We are excited to launch our free taster programme at our open days this Friday 22 and Saturday 23 June.

To sign up please head to Arts Two foyer from 10am.

Friday 22 June 2018

English

11.30

a) Lecture: Othello: Race and Religion – Professor Jerry Brotton

From the late twentieth century, criticism and productions of Othello focused almost exclusively on the tragic hero’s blackness, in an attempt to challenge the racist assumptions that have defined the play since the seventeenth century. But ‘race’ has a history, and its meaning for Shakespeare was very different from our modern understanding of the term. This session examines key passages from the play and suggests that what we see as ‘race’ in Othello is a complex mix of Elizabethan beliefs and assumptions about ethnicity and religion. If we see Othello as a Christian convert from Islam, and read the play alongside ambivalent English relations with Muslims in this period, the play becomes far more complex and, in our time, even more relevant than we have come to believe.

Location: Arts Two Building, 3.20

b) Lecture: Time in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – Professor Mark Currie

How do novels imagine time? Focusing on excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, we’ll be exploring the many ways this text represents subjective time – thinking about how linear time is disrupted by flashbacks and flash-forwards, evoking the flux of thought.

Location: Arts Two Building, 2.17

13:45

c) Lecture: John Donne’s Poetry – Relationship Trouble – Professor David Colclough

Parting from a lover; trying to get through to God; imagining the soul leave the body – even getting undressed or being woken up too early: Donne’s poems return continually to problems with relationships.  They do so by thinking about language, persuasion, poetic form, and audiences. This session will focus on a selection of poems and help you to analyse the way they work, making reference to Donne’s biography and to the historical context in which he was writing.

Location: Arts Two Building, 3.20

d) Seminar: Witchy Women in Macbeth – Professor Andrea Brady

This class will investigate the different functions of witchcraft in Shakespeare’s Scottish play: as an exciting spectacle; as a form of flattery; and as a kind of rebellion, both against the king and the patriarchal rule of the family. We’ll think about how the witches embody some cultural anxieties about women’s bodies in this period, particularly by focussing on Lady Macbeth’s ‘unsex me here’ speech (I.v).

Location: Arts Two Building, 2.17

Drama

11.30

e) Seminar: Site-Specific Theatre: Must This Be the Place? – Dr Michael McKinnie

Site-specific theatre is theatre that consciously explores the unique sites in which it happens, frequently outside of conventional theatre spaces.  In recent years theatre makers have created performances in places such as courthouses, private homes, castles, railway stations, and more.  This practical workshop will explore different techniques for making site-specific theatre, using the environment in and around Queen Mary’s Mile End campus.  OR This seminar will explore some of the challenges that site-specific theatre poses, and asks whether it is as innovative as it is often claimed to be.

Location: Arts Two Building – Film and Drama Studio (FADS)
f) Seminar: Walking in the City – Dr Catherine Silverstone

Artists have used the practice of walking in their work, inviting spectators to see the city (and perhaps themselves) differently. We will look at ‘walking performances’, focussing particularly on gender, sexuality, participation and spectatorship.

Location: Arts One Building – Pinter Studio

13.45

g) Practical Workshop: Devising from Games – Dr Mojisola Adebayo

This will be a playful workshop exploring how to devise plays and create performance material from playing games. We will explore exercises that combine Theatre of the Oppressed and Physical Theatre techniques, made accessible for all. We will explore how playing and play making can help to generate a sense of ubuntu (humanity / human connection) towards social and political change.

Location: Arts Two Building – Film and Drama Studio (FADS)
h) Practical Workshop: Keeping the Plates Spinning – Dr Julia Bardsley

A practical look at processes of performance that embrace complexity and disruption. What creative opportunities present themselves when we deliberately let those plates fall?

Location: Arts One Building – Pinter Studio

Saturday 23 June 2018

English

11.30

a) Seminar: Romeo and Juliet’s First Meeting – Professor Warren Boutcher

This workshop will combine a close-reading of the scene in which Romeo and Juliet first meet with a viewing of two filmed versions: a recent production at Shakespeare’s Globe, and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 update.

Location: Arts Two Building, 3.20

b) Lecture: Happy 200th Birthday, Frankenstein – Dr Shahidha Bari

200 years after the publication  of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, this lecture explores the themes of the novel and examines the different ways in which it has been read over the course of its history.  The lecture rehearses some of the classic feminist readings of the novel, as well as the Marxist accounts of Frankenstein’s labour. It reaches to modern eco-critical readings of the novel’s landscape and asks whether it is a “creature” or “monster”  that Shelley creates.

Location: Arts Two Building, 2.17

13:45

c) Seminar: James Joyce’s Ulysses: Writing Modern Consciousness – Dr Rhiannon Moss

What relationship is there between our inner selves and the world in which we live? How can writing seek represent internal subjectivity? Is it possible to know the interiority of another? This session will explore these questions by looking at passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the most important and influential works of modern literature. Joyce innovated and experimented with literary techniques to represent the complexity of experience in the modern world, and to give the reader an intimate experience of the minds of his three everyday heroes. This session will give an insight into his writing of modern consciousness, and will begin to explore the central questions you will discuss as literary scholars.

Location: Arts Two Building, 2.17

d) Seminar: Introducing Literary Theory – Dr Molly MacDonald

What is literary theory? How does theory help us read literature? Throughout the history of literature, there have arisen various competing interpretations of literary texts and, with that, the need to adjudicate between rival interpretations.  ‘Theory’ has therefore emerged as a means of justifying particular interpretations over and against others. This session will offer an introductory session to using literary theory, and will model the kinds of lessons you can expect to encounter on our first-year module, Reading, Theory and Interpretation.

Location: Arts Two Building, 3.20

Drama

11.30

e) Seminar: What is Performance Art? – Dr Dominic Johnson

In Performance Art, an artist often uses her or his body as raw material and abandons the traditional tendencies towards acting, characterisation, and narrative that typify performances in the theatre. We’ll explore some of the key experiments that Performance Art has included in the twentieth century.

Location: Arts One Building – Pinter Studio

f) Practical Workshop: Audience Participation in Contemporary Theatre – Dr Daniel Oliver

In recent years many theatre and performance practitioners have aimed to create immersive, interactive, and participatory experiences for their audiences. We will explore the ethics, aesthetics and methods of such audience involvement through practical exercises, short readings, and discussion.

Location: Arts Two Building – Film and Drama Studio (FADS)

13:45

g) Seminar: Histories of Emotion in the Theatre – Dr Penelope Woods

Theatres are sites and spaces of emotion. But the kinds of emotion that have been sought and produced in theatres around the world through history has varied greatly. How do we begin to examine and research ’emotion at the theatre’? And what significance does this investigation of emotion in theatres around the world through history have?

Location: Arts Two Building – Film and Drama Studio (FADS)

If you have any questions or need help on the day please do get in touch…

Rupert Dannreuther
Web and Marketing Administrator
School of English and Drama
Queen Mary University of London

sed-web@qmul.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 7882 8910