SHUT DOWN BUT SCRATCHING

As we find ourselves in deeply challenging times, now more than ever emerging artists need support. The doors to the creative industry have been slammed shut and with that, almost all of the opportunities to make new work.

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.

An AHRC grant of approximately £600,000 has been awarded to Professor Jim Davis as Principal Investigator and to Professor Kate Newey (Exeter University) as Co-Investigator for a research project on Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century. The project will be based at Warwick in Theatre and Performance Studies. Two named postdoctoral full-time research fellows will also be attached to the project for its three-year duration: Dr Pat Smyth, an art historian specialising in the relationship between art and theatre in nineteenth-century France, who will be based at Warwick, and Dr Kate Holmes (who has a specialist interest in circus and aerial performance), based at Exeter. Bristol University’s Theatre Collection and Exeter University’s Bill Douglas Museum will be project partners, collaborating in the mounting of exhibitions and conferences.