similar autobiographical manner, Beau’s talk focused on the importance of performance for his survival, his relationship to enabling others, and the value of narrative in representing minority voices, a recurring theme of the day.

Questions arose on the separation between artist and human, performer and audience, and the ways we connect to each other. The value of obstacles and doing work in the community were the focal point of Lee’s and Shah’s presentation.

Lee discussed being sustained from the knowledge of creating something valuable for the society, and Shah explored thriving through disappointment, and utilising negative feelings on improving and going on.

Theatre in the community

During the second part of the day, Green examined the role of the producer in the theatre and the intricacies of surviving and controlling oneself. Wookey presented her work as an artist and entrepreneur and discussed finding strength to go on from within community, which was a common theme in Paul’s presentation as well, while Fleming presented the union’s efforts in giving people a voice and thus sustaining artists.

David Slater (left) and Alan Read (right) discuss their work in Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop

David Slater (left) and Alan Read (right) discuss their work in Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop

The Key Note Dialogue delivered by Alan Read and David Slater, complemented recurring themes about the place of theatre in the community and the importance of the community’s critique and concentrated on theatre as a mirror of societal change.

Perseverance and willingness to share were some of the day’s conclusions, as well as perceiving artist and human as one, and recognising performance as inextricably linked to its surroundings, in a community where each individual plays an instrumental part on sustaining and enabling themselves and others.

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Arts Week 2015: Scribblers

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This post was contributed by Steve Waters, playwright for stage, radio and screen, and also senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

A script-in-hand performance of his new radio play, Scribblers, will be performed during Birkbeck Arts Week 2015 at 43 Gordon Square on Monday, May 18 at 7.30pm. The play charts the stormy relationship between two real life characters: young playwright Henry Fielding and the First Minister Robert Walpole.

Ahead of the sneak-preview performance on May 18, Steve offers some insights into the creative spark behind his latest theatrical work.

ScribblersScribblers’ developed out of a mystery.  I was looking into the notorious Theatre Licensing Act of 1737 with which in effect Robert Walpole used to extinguish an increasingly virulent culture of theatrical satire and noticed in Hansard, published a century later, there was mention of a particular play which provoked Walpole to use the power of the law against playwrights.

This play, ‘The Vision of the Golden Rump’, was apparently brought to Walpole by theatre manager Henry Giffard; yet despite Horace Walpole’s assertion that he saw it amongst his father’s papers, no trace of it has ever been found, nor has it authorship been established.

Yet the target of the law was clear – Henry Fielding, who we now know as a great novelist, but who then was famous for his amazingly bold and inventive satirical plays which were staged outside of the safe circuit of the licensed stage, in the semi-legal world of theatres such as the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.

But on closer inspection Fielding’s reputation as arch critic of Walpole’s tired Whig government was also more complicated. Wasn’t this the playwright who’d written a sycophantic preface to his innovative drama ‘The Modern Husband’, lavishing praise on Walpole who elsewhere he sent up as a dodgy butler (in ‘The Grub Street Opera’) or as the source of all political corruption in ‘The Historical Register of 1736’?

In pondering these mysteries, and looking closer at the fascinating interplay between stage and state in the 1730s, the play emerged as a tale of patronage and revenge. It begins with Fielding thrown on the mercy of Walpole as the Great Man fears he is about to lose his position under the new king; and we see Fielding attempt to bend his wild talents to please power – but in his failure, we see the birth of a radical stage where the truth is voiced whatever the consequences.

Yet whilst my heart is with Fielding I was also compelled by the figure of Walpole, Britain’s first ‘Prime Minister’, who lived and died a political animal and presided over the gradual throttling of the bold ideas of 1688. Walpole shaped a world of politics which resembles our own in its fast-track between money and influence, its paranoia and defensiveness.

So out of these mysteries emerged SCRIBBLERS, a vivid and all too familiar world of writers, theatres and politicians….it’s a comedy that gets darker as it proceeds; and a fable about art and power that I hope illuminates our times as well as revealing this fascinating moment in our past.

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Arts Week 2015: Precariousness in Latin American Cinema

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Radical approaches to precariousness and violence in Latin American Cinema will be showcased in a stunning quartet of contemporary films from Brazil and Colombia which will be screened at Birkbeck, University of London.

A still from Mambo Cool, directed by Cao GuimarãesRealisms of Precariousness, a three-day series of free-to-attend screenings which push the boundaries between fiction and documentary, will run from Monday 18 to Wednesday 20 May at the School of Arts (43-47 Gordon Square) in the heart of Bloomsbury.

The screenings form part of Birkbeck Arts Week – the College’s annual arts and culture showcase. This year’s programme boasts more than 40 lectures, performances, workshops and discussions.

Realisms of Precariousness will feature the following cinematic works:

  • Exilados do Vulcão by Paula Gaitan (Brazil). A reflection on veiled time and emotions, on memory finding its path. (Monday 18 May, 6pm-9pm, Birkbeck Cinema)
  • Otto by Cao Guimaraes (Brazil). A film about about alterity, the intimate, the portrait, the image as devotion. (Tuesday, 19 May, 2pm-5pm, Keynes Library)
  • Colombian double feature (Wednesday, May 20, 6pm-9pm, Room B04, 43 Gordon Square):
  • Señoritas by Lina Rodriguez (Colombia). The picture goes up in flames when the girl performing at Señoritas walks on the streets. A certain fragility of the everyday is broken.
  • Mambo Cool by Chris Gude (Colombia). We are in a land of images and ‘exile´ where swing and sabor are well known. Something drowns at the same time that flashes like lightning – and emerges as a source of life.

The Realisms of Precariousness series – which comes as a result of collaboration between Hambre and Colombian Film Panorama with the support of the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS) at Birkbeck – will also feature Q&A opportunities via Skype with the film makers, and an opportunity for attendees to discuss the status of current Latin American filmmaking.

Sebastian Wiedemann, Florencia Incarbone and Geraldine S. Kobilanski from Hambre, who have curated the screening series said Realisms of Precariousness aims to show a hidden reality, without excluding the absurd seriousness of violence or the essential poetics of precariousness.

Paula Bohórquez from Colombian Film Panorama said: “The series deals with the question of identity and gathers alternative views of some Latin American realities. Each work, in its own way, breaks the canon expected from films of certain geographies, by separating its stories from stereotypes and socio-political contexts.”

Realisms of Precariousness is part of Birkbeck Arts Week, which runs in and around Bloomsbury from Monday 18 to Saturday 23 May. To book a free place at the screenings, and to view the full programme of Arts events, visit www.bbk.ac.uk/artsweek.

Photo caption:

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Notes

Hambre is an observatory and laboratory dedicated to research, discussions and the production of critical and sensitive thought by contagion and through connections with experimental cinema(s).

Colombian Film Panorama showcases Colombian documentaries and fictional films and creates relevant film programmes for London audiences

Arts Week 2015: Coffee and Commonwealth

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What do coffee, tea and rancid meat have in common? All are intimately tied to the politics, gender dynamics and social unrest of the 18th century.

A fascinating free public event will delve into the Enlightenment’s beverages of choice and disgusting diets as part of Birkbeck Arts Week (18 to 23 May).

An English 17th Century coffeehouseCoffee and Commonwealth, which will feature a panel of Birkbeck academics, will be held at the Upper Fleet Café (7-11 Upper Woburn Place) on Monday, May 18 at 6pm.

From the bawdy houses and pre-modern pubs of Derbyshire to the coffee houses of London, the Birkbeck, University of London’s panel of historians and literary experts will explain how a food and drink can lead to full-scale mutiny.

One main strand of the panel event will focus on the often revolting – and frequently contentious – diet of sailors on long-haul sea voyages in the late 17th century.

PhD student Sue Jones’s presentation will draw on real-life case studies of some poor souls who had to endure the cramped conditions and putrid meals on board trading and pirate ships.

Weavil-ridden ship biscuits, rancid meat swimming in pickled brine and woefully little grog to numb the pain – this was the diet which awaited many a seafarer on long odysseys which could last anywhere up to two years.

By delving into diary entries of an ordinary sailor for the East India Company, and the British ambassador to Tunisia, Sue will reveal just how limited the diet on the open sea was, and the effects it had on the seafarers – from widespread scurvy, to full-blown mutiny

Sue said: “Being self-contained spaces and communities, these ships were often a powder-keg of social ructions. A limited and pretty rotten diet might not seem a huge deal in the grander scheme of things, but on the open sea you don’t have much else to think about. And so food and drink were often the catalyst for unruliness.”

Other speakers at the Coffee and Commonwealth event include:

  • Professor Sue Wiseman, who will present on the milieux of alehouses versus coffee house, exploring the role of coffee and beer in sustenance, sociability, sex and politics
  • Mr Robert Stearn who will explore the way food and drink interacted with ‘sexual immorality’ in the secret subcultures of London’s alehouses, coffeehouses, brothels, homes, and lodgings
  • Dr Elizabeth Eger (King’s College) will discuss tea and sociability in the age of Enlightenment, and why tea became the thinking woman’s drug of choice.

The event runs as part of Birkbeck Arts Week’s packed programme of more than 40 lectures, discussions, workshops and performances exploring the worlds of arts and culture.

Attendance at all Arts Week events is free, though booking is essential. To book a place, and to see the full programme of events, visit www.bbk.ac.uk/artsweek.

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