The full programme for Being Human Festival led by University of London’s School of Advanced Study has been announced and is available to peruse to your heart’s content here.
We’ve picked out a few events that caught our eye and feature some of our School of English and Drama connections:
No Feedback
People’s Palace Projects is a partner on this one…
Saturday 19 November | 18.00–19.30
No Feedback is a theatrical event highlighting the gentle pull of discrimination that tears at the fabric of everyday life. Giving an insight into human nature, it is set against the backdrop of catastrophes both historic and contemporary. By taking Genocide Watch’s groundbreaking research as the backbone of the production, No Feedback intelligently and sensitively asks audiences to consider their own place on the spectrum of how we relate to one another. Come and play your part in this new kind of theatre experience.
More info and book online here
Spitalfields, winter 1892: a guided walk
Led by SED’s Dr Nadia Valman
Sunday 20 November | 16:00–17:45
Novels have a particular power to conjure the past life of a place and to make us alert to the traces of the past that are still visible all around us. See Spitalfields in a new light through the eyes of bestselling Victorian writer Israel Zangwill and his closely observed novel Children of the Ghetto. Explore the neighbourhood with the ‘Zangwill’s Spitalfields’ walking tour app created by Dr Nadia Valman with the Jewish Museum, London and Soda Ltd. This app brings together archive sources including photographs, documents and digitised objects from the Jewish Museum to create an immersive experience of the lively and fraught milieu of Jewish immigrant life in Victorian Spitalfields. Hear about the making of the app and sample its content on the streets of east London in this guided walk.
More info and book online here
The museum of the normal
Includes SED’s Dr Tiffany Watt Smith is presenting a talk entitled: ‘Blending in: The Lost Art of Disappearing’
Thursday 24 November | 18.00–21.00
From angst-ridden teenage letters to agony aunts to concerned posts in online parenting forums, it’s clear that as a society we are haunted by a fear of being labelled abnormal. But who gets to define what’s normal? Is it really something to aspire to? And is worrying about ‘being normal’ normal? At this drop-in late event at Bart’s Pathology Museum, led by the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, visitors will enter the ‘land of the abnormal’: a pop-up museum of games, talks and performances addressing different aspects of the history of normality. Expect lost emotions, historical psychometric tests, themed refreshments, history of medicine talks and guided tours of the ‘museum of the normal’.
More info and book online here
