Theatre and Performance Studies Research Events

Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick has an active research community. As well as having a departmental Research Seminar Series which meets twice-termly, there are regular events hosted by individual members of our community relating to their current research projects. Above you'll see a link to our 'Past Events'. From here you can find out about individual events hosted recently, but can also link to ongoing research project webpages.

Departmental Seminar Series

Every year Theatre and Performance Studies run a twice-termly departmental seminar series. The dates and times for the 2024/25 Theatre and Performance Studies seminar series are as follows:

Research Seminar, Wednesday 21 May 2025, 11.30-1.00 pm, FAB 0.20

Marcus Tan, ‘This is us, this is our story’: Historicity, Musical(ity) and The Singapore Story

2015 was a portentous year in Singapore’s history in which the country celebrated its golden jubilee (entitled ‘SG50’). It was also the year in which famed statesman Lee Kuan Yew died. With the intention to be part of the SG50 celebrations, two musicals were staged and both of which became a performative means of memorialising and mythologising Singapore’s oft regarded founding father of the city-state. Singapura: The Musical (2015) was a musical theatre performance that attempted to chart ‘The Singapore Story’ – a national, state-fashioned, rags-to-riches story. The LKY Musical (2015), relatedly but dissimilarly, explored The Singapore Story through the personal lens of Lee. It follows his public and private lives and his metamorphosis into the nation’s first, and longest serving, Prime Minister. Both musicals were staged shortly after Lee’s death and, though primarily in conjunction with the SG50 celebrations, were distinct attempts at exploiting historicity for commercial expediency but inadvertently became appropriated for political gain. Regardless of creative intentions, staging a nation’s history (and her founder) is always already an act of political performativity where the mise-en-scene will necessarily be framed and read as a performance of the political. Consequently, in this seminar, I will interrogate the politics of music(als) and examine how both Singapura and LKY can be regarded as political artefacts that uncritically promote the ruling government’s dominant, singular narrative – The Singapore Story. In both musicals, the intent to perform a musical spectacle of the birth of a nation, and the larger-than-life biopic of a man whose status itself far exceeds any fictional representation, nullified the possibility of musicals as a medium for counter-narrativity; the need to cohere to prevailing sentiments and mood in 2015, the self-censorship prevalent in the arts, and the necessity of conforming to state-prescribed narratives meant Singapura and LKY were little more than reverberations of a founding fiction used to support the continued legitimacy of the prevailing single-party dominated government of the People’s Action Party. In relation to, and apart from, considering the surrounding events that led to the politicisation of both musicals, the paper invites considerations of the potential and precarity of staging history as musicals for musicality, the physical properties of sound, pitch, rhythm, timbre, as well as the lyrics, have profound impact on the construction of subjectivity. These advent questions of musical narrativity as representations of political history, considering how Jacques Attali posits that ‘any organisation of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality […] it is an attribute of power in all of its forms.’

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 30 April 2025, 4.00-5.15 pm, Microsoft Teams

Joscha Chung,What does the Coexistence of Chinese and European Theatres in Shanghai Treaty Port Mean to the Writing of Theatre History?

The historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Shanghai theatre has commonly viewed its Chinese and foreign performances as separated matters. Despite their simultaneous activeness within the settlement ever since the opening of the treaty port, theatre scholars paid little attention to the meaning of their coexistence. This paper proposes to remodel the writing of Shanghai theatre history of this period by adopting M. L. Pratt’s notion of the “contact perspective,” as opposed to the “national perspective.”

The non-Chinese theatre in Shanghai included English-, French-, German- and Portuguese-speaking amateur performances. They were organized by local dramatic clubs and educational facilities which were attended by both settlers’ and Chinese students. In addition, professional artists and companies which traveled internationally form another important part of foreign theatre in Shanghai. Opera, circus, minstrelsy and illusion shows all frequented the city. While the amateurs interpreted beloved works on the stages in London or Paris, the professionals presented repertoires which were also welcomed by audiences in other treaty ports.

While modern Chinese theatre may have participated in the course of enlightening the people or saving the nation from perishing , it also belonged to the innovations of theatre around the globe which were connected by touring artists in the contact zone.The emergence of modern Chinese theatre from this multilingual, cross-cultural environment reminds us that features of “national” importance, which often received recognition later as part of the nation-building process, may well be the product of the contact zone which existed between or at the margin of any established nation.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 12 February 2025, 4.00-5.15 pm, Microsoft Teams

Tania Cañas, Archiving the Present: Memory as creative practice, Multi-local and site-specific creative memory work

Public memory practices are continual sites of struggle and contestation on unceded lands as the nation-state continually functions to relegate and dispossess memory. Archiving the Present (AtP) is a multi-site digital community archive project of "remembering as insurgent practice" (Cusicanqui 2020, p.xxxii) and memory as creative practice, from a Central American, site-specific, and multi-local perspective. The project is made up of artists and community members who are primarily of the Australian Salvadoran community, having arrived in Australia through the refugee and humanitarian program in the 80s and early 90s. Archiving the Present is a grass-roots initiative that seeks to develop alternative practices of remembering in ways that do not conform to whiteness and aesthetics of colonial forms of remembering (i.e. plaques, statues). Archiving the Presentasks: who gets to be remembered and what gets to be preserved in settler-colonial Australia? How does memory and embodied archiving occur for sites deemed to have no “heritage significance” by national and state-level heritage organisations? What does it mean to engage in acts of creative remembering that sit outside of heritage regimes? How do we remember within displacement and in the context of ongoing dispossession?

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 29 January 2025, 12.00-1.30 pm, Faculty of Arts Building 2.48

Priyanka Basu,The Poet’s Song: ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia

Kobigaan (lit. song of the poet) is a verse-duelling and song-theatre genre practiced across the India-Bangladesh border. It is one of the many dialogic genres in South Asia highlighting the verbal virtuosity, bricolage, and storytelling abilities of performers (kobiyaals/sarkars). While rural performances of Kobigaanat religious rituals and village fairs can last through overnight sessions, its other manifestations are often truncated and adapted according to diverse venues, audience tastes and artistic choices. This talk focusses on the questions of authenticity ofKobigaanas a ‘folk’ genre while travelling with the performers as well as in and out of the literary archive. Caste, class, gender, and identity politics intertwine with the larger cultural politics of ‘folk’ in cross-border contemporary practices of Kobigaan. Consequently, several performing groups become ‘claimants’ of authentic Kobigaanas it travels from rural settings to urban festivals, and from Bengali cinema to television and the new media. Over time, the element of debate (kobir loraai) has emerged as a synecdoche for Kobigaan. It has also come to signify people’s songs, national culture, folk heritage and even sound chronotopes (in cinema). Conflictingly, the perception of Kobigaanin Bengali cultural memory relies much on its status as ‘decadent’, ‘extinct’ or ‘obsolete’. This talk considers such varied conceptions of Kobigaanas a performance genre as it traverses local, national, and trans-national diasporic communities.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 13 November 2024, 4.00-5.15 pm, Microsoft Teams

Dorothy Chansky,Representing Cognitive Decline on the American Stage

This talk is an overview of the 2023 book Losing It: Staging the Cultural Conundrum of Dementia and Decline in American Theatre, which historicizes representations of dementia and decline on the mainstream (with a couple of exceptions) American stage, connecting a little over a century’s worth of plays featuring characters in cognitive decline to the medical, social, and legal aspects of healthcare and elder care that made and make them legible to audiences whose metric for theatrical appeal has largely been realism, albeit with the understanding that realism is a capacious category. This history, however, is not only a chronicle of what came before us; it is also meant as a guide to the cultural DNA that is our legacy and [is] still discernable in American policies and attitudes concerning dementia. The book also considers links between dementia—a neurological but also a social condition—and age, with a focus on how these are presented onstage.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 23 October 2024, 4:30-5.30 pm, Microsoft Teams

Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal and Shane Boyle,‘One for the money, two for the show’:Taylor Swift as Commercial Infrastructure

Show business is big business. Nothing exemplifies this truism more today than the industry that is Taylor Swift. But what kind of business is show business exactly? What does the business of putting on a grand performance, like Swift’s ongoing international “Eras Tour,” share with other capital-intensive commercial undertakings? This talk proposes a definition of commercial performance as a form of show business geared, first and foremost, to circulation. Commercial performances, we contend, have the capacity to move but are also defined through the particular way they abet and depend on the circuit of capital.

Our paper considers what Swift can tell us about how commercial capitalism operates today. To do this requires taking seriously both the role of performance in the “Eras Tour”, but also all of the material infrastructure it demands—the trucks, the planes, the stadiums, the workers, the supply chains, and more. In addition, this paper will explore how the profitability of huge musical tours like Swift’s are increasingly reliant on fan-maintained digital and physical infrastructures which aid their continued success and circulation. Contrary to those who emphasise the ephemerality and dematerialised quality of performance commodities, we insist on attending to the significance of the capital-intensive infrastructure on which commercial performance depends.

While written and presented by Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal and Shane Boyle, this talk draws on conversations and collective writing with colleagues who, for the past 18 months, have been collectively researching commercial performance.

If you would like to attend please emailRashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk