Peopling the Palace(s) Festival invites you to connect with academics, artists, students, and alumni in 9 full days of performances, films, conferences, exhibitions, conversations & fun.
Moonface, a new solo performance by QMUL alumni Meg Hodgson followed by a Long Table on Intergalactic Colonisation at 19:30
Tuesday 6 June
14:00-16:00
A Public Studio on Neurological Disease Prevention and Risk Assessment, a conversation that uses the designer’s studio as a format for creative problem-solving with Dr Ruth Dobson, a consultant neurologist, and Dr Alison Thomson, a design researcher from the Preventive Neurology Unit at the Wolfson Institute
16:30- 18:30
Feeling Places, a participatory research collaboration with Departments of Drama, Film, Geography, and young people from local schools to explore the psychogeography of the university
Kiki Tianqi Yu’s Nest, a documentary that follows the life of Fang Junrui, who encounters relentless obstacles in his pursuit of a job.
19:00
Yasmin Fedda’s Ayouni, a film searching for answers about loved ones, who are among the over 100,000 forcibly disappeared in Syria.
Wednesday 7 June
9:30-13:00 (Exhibition runs to 18:00)
Women/Theatre/Justice, a sharing of findings from the Women/Theatre/Justice research project with and about Clean Break Theatre Company that includes a long table, an exhibition, and film screenings.
After Hours Performance Club, inclusive queer performance night that celebrates diversity and empowers emerging LGBTQIA+ artists
Thursday 8 June
14:00
Long Table on Care and Solidarity, a long table on care and how it can risk individualising responsibility and eroding our commitment to social welfare. Table quests include Dr Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, Professor Jen Harvie and Niall Morrissey.
Blind Date with Maya Rao & Lois Weaver, two feminist performers from New York and New Delhi, making art for almost half a century in their own corners of the world, meet each other for the first time for a blind date
20:00
Jelly Live, live performance of the new album by Andrew Poppy
Charlie Pullen suggests we look to the career of Professor Emerita Morag Shiach for inspiration in what the arts and humanities can do within and beyond the university. Here, in an adapted version of his opening remarks to the Practical Experiments in Hope conference in March 2023, he explains why we should view education and creativity as hopeful resources which we can use to combat the enveloping despair of our present moment.
On the dark and rainy morning of Saturday 18 March 2023, colleagues from Queen Mary and beyond joined me at Practical Experiments in Hope – a day of celebration to mark the retirement, in September 2022, of one of the School of English and Drama’s longest-serving and most distinguished colleagues: Professor Morag Shiach.
In whatever capacity we know Morag – whether we’re colleagues from Queen Mary, former students, collaborators from different universities and organisations, friends, family, or some combination of the above – many of us will be aware of the central, decisive role that she has played in the formation of English, Drama, and the institution as a whole here at Queen Mary. Across some thirty-five years – a period in which she served in many leadership positions, from Head of School to Vice Principal for Teaching and Learning and subsequently Vice Principal for Humanities and Social Sciences – Morag’s dedication to the shaping and development of this university and especially to arts and humanities education and research has been unmatched.
Arriving in 1987, Morag came to Queen Mary first as a temporary lecturer in English, before becoming permanent the following year and then, in 1999, Professor of Cultural History. Over that time Morag has been at the forefront of great and progressive changes at Queen Mary as well as an expansion of higher education more broadly. To take the English department as just one example of those transformations: when Morag first came to work here at the tail-end of the 1980s (another low, dishonest decade not unlike our own in the 2020s), the English department took just 25 students a year; now it’s more like 200. When Morag arrived at Queen Mary, we didn’t have a Drama Department – and it was she who played no small part in the founding and growth of what is now a pioneering centre for the study and production of theatre and performance.
But many of us, within the School of English and Drama and further afield, will also know Morag through her work as a notably prolific and incredibly versatile scholar. From her early research on popular culture and feminist studies, and her wide-ranging publications within the field of modernist literature and cultural history, to her more recent turn towards work in the cultural and creative economy, Morag’s career has been marked by a unique degree of flexibility and by a dedication to fostering connections and conversations reaching across disciplines, institutions, and sectors.
That commitment to interdisciplinary study, and that capacity to turn her hand to an extraordinary range of subject areas and methodological approaches, is borne out in Morag’s educational trajectory. She began her academic career with a degree at the University of Glasgow, starting out in English – a department which, quite unlike our own here at Queen Mary today, she found to be ‘disengaged’ and uninspiring – before switching to an innovative programme in Drama and Philosophy, the first student to take such a combination of subjects at that university.
It was at Glasgow, coincidentally, that Morag seems to have developed a taste for university leadership. There she served in numerous student council roles, voicing her progressive views on student politics in the Glasgow University Union paper – as she does here, in this clipping from 1978, which details her work in anti-Apartheid and anti-Nazi movements, as well as her commitment to increasing student grants and improving democratic representation at the university.
(Image Source: University of Glasgow)
From Glasgow, Morag continued her journey across disciplines (and indeed the world) by taking a Master’s degree in Communications at McGill University in Canada, where she read literature, media, and film studies, and wrote a thesis on ideas of ‘the popular’ in cultural studies, the front page of which you can see reproduced below. That MA dissertation led into her PhD at Cambridge on the historical development of a critical discourse on popular culture from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, which was supervised by the great cultural theorist Raymond Williams.
(Morag’s MA thesis from McGill, University in Montreal, Canada)
On the day of the conference, colleagues in the School of English and Drama and I created an exhibition of just some of the many publications Morag has produced throughout her career. And so, in preparation for this display, I took a trip to the library to see what books I could find. During this trip, I was struck by two things. Firstly, by how well-used Morag’s books clearly are by our students and staff: hardly any page in her volumes is left untouched by pencil markings and sticky notes. And secondly, I was struck by how far I had to walk around the library to find her work. I began, in the history section, where I picked up her first book, an adaptation of her PhD thesis from 1989, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender, and History in the Analysis of Popular Culture. From there I found myself having to walk to the modern languages section to find her study of the French philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous (A Politics of Writing, from 1991).
After that, I had to walk to sociology to get a copy of her edited volume Feminism and Cultural Studies (1999); and then, to English literature, to pick up various works on modernism, most notably 2004’s Modernism, Labour, and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930. The search continued: from there I went to economics to find Cultural Policy, Innovation, and the Creative Economy: Creative Collaborations in Arts and Humanities Research (2016). These were just some of the intellectual products of Morag’s career. But by the end of this trip around the library, aside from being quite worn out and weighed down with all these books, I had got such a strong, experiential sense of the sheer range of Morag’s work – this ability to produce highly influential and impeccably researched scholarship within and across disciplinary boundaries. Who amongst us could have their work spread so far across a library?
Morag’s ability to bring together and to create connections between disciplines and practices that might otherwise simply not get much of a chance to talk to each other was demonstrated vividly at the Practical Experiments in Hope conference, which saw assembled colleagues from English, Drama, and Creative Writing, of course, but historians too, and scholars from modern languages, geography, law, and economics, as well as from arts projects, heritage organisations, and museums. So it was then, on that cold and wet morning, we came together at Practical Experiments in Hope to continue that spirit of conversation and interdisciplinarity that Morag had long pioneered through her work.
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And yet, when I first began planning the conference, I was, I must admit, more than a little overwhelmed by the prospect of bringing together this incredible range of interests, experience, and expertise in Morag’s career into just one day. When I sat down with Morag in late 2022, I asked, pleaded really: ‘You’ve done so much, Morag! How can I possibly tie it all together into a single conference?!’ And Morag, with characteristic clarity, composure, and modesty too, replied: ‘Yes, it is quite a lot. But there is a thread running through it all. And it’s that old Raymond Williams thing, of resources of hope. The arts and humanities, literature and the study of literature, education, and creativity as resources for a journey of hope. Resources, as Williams once put it, to make hope practical rather than despair convincing.’
And there we had our keywords for the day. From then on, re-reading Morag’s work, I found that thread which I should have seen all along – not least in an article she wrote for Paragraph in the year 2000, right on the cusp of the millennium, which gave us our title and central theme for the conference. In this fascinating essay, ‘Millennial Fears: Fear, Hope, and Transformation in Contemporary Feminist Writing’, Morag – showing once again her versatility and her willingness to engage with the actualities and difficulties of the present moment – identified in a variety of feminist writers of the time what Raymond Williams might have called a structure of feeling: a particular mood, or effort to respond to fear and despair about the political realities of the day with a defiant, hopeful outlook. Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, and others, Morag argued, were carrying out through their writing ‘a practical experiment in hope, or perhaps in refusing fear.’ Those writers were meditating on and expressing the possibilities, she said, ‘of the collective and individual construction of hope.’
(Charlie Pullen presenting at Practical Experiments in Hope, 18 March 2023. Photo by Richard Ashcroft)
From the perspective of our own day, over twenty years later, in the face of the horrors of the pandemic, humanitarian crisis, climate breakdown, economic disaster, the systematic divestment of the arts and cultural sector, and, more locally, the devastation of university departments and entire disciplinary communities, the need for such a hopeful energy seems both immeasurably necessary but also increasingly inaccessible, impossible. Despair seems all the more convincing; fear seems impossible to refuse.
I myself am one who, like Connie at the beginning of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tends to think of our particular historical moment as a tragedy. ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age,’ Lawrence wrote in 1928, in the fallout of war, plague, economic and political crisis, so much that seems familiar to us. ‘The cataclysm has happened’, he writes, ‘we are among the ruins.’
It’s very telling, however, that when Morag came to write about D.H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she drew out and emphasised the rest of what Lawrence says. And here is the opening paragraph of the novel in full:
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘thus begins with catastrophe and ruin’, Morag says in her book Modernism, Labour and Selfhood, ‘but it also begins with the necessity for hard work’. With both disaster and the possibility of carrying on.
Here then we had, at the start of the conference, the beginnings of an answer to the question, ‘why “practical experiments in hope”?’ In what ways might we imagine hope to be a practical and experimental process? What might the arts and humanities broadly conceived have to do with the making of hope in dark times? My answer, riffing on Morag, was because hope is hard work. Because it is, as she says, something we ‘construct’, which we build, which we make practically in the here and now even as the sky has fallen. And that reminded me too of something the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin said about love: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone,’ she said: ‘it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.’
Hope, then, might not be something that just sits there waiting to be picked up, but instead the work ofhope might be something we have to do and keep doing. As an experiment, as an open-ended process, we might not know the outcome of this hopeful work, we might not have a smooth road or clear view of the future, but that, I suggested, is the journey of hope, that is the path we must take to discover a new and better future.
My suggestion for us on the day was that we must look to the the balance between, as Lawrence says, cataclysm, ruin, and the hard work of rebuilding; or, as Morag says, between fear and the refusal of fear; or despair and the construction of something better. For in that uneasy balance, I ventured to propose, that is the space of hope, that is the location where our practical experiments in hope take place. And throughout the day, in our speakers’ presentations and through open discussion with everyone there, I invited us to explore, test out, and discover what hope we might still create with the work we do in the arts and humanities, in education, and in our creative practices.
During the day we shared our experiences of teaching and learning with Morag, as students and as lecturers; we reflected on her work shaping educational institutions beyond Queen Mary, such as the founding of our partnership schools like Draper’s Academy; and we discussed the interaction between arts and humanities research with the wider world of the creative economy, including via the class politics of the publishing industry. What became clear to us across the event was the possibility that such a conference, with its potential for facilitating collective discussion, sharing, and forming generative connections between disciplines and practices, might itself constitute one of the most fruitful opportunities for carrying out our own practical experiments in hope.
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Those of us who could be present on the day were there to celebrate Morag, to thank her for all that she’s made possible for us, and to recognise the way her work has shaped and will continue to shape our own work, whatever that is – whether it be academic, administrative, creative, or some blend of all three. And it was in that spirit of tribute that I ended my welcome talk on a personal note – by briefly gesturing to the impact that Morag has had on me, on my life and work, as a student and now a member of staff at Queen Mary. For my own history is very much bound up with the work that Morag has carried out and made possible during her time here at this university.
Arriving as an undergraduate just over ten years ago to study English, I was one of the many, many students who came and still come to Queen Mary from working-class backgrounds and the first in their family to go to university. I couldn’t have known it then, but coming here I was stepping into an institution that had been, over many years, built and shaped to transform the lives of those who might not otherwise get the opportunity to experience higher education, much less to work in it.
While here, even though Morag – then Vice Principal – was not teaching in the department, her presence was felt in the incredibly diverse and stimulating learning I was taking part in, on a degree programme that allowed me to move across methodological approaches and genres of literature and media: my studies led me directly to her work on popular culture when I wrote essays on topics as diverse as the film Titanic or cultural responses to Princess Diana’s death; to Cixous when I studied the reception of ancient myth in modern critical theory; and to Virginia Woolf, especially Morag’s 1992 Oxford University Press edition of A Room of One’s Own andThree Guineas, which did much to foster my own interest in the vexed topic of education in the modernist period.
After that, as a Master’s student at Queen Mary, I came to Modernism, Labour and Selfhood, which became, then as now, a model of the sort of modernist literary scholarship I wanted to do: richly cultural historicist; attentive to the dynamic relationship between literary forms and their changing political and historical context; and committed to the study of alternative and marginal traditions within the literature and culture of the early twentieth century. It was inevitable, then, that I would go straight to Morag for a PhD on modernism and education, her supervision of which – with Scott McCracken – was by turns generous, exacting, and empowering.
(Charlie Pullen, Morag Shiach, and Scott McCracken)
And one of the greatest pleasures of the conference was to see more of Morag’s former students return to Queen Mary to reflect on the power of her teaching and mentorship, including the writer Lynsey Hanley, who in her memoir Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide (2016)writes of her journey from a working-class home on a Birmingham council estate, via a traumatic interview at Cambridge, and eventually to Queen Mary, where she was interviewed much more supportively and given a place by Morag. Hanley recalls the Queen Mary of the 1990s as a beacon of progressive higher education, as a place which ‘resembled far more closely the dream that some of us have of all children getting a good education’, she says: an education ‘which equips them both to function well in the society we have and to take part in building the society we hope for – regardless of their origins.’ If ever there was an articulation of what a practical experiment in hope might be, there it is, in Hanley’s account of the transformative potential of a properly inclusive and socially-directed form of higher education.
After a long and productive career, Morag now gets the chance to enjoy her well-earned retirement. For those of us who remain working at Queen Mary and at universities and the cultural sector more broadly, I suggest Morag’s work still has lessons for us. As our day of discussion, sharing, and conversation unfolded at the conference, and as I reflect on the day now, my final thought for us was and is that we look, for inspiration, to the breadth of Morag’s work, at Queen Mary and beyond, as one quite varied but continuous project committed to the principle that the arts and humanities, education, and creative practice are some of our most vital and enduring resources – the tools and the very basis for our practical experiments in hope.
A new performance explores the positive potential of foster care and its histories through creative practices, hoping to change the stigma and negativity attached to being in care. This is part of our ongoing research project The Verbatim Formula, working with care-experienced young adults to explore issues in the system, led by Queen Mary’s contemporary theatre and performance expert Dr Maggie Inchley. and funded by People’s Palace Projects.
This series of events celebrates the arts, activism and publishing in Tower Hamlets – reflecting on the local histories of community-led politics and multilingual literary cultures, as well as exploring what’s going on in the area today. Events are organised by Queen Mary literature expert Dr Rehana Ahmed, who is currently writing a book about the production and reception of contemporary British Asian writing in the context of debates around race, ‘diversity’ and inclusion in the publishing industry.
Young artists from Phakama will host new and existing East London communities to share food donated by local eateries and restaurants. The event will showcase and celebrate ideas around how creativity can positively affect marginalised people and communities. This event is produced alongside Queen Mary researchers whose work is themed around home, migration and creative practice.
Join Queen Mary’s Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow Dr Clare Stainthorp to discover how people have celebrated life events outside of religious traditions, in Victorian times and today. Dr Stainthorp is currently researching how ‘freethinkers’ harnessed the power of regular publications to shape conversations about faith and society in Victorian Britain.
Newly discovered secrets include one-act plays, sketches and songs, translated and directed by Queen Mary research fellow Dr Vivi Lachs. Get a sense of the history and atmosphere of London’s vibrant Jewish immigrant theatre in English and Yiddish through Dr Lachs’ work on AHRC-funded research project, ‘Making and Remaking the Jewish East End’.
There Are Plenty of Businesses like Show Business: Launch Event for ‘Marxist Keywords for Performance’
by Performance and Political Economy research group (Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, Shane Boyle, Ash Dilks, Caoimhe Mader McGuinness, Olive Mckeon, Lisa Moravec, Alessandro Simari, Clio Unger, Martin Young).
Theatre and performance studies is awash with scholarship that examines performance in relation to its labour processes, modes of management, financial infrastructures, and so forth. But there lacks shared critical understanding of what terms such as “value” or “capital” mean and how they can be applied when studying performance forms like theatre, dance, or live art. The range of meanings that performance scholars attach to the word “commodity” or even the seemingly obvious entities of “class” and “the state,” for example, reveals more than a slight degree of imprecision or disagreement. It indicates a lack of systematic thought and, consequently, a need to interrogate the categories used for discussing performance’s political economy.
Collectively written by nine people, “Marxist Keywords for Performance” (2021) contributes to growing critical attention within theatre and performance studies towards political economy by defining key Marxist concepts and exploring how they can be applied to study performance. Ahead of our project’s publication in a joint issue of The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Global Performance Studies: GPS, this presentation introduces our aims in writing the keywords and reflects on the collective research, carried out in the midst of the pandemic, that went into them. As Tithi Bhattacharya (2017) reminds us, the aim of any critique of political economy should be to “restore to the ‘economic’ process its messy, sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly component: living human beings capable of following orders—as well as of flouting them.” A critique of the political economy of performance, as we understand it, should have this same goal.
Thank you for your help!
Best
Hanife Schulte, Carolyn Naish, Gill Lamden, Tobi Poster-Su, Souradeep Roy, and Sam Čermák,
Creative Writing Taster Session: Finding Your Many Voices – Nisha Ramayya
In this session, we will listen to a selection of contemporary poets who write and perform in voices, discuss their work, and then try writing our own dialogic or multivocal texts.
1300-1330
What’s Love Got To Do With It? Putting Romeo and Juliet In Its Place’- David Colclough
In this short taster lecture I’ll explore what happens when we read one of the most famous love stories – Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – with the help of some historical context (spoiler: it gets less romantic). No prior knowledge of the play is required.
1515-1545
Drama
Show Business: Theatre and Capitalism – Michael McKinnie
What is “show business”? How is it different from other business? How is it the same? And what can it tell us about the relationship between theatre and the economic world in which we live, work and play.
1345 -1415
Theatre and Protest – Aoife Monks
This session gives a taste of the long history of protest at the theatre, looking at riots, censorship and theatrical activism in the auditorium and on the streets.
Whether you’re a Londoner, taking a day trip before moving here or a new resident here’s our arty list of exciting ways to spend your summer in the city.
Free activities all week in Victoria Park near our Mile End campus including live music, free outdoor cinema, live music, live performances from Pan-Asian cabaret collective BITTEN PEACH and much more.
PLUS: We’ll be there at 2pm on Thursday 2nd September for a pop-up podcast recording with a surprise author guest.
A feast of (mainly) free performance across east and south London including this spectacular ‘northern lights’ installation called Borealis and a promenade show at the Tudor surroundings of Charlton House by our very own Mojisola Adebayo. Be sure to book in advance for free and paid events.
The doors are thrown open to London’s gorgeous, unusual and secret buildings at Open House London. Booking opens on 11 August at 12pm (midday) and it’s the perfect chance for locals to discover something new in your area or if you’re new to explore London.
Free summer weekenders curated by some cult icons including Shingai (pictured above) who’s showcasing Black talent, dance battles from Zoonation and bank holiday carnival vibes from Dennis Bovell’s Sound System Experience.
MISERY, Sad Girl Summer event 2020. Photo by Ella J Frost
What Shall We Build Here is a festival of art, climate and community at Artsadmin’s Toynbee Studios in Aldgate East, in parks and in your local supermarket.
This two-day online event explored productive, radical, contemporary encounters between the arts and mental health, bringing together clinical, artistic, and research perspectives that offered a re-interpretation of contemporary mental health science and practice, with a view of imagining a different future. This event was joined by more than 100 people including survivors, service users, mental health professionals, artists and researchers interested in how the arts can contribute to mental health.
The conference was opened by photographic artist Daniel Regan, who shared his discovery of the power of the arts in his own mental health journey. Daniel discussed the shame and stigma of living in crisis and how transforming his relationship to his lived experience turned it into his greatest asset. Consultant psychiatrist Dr Tom Cant introduced Peer Supported Open Dialogue and the ODDESSI* trial, a multicentre randomised control trial funded by the National Institute for Health Research. Developed in Finland in 1986, Open Dialogue is a social network model of mental healthcare where the person of concern is genuinely offered the power to define their recovery.
[*ODDESSI stands for Open Dialogue: Development and Evaluation of a Social Network Intervention for Severe Mental Illness]
On the second day, the artist keynote was given by playwright and theatre directorJulie McNamara, an outspoken survivor of the mental health system, who works with people from locked-in spaces, foregrounding the stories of disavowed voices from the margins of our communities. People who have lived in long-care hospitals are not ordinarily perceived as artists and storytellers with meaningful contributions to make in our cultural industries. Julie talked about her creative process, staging the voices of women who transgress, women who fail to perform femininity as constructed in this ableist, patriarchal society. Lived expert consultant Amanda Griffith introduced the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), a radical approach to understanding emotional distress and wellbeing that is attracting interest both nationally and internationally. Aimed at a wide range of stakeholders, the framework highlights the links between personal, family and community distress and wider issues arising from social inequalities and injustices. This gives particular attention to the experiences of people and groups who have been exposed to abuses of power on the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, nationality, age, sexuality, disability, or their status as a mental health service user, and the way these identities and associated experiences of power intersect.
A series of panels invited discussion on different topics. In the panel led by the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, the audience applauded the concept of “emodiversity”, developed as part of a programme for emotional literacy in primary schools, a superb pilot run by Prof Thomas Dixon.
Conference delegates participated in a Creative Enquiry all group activity, led by Dr Louise Younie, pioneer of the creative enquiry approach for flourishing in medical education. Moreover, selected participants were invited to present their artworks of poetry, painting and music: a delightful moment, inviting both aesthetic pleasure and reflection.
During discussions and reflections raised by this momentous event, the audience was enraptured and applauded the presented projects and innovative practices. Also, organizers and the public felt stimulated to discover new alternative approaches to mental health for future times, taking into account above all creativity, open dialogue, and direct participation from users of the health system.
It was clear that the bio-scientific, logical-rational, reductionist, and mechanistic model of mental health needs updating. An empathetic look, which gives rise to interpretive and communication abilities, is necessary to approach the idiosyncratic narratives brought by survivors and service users. In addition, the well-established hierarchy relationships within the mental health medical environment, which highlight authority and power, oppress and make stagnant the creativity and humanization that should permeate all human relationships. All this misinterpretation over mental health care leads to overly rigid and standardized models of approach, lacking human connection.
Hence, health professionals need to be open to access subjectivity and make deeper connections, giving voice and opportunity for self-expression. Ultimately, the arts seem to be a catalyst tool to materialize the inner turmoil of mental disorders, providing opportunities for representation and meaning-making, as well as being a fantastic means to well-being.
Performance, Possession & Automation – a collaborative research project led by Nick Ridout and Orlagh Woods, in collaboration with Dhanveer Singh Brar – invites you to two online conversations.
Possession & Modern Acting
Friday 4th June, 6-8pm (BST)
Online
Shonni Enelow, Julia Jarcho and Nicholas Ridout
Possession: an actor seems to have been taken over by someone else.
Automation: an actor is someone whose actions are not their own.
In this public conversation, Shonni Enelow, Julia Jarcho and Nicholas Ridout explore ideas about possession and automation in relation to 20th and 21st century experiences of acting, theatre and the movies. Do they hold clues to the roles that both possession and automation play in contemporary life, and to how we might think and feel about them.
Click here, to book your place and for further information.
What occurs when “lose her” is recast as “loser”, and covered over once more to become “winner”? And why in each reversioning does “pride” persist, but never in the same guise? These are questions which arise from listening to the Jamaican essayist of the song form, Alton Ellis.
By losing ourselves in Alton Ellis’s losses and revisions, Edward George and Dhanveer Singh Brar believe it is possible to begin to open up an auditory dimension to the question of spirit in Jamaica, the Caribbean, the diaspora, and in turn, modernity itself, as it was being rendered towards the end of the twentieth century.
Click here, to book your place and for further information.
Performance, Possession & Automation is a research project exploring automation and possession as two ways of thinking about what happens to human subjects who act in ways that they do not themselves fully control. How can making and thinking about performance contribute to thinking about these ideas?
In partnership with Fierce Festival, performingborders and Transform Festival
This project is supported by:
Collaborations Fund of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) The Centre for Public Engagement, QMUL Strategic Research Initiative, School of English and Drama, QMUL
Conducting conversation / Connecting Creatively / Creating Courageously / Courageously Carrying On / and Cabaret! / Come on and join us!
Peopling the Palace is a yearly festival of performance, workshops and events that showcases the work of Queen Mary academics, artists, current students and alumni.
This year’s theme is care and features over 25 events from outrageous cabaret nights to a day exploring the rituals of care. In times of global unrest and pandemic, Peopling the Palace Festival, creates a space to explore how important caring about each other is. The festival tackles important contemporary issues of racial inequality, mental health, care provision, neurodivergence, art in a crisis, climate justice and aging.
All events are free to attend and open to all. Advanced booking required for all events.
I am Leah (13 June) A vital new play inspired by the stories of survivors of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Dadders (19 June): Escape to the Meadowdrome with acclaimed artists Daniel Oliver and Frauke Requardt (The Place, Latitude Festival) to delve into their experiences of neurodivergent parent.
Last Gasp WFH (19 June):Playing with the fragility of technology, particularly the unpredictability of Zoom, the team found new avenues to the classic Split Britches (Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw) aesthetic of broken down theatrical conventions, exposing the self on stage.
The Tempest in English and Spanish (17 June):This interactive experience explores how the arts can break the stigma around autism.
The Possibility of Colour (12 June):Dystopian play about a new miracle cure and explores themes around mental health voice hearing, synaesthesia, neuro-diversity, Artificial Intelligence, privatised health and the illusion of choice.
Cabaret & Showcases
Alumni and Current Student Performance Showcase Nights (10,15 & 17 June): Be shocked, surprised and inspired when you support new artists and performers as they show their latest works.
Her-Pees (9 June) a comfortable, inclusive, and questioning performance night ahead of their Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club Debut.
Friday Night In (Film Night) (11 June): A small screen celebration of work from QMUL students, alumni, staff and other exciting filmmakers.
Cossy Fanny Tooty Cabaret (16 June): A cheeky performance cabaret curated by Vivian Harris.
Workshops, Conferences & Conversations
A Queer Climate Justice Workshop (16 June)by Queen Mary Theatre Company in the lead up to a new show, The Cabaret at the End of the World.
Free Creative Skills Workshops (14-15 June) to help QMUL students and the community get into the creative industries with Creative Skills Academy.
Workshop on Writing Race (16 June) for sixth-form students with acclaimed artist Vanessa MacAulay.
Enlightening Conversations and Conferences: ‘Women, Theatre, Criminal Justice’ with Clean Break, ‘Making During States of Emergency’, ‘Cults, Conspiracy and Pseudoscience’, ‘Mental Health and the arts’ and ‘How do Universities Care for Students Learning’.
Dear Colleagues, we can in theory sit outdoors with friends now, but it is threatening to snow. So instead I just wanted to invite you to some more events taking place this week involving our colleagues and collaborators:
On the Art of Boxing in the East End: A Conversation – The celebrated East End prize-fighter Daniel Mendoza revolutionised boxing in the late 18th and early 19th century. As a Jewish boxer, Mendoza experienced and challenged antisemitism throughout his life. Mendoza’s body was buried in the Novo Jewish Cemetery at Queen Mary, which still contains a plaque commemorating his life. Chaired by QMUL’s Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture. The conversation will include Professor Nadia Valman (QMUL), a artist named Jake Boston, and with other guests from the boxing world, TBC. They are joined by Ian Gatt, a sports scientist and Upper Limb injury specialist of the English Institute of Sport, who is Head of Performance Support for GB Boxing.
I’m Thirsty: On Reclaiming Water and the Arts as Universal Common Goods – This conversation starts from the premise that as much as water is indispensable to our survival, so are the arts. And yet, both are dangerously devalued in our society. To start the conversation, a social anthropologist named Megan Clinch, and a artist named Ruth Levene will introduce their research exploring the impact of flooding on the communities that live in the Calder Catchment, Yorkshire. After this, the co-directors of the MSc Creative Arts and Mental Health, Bridget Escolme (Professor of Theatre and Performance, QMUL) and psychiatrist and theatre scholar Maria Grazia Turri (Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, QMUL), will come in as well.
On Storytelling, the Child and Public Health: A Conversation – This panel will explore the critical work of storytelling in communicating public health messages to children or about children. Professor Tina Chowdhury (QMUL Engineering) will talk about her work using immersive tech to visualise foetuses in the womb – a practice that both treats foetal illness, and inspires women to experience agency around preventative health measures during their pregnancies.
On Promoting Wellbeing Through Music: A Conversation – This conversation delves into the incredible power of music to support wellbeing in social and educational settings. Hattie Rayfield of the London Chamber Orchestra introduces the LCO’s Music Junction programme, which works with children and young people from a wide range of backgrounds to provide them with opportunities to develop artistic and social skills through shared music making. Kerstin-Gertrud Kärblane joins the panel to discuss her work with Music Junction as a mental health practitioner through Queen Mary’s MSc in Creative Arts and Mental Health. Professor Paul Heritage of Queen Mary’s People’s Palace Projects will speak on his collaborations with María Claudia Parias Durán, Director of the Fundación Nacional Batuta in Colombia, who make music with 40,000 young people each year – many of them displaced by the civil war. Director of Music Paul Edlin (QMUL), who has created an online space for student musicians at Queen Mary to share their experiences and music throughout lockdown, chairs the panel.
Welcome to 2020 at Queen Mary. We want to get you excited about studying and exploring London and culture online as part of your university experience.
Performance, Possession & Automation – a collaborative research project led by Nick Ridout and Orlagh Woods, in collaboration with Joe Kelleher, Fiona Templeton and Simon Vincenzi – invites you to three online conversations.
Automation & Cultural Production
17 July, 6-8pm (BST)
Online
Seb Franklin and Annie McClanahan join Nick Ridout for a conversation about automation and cultural production.
Instead of imagining a future in which our lives are managed for us by robots or AI, it may be time to think instead about how automation is already deeply embedded in our everyday lives. Automation is not replacing human beings, but it may be changing how we work and act, and how we think and feel about ourselves and other people.
Clickhere, to book your place and for further information.
Paul C. Johnson and Rebecca Schneider join Nick Ridout for a conversation about possession and performance.
What if possession is a totally modern idea? Could it be a way for people who live modern lives in a supposedly secular culture to describe modes of being that don’t fit with their ideas of what it is to be yourself? How does performance help us think about possession? Are performance and possession both ways of becoming an automated or programmed self?
Clickhere, to book your place and for further information.
Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Roberto Strongman join Nick Ridout for a conversation about possession and subjectivity.
Might possession and other experiences in which people seem to lose control of themselves – like intoxication or narcosis – expand our understanding of what it means to be a subject, beyond the bounded subjectivity assumed and promoted in so-called ‘Enlightenment’ thought? Do subjects always and everywhere have to fit neatly into bodies?
Click here to book your place and for further information.
Performance, Possession & Automation is a research project exploring automation and possession as two ways of thinking about what happens to human subjects who act in ways that they do not themselves fully control. How can making and thinking about performance contribute to thinking about these ideas?
This project is supported through the Collaborations Fund of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and The Centre for Public Engagement, Queen Mary University of Londonin partnership with Fierce Festival and Hampstead Theatre.
Anərkē
Shakespeare’s candlelit production of Macbeth premieres at The Holy Trinity Church,
Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s burial place, and then tours to London
for a very limited run at St Leonard’s
Church, Shoreditch, the burial site of Shakespeare’s main actor, Richard
Burbage.
Anərkē
Shakespeare is an innovative theatre company that combines scholarship and
creative practice inspired by the working conditions in which Shakespeare
conceived his plays. Shakespeare’s “myriad minded” texts are brought to life by
a diverse, gender-blind, actor-led ensemble, in an intensively short rehearsal
period, without a director.
Stratford-upon-Avon Run
Show Details:
Stratford location: Church of the Holy Trinity, Old Town, Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 6BG
“The
best Shakespeare performance that I have seen for years!!” – audience response
“The
lack of fuss about mimetic casting … cleared the way for the play to shine
radiantly through.” – Professor Michael Dobson, Shakespeare Institute
“The
production made questions of ethnicity completely irrelevant … benefited hugely
from the experience and authority of its multiracial cast.” – Professor Tony
Howard, University of Warwick
“A
feast of fine acting, and a revelatory X-ray of the structure of the play.“ –
Professor Richard Wilson, Kingston University
