Theatre and Performance Studies News

Nadine Holdsworth publishes the co-written book The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137508096 

Monday 15^th- Wednesday 17^th April 2019

Warwick University in Venice

Palazzo Pesaro Papafava

Keynote Speaker: Professor Chantal Mouffe

This event is the culmination of a substantial period of research funded by the British Academy Partnership and Mobility grant (2016-19) that brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Warwick University (UK) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (India) as well as researchers, artists and activists from other European and overseas institutions and places. We are asking how could both the historical legacy of the Left and its current manifestations and performances contribute to formulating an aesthetic of resistance not only as a reactive practice, but as a way to sustain the politics of inclusion, equality, care for the commons and social justice? The concept, coined by playwright Peter Weiss against the backdrop of raising fascism in the 1930s—asserts that art and culture, by formulating an aesthetic of resistance, are the means of finding new modes of political action and new forms of social understanding. The urgency of this project is to explore the politics and aesthetics of these forms as means of dissent, but even more importantly, as strategies of sustaining the progressive political agenda both against the backdrop of the alarmingly rising Right and on its own term.

Conference at the University of Warwick

Friday 8^th and Saturday 9^th November 2019  

Conference at the University of Warwick

_{Thursday 27 – Saturday 29 June 2019}

This research event will consider new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century stage spectacle, its meanings, its relationship to a wider visual culture, and its spectators. This period is associated with a widespread transformation of conceptions of vision and subjectivity, evidenced by an explosion of graphic imagery and new forms of visual experience such as panoramas and dioramas. Theatrical spectacle was at the centre of this emergent trans-medial, popular visual culture; yet there has been no major work to address this area since Martin Meisel’s seminal study, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, of 1983. Organized as part of the three-year AHRC-funded collaborative project, ‘Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century’, this event aims to foster cross-disciplinary discussion of spectacle and spectatorship in this period.