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Theatre & Performance Studies News

In Memoriam - Professor Jim Davis

Prof Jim DavisIt is with a very heavy heart that we write to let you know that Professor Jim Davis passed away on Saturday 4th November following a stroke. Everyone who had the pleasure of encountering Jim will appreciate that this is a huge loss for his family, friends, colleagues, collaborators and the wider research community. He was a fantastic scholar and unwavering champion for the discipline and theatre historiography. He was such an important part of the Theatre and Performance family at the University of Warwick and will be missed for his leadership, mentorship, friendship and unfailing sense of fun and mischief.

Jim Davis joined Warwick in 2004 as Head of Department (2004-2009) after eighteen years teaching Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he was latterly Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance. In Australia he was also President of the Australasian Drama Studies Association and member of the Board of Studies of the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Prior to leaving for Australia he spent ten years teaching in London at what is now Roehampton University. He co-organised many conferences including for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) in New South Wales and at Warwick. He convened Historiography Working Groups for both IFTR and for TaPRA. He served as an editor for the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.

He published widely and with considerable critical acclaim in the area of nineteenth-century British theatre. His most recent bookComic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (2015) won the TaPRA David Bradby Prize for Research in International Theatre and Performance in 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2015 TLA George Freedley Memorial Award. His other publications include Theatre & Entertainment (2016), Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens Volume II (2017) and European Theatre Performance Practice Vol 3 1750-1900 (editor, 2014). He was also joint author of a study of London theatre audiences in the nineteenth century Reflecting the Audience: London 1840-1880 (2001), which was awarded the 2001 Theatre Book Prize. He contributed numerous chapters including essays on nineteenth-century acting to the Cambridge History of British Theatre and on audiences to the Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. He also published many articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Notebook, Essays in Theatre, Themes in Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Theatre, Theatre Research International and The Dickensian. He was also responsible for many of the theatrical entries in The Oxford Readers' Companion to Dickens and contributed to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Stage Actors and Acting and the New Dictionary of National Biography. For several years he wrote an annual review of publications on nineteenth-century English Drama and Theatre for The Year's Work in English Studies.

There will be an event to celebrate Jim’s life and work on 6 January 2024 12pm-4pm in the Studios in the Faculty of Arts Building on the University of Warwick's campus. Anyone is welcome (colleagues, friends, alumni etc). This will be a hybrid event, so if you cannot attend in person, but would like to join us online, that's also possible. Please RSVP to Dr David Coates - D.J.Coates@warwick.ac.uk

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Student Prizes 2021: Winners Announced

Congratulations to all of our students who are graduating this week. At our graduation ceremony we usually announce our Student Prizes. We have extended the list of prizes this year to reward group work and to acknowledge practice and research separately. As ever, we also want to acknowledge students who have contributed significantly to the Theatre and Performance Studies, the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, and the University during their time here. This year's prizes are as follows:

  • Research Prize (Dissertation) Josh Myers
  • Research Prize (Practice) Jana Azuipe
  • Contribution Prizes: Hannah Khan, Lucy Chamberlain, Angelo Balagtas
  • Group work prize for process: Niamh Mulcahy, Lyra Cooper, Elia Waymouth, Vishal Ratnajothy (Applying Theatre - Care Home Project)
  • Group work prize for product: Adam Wilmhurst, Tabitha Collingridge, George Brown, Guillaume Massenet, and Ashwin Rupanagudi (Wired - Short Film).
Wed 14 Jul 2021, 11:14 | Tags: Student Undergraduate Awards

Clive Barker Award 2021

Congratulations to our first year students, Jon-Luke Goodman and Cai Kennedy, who have successfully applied to this year's Clive Barker Award. Clive Barker was a pioneering theatre studies scholar. He worked with Arnold Wesker and Joan Littlewood and wrote influential books such as Theatre Games. He worked at Warwick from 1976 until he retired in 1993. This award is designed to provide practical and financial support for Theatre and Performance Studies students who plan to create a piece of extra-curricular performance, with a view to submitting this work to the Edinburgh Festival or a similar public platform.

Their project is provisionally titled The Awakening of Spring and will offer a modern adaptation and de-contextualisation of the play that inspired Spring Awakening; challenging traditional staging and theatrical conventions with heavy elements of technology, performance art and promenade elements. Taking Frank Wedekind’s 1890 play and transposing it into a 21st Century setting, inspired by the current movement in the light of the death of Sarah Everards’s tragic death. This abstract non-linear deconstruction will also be scrutinising the media, exploring social media and how this relates to physical, domestic and sexual violence.

The students will receive up to £600 to help mount the work and will be given access to rehearsal space and technical support.

Well done Cai and Jon-Luke. We look forward to seeing how this project develops!

Tue 11 May 2021, 13:45 | Tags: Student Edinburgh Fringe Undergraduate Awards

Free Online Course. Explore Filmmaking: from Script to Screen

Learn from award-winning filmmakers how films go from script to screen with this film production course from the BFI Film Academy.

Fri 01 May 2020, 11:54 | Tags: Student Undergraduate Online Education Industry

Outcomes from The body, making & (s)languaging Workshop

For anyone that might be interested in learning more about the outcomes of our workshop The body, making & (s)languaging last month @ Birmingham Rep, here is a little film and blog post covering it: https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/blog/exploring-multilingualism/performing-languages-we-live


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