RESEARCH SEMINARS AND SYMPOSIA

2009-10

All seminars run from 2pm - 4pm in TS2 in the Alexander Building, Thornlea, University of Exeter.

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This year the departmental seminar series is co-ordinated by Jerri Daboo on the theme of Inter-Arts.

Wednesday 28 October, 3pm
‘Fragments of Memory: accessing concepts of interdisciplinary practice’
Presentation by Marion Wood

The University’s Director of Music, Marion Wood, will talk about one of her latest interdisciplinary compositions.

Tuesday 3 November, 6pm, upstairs foyer of the Alexander Building
Opening of Exhibition
'The Southall Story'

You are invited to attend the opening of an exhibition of photographs documenting and celebrating the cultural life of the communities in Southall over the past 30 years. Known as 'Little India', but encompassing a wide cultural heritage, Southall experienced a coming together of communities as a result of the resistance following the race riots and murder of Blair Peach in 1979. This led to a unique period of cultural creativity and political activism among the British Asian community, which influenced the development of new forms of performance and art.
The opening of the exhibition will include a talk about the Southall Story project by its Artistic Director and renowned musician and producer, Kuljit Bhamra, and its Creative Director and film director and writer, Shakila Maan.

This event is supported by the Arts and Culture Strategy of the University of Exeter and the Link Fund, and is part of the University’s events for Black History Month and One World Week.

Wednesday 11 November, 2pm
Music and Sensation in Dion Boucicault’s ‘The Colleen Bawn’
Presentation by Steve Cockett

Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn and its celebrated ‘sensation scene’ depicting the attempted murder of Eily O’Connor made an instant hit with Victorian theatregoers when it opened at the Adelphi Theatre, London, in 1860.  As in other theatrical events of the period, incidental music by a pit orchestra was a taken for granted feature of the performance: music played a unique part in working sensational effect on the audience.  Most scores have been lost, but a few remain.  This seminar, which is part of a broader research enquiry into music to spoken plays in the nineteenth century, will use a digital recording made from original orchestral parts for The Colleen Bawn, found in an uncatalogued collection of theatre music in the British Library, to illuminate questions about the interrelationship between orchestral score, text and stage action; about musical styles and codes employed; how music served to mediate audience perception of stage events, link dramatic episodes, underscore dialogue, reinforce character, and, vitally, to intensify horror of the crime on the fair-haired Irish colleen.

Wednesday 25 November, 2pm
‘Moving Between’

Kuljit Bhamra is a highly influential British Asian musician, composer and producer, and has offered a significant contribution to collaborative projects across forms of music, theatre and film. He has composed and produced over 2,000 songs, as well as working on film scores such as the award-winning 'Bhaji on the Beach', 'Bend it like Beckham', 'Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom', 'The Guru', 'A Little Princess', 'Wings Of A Dove', 'The Four Feather's and 'Charlie and The Chocolate Factory'. He has also worked extensively in London's West End, and highlights in this arena include assisting on the percussion arrangements and performing for Andrew Lloyd-Webber's massive hit musical Bombay Dreams and, with his acclaimed score for The Far Pavilions, Kuljit was the first British Indian to compose for a West End musical.
In this talk, he examines his changing role of moving between the worlds of music, theatre and film, and will offer a short performance. Kuljit is an Honorary Fellow of the Department of Drama.

13 January, 4.30pm, TS2
Dr David Roesner, University of Exeter

The Guitar Hero's Performance
Music oriented videogames like Guitar Hero, Wii Music or Singstar have interesting implications for our understanding of musical performance and music as performance. They intertwine interactive virtual performances with domestic performances that performatively emulate "real" music making. Whereas traditional gaming constrains the gamer to a rather introvert handling of a joystick or controller, music games seek to unleash a performative potential in the gamer by providing virtual microphones, guitars or drum-kits as controllers and have led to public music gaming events such as Guitar Hero Events. I'd like to investigate what consequences this interplays of gaming and 'musicking', real and virtual sound production, console and instrument have for the performativity of rock music.

27 January, 2pm, TS2
Emeritus Professor Peter Thomson, University of Exeter

Brecht; Survival and Contradiction
This paper proposes that Brecht's poems offer inroads to his autobiography that his plays don't. Even at face value, they provide a commentary on key points in his own life story.

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10 February, 3pm, TS2
Postgraduate students, Department of Drama, University of Exeter

A selection of talks given by postgraduate research students from the Department of Drama.

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24 February, 2pm, TS2
Howard Barker

Plethora and Bare Sufficiency
Howard Barker is one of Europe's most important living playwrights. Both in the plays he has written, and in his theoretical writings (Arguments for a Theatre, Death, the One and the Art of Theatre) he has consistently worked at the cutting edge of contemporary dramaturgy. This year marks the start of Howard Barker's AHRC Creative Fellowship in the Exeter Drama Department, in which he will be undertaking a three-year project, entitled "Plethora and Bare Sufficiency" in which he will be exploring some of the extremes of dramatic possibility. In this talk he will be outlining the project, the reasons for doing it, and how it relates to his work so far.

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3 March, 2pm, TS2
Emeritus Professor Martin Banham, University of Leeds

Africa talks back
This talk looks at the way in which contemporary African dramatists have taken incidents from colonial history and looked at them from an indigenous – and usually alternative - point of view from that presented in colonial records. Playwrights and plays under discussion will include ‘The Trial of Dedan Kimathi’ by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo (Kenya), ‘Anowa’ by Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), ‘Death and the King’s Horseman’ by Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi (Nigeria), and ‘Ovonramwen Nogbaisi’ by Ola Rotimi.

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10 March, 4.30pm, TS2
Dr Dee Heddon, University of Glasgow

Forest Walks: Emerging Routes
Since creating One Square Foot: Tree (2003), in collaboration with and directed by Dorinda Hulton, here in Exeter, I have entertained a growing obsession with trees and forests, particularly the multiple relationships to be found between forests and performance. It seems appropriate, then, that I return to Exeter now to share something of that obsession.
This paper will walk a tentative route through forests, from the autobiographical (my father was a forester), to the cultural (folkloric and ritual), to the environmental and ecological, sketching the various performances that forests enact (or are made to enact), alongside performances enacted within forests (including my own one of pan-ic). Forests have long been cast in a multiplicity of performance roles: from Dionysus’s bacchic environment to the magical underworld of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; from Joseph Beuys’s Documenta 7 action (the planting of 7000 oak trees in Kassel) to the Puppet State Theatre’s adaptation of Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees; from the performance of fairy tales, such as Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel to Grotowski’s ‘parashamanic’ actor training in the forests of Brzezinka (an example of what Peter Hulton refers to as ‘anthropomundic’, the alignment of a person with the world – in place of the ‘anthropomorphic’ (2006).
Our walk will be taken at a fairly fast pace, but we will pause for breath to view in more detail two recent forest performances: the Forestry Commission Scotland’s hugely popular winter light show ‘staged’ annually in Faskally forest (Pitlochry) and Rachel Henson’s Flicker-book interface with the forest of Kuopio (Finland).
This paper is very much about research at the early stage of its emergence and I look forward to gathering more forest performances (or ideas concerning their inter-relationship) from friends and colleagues in Exeter.

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24 March, 4.30pm, TS2
Professor Mick Mangan, University of Exeter

“Sawing the lady in half”: eros, thanatos and “The Uncanny” in the performance of grand illusions
The conjuror, the stage magician, is a Janus-faced figure:  on the one hand he is the purveyor of cheap tricks in an act which is generally seen as being at the low-status end of showbiz. And yet within his performance there are resonances such as those noted in the 1940s by the essayist Edmund Wilson – hints of a hidden symbolism which links the conjuror with a sacred past. There is, says Wilson

… more to these feats and to our pleasure in them than we are likely to be conscious of. Some of the tricks that have lasted longest and become fixed in the popular imagination must be the remnants of fertility rites ... And the magician who escapes from the box: what is he but Adonis and Attis and all the rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise?

One of the accepted type-tricks of conjuring is the “death-and-resurrection” routine. This involves not only the Houdini-like escape from the box that Wilson links with fertility gods, but also the more direct confrontation with deathin that genre of grand illusion whereby the magician – or, more usually, his assistant – are apparently killed, dismembered, cut in half or pierced through with swords or bullets. In this paper I will offer a historicized analysis of the meanings which are generated by this kind of archetypal performance, exploring the way in which they arise from an interplay between eros , thanatos and what Freud called “The Uncanny”.

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All seminars run from 2pm - 4pm, unless specified above, in TS2 in the Alexander Building, Thornlea, University of Exeter.