Thursday 22nd October 2015, Fintan Walsh, Birkbeck College, University of London. ‘Vertiginous Loss, Love and Belonging: Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland.’

Room 102 (Studio Space), The Minghella Building, Whiteknights Campus.

Running as part of the Film, Theatre and Television Department’s research seminar series, Fintan Walsh’s presentation examines the pivotal role played by theatre and performance in the negotiation of Ireland’s recent Marriage Equality campaign, which saw the Republic becoming the first country in the world to make same-sex marriage possible by popular vote in May 2015. But it also considers how certain productions tempered this seemingly singular drive by staging disorienting visions of intimacy and belonging, which both critiqued aspects of contemporary Ireland in the wake of the country’s recent economic collapse, and redirected the focus of dominant strands of LGBTQ culture.

Fintan Walsh is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is Co-Director of the Centre for Contemporary Theatre. He is author of the forthcoming book Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which informs this presentation, and Associate Editor of Theatre Research International.

Professor Jonathan Bignell addresses an international conference on Television post Second World War

On 25 September 2015, Prof. Jonathan Bignell spoke at the annual Association of Adaptation Studies conference in London on the subject of “Rings around London: Television in 1946”. He explored how British television re-started after the Second World War, noting a recurrent motif of loops and rings in the spatiality of broadcasting at that time. Television radiated out across London and into its hinterland, in a circle of about 40 miles radius. BBC Outside Broadcast units were plugged into a cable encircling London’s West End, enabling them to shoot pictures from the Dress Circle of London theatres, to follow the circling couples at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, and cover Wimbledon motorcycle speedway and the Oval cricket ground. The talk used these spatial and temporal loops to analyse the BBC’s sense of its post-War role.

Home Theatre (UK) 2015

Home Theatre (UK) is taking place this week, for only the second time. Thirty students from Film, Theatre & Television are again working as Associate Artists with colleagues from Theatre Royal Stratford East, helping to develop the performances and then filming them on Saturday night when they are staged in thirty homes across London. Third year undergraduates, students on our MA Creative Enterprise and three PhD students are involved: each is paired with an Artist (an actor skilled in dramaturgy and or devising skills) charged with creating an individual performance for one of the hosts.  During the week, performances are developed taking inspiration from the host and their home. On Saturday 17 October hosts will be encouraged to invite an audience of friends and family to see the performance. After this, they will provide refreshments, over which thoughts and experiences can be shared about the performance. Watch out form more details of when the filmed performances will be screened. An international symposium on Home Theatre is taking place at the theatre on Monday. For more details visit:
http://www.stratfordeast.com/get-involved/home-theatre-uk/home-theatre-uk-2015/

CFAC Public Lecture by Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, University of Liverpool

CFAC Public Lecture by Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, University of Liverpool

28 October 2015 – 6pm – Bulmershe Theatre, Minghella Building, Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading, RG6 6BT

‘Diamonds of the Night: Childhood Loneliness in World Cinema’

Prof Hemelryk Donald’s will discuss the sounds of a child’s loneliness in film. Her paper draws specifically on films treating the child in accelerated motion, whether in flight from immediate danger or in search of home, a new home or a return to a previous environment. Part of a larger project on the child migrant, this paper attempts to hear how sound or its absence provokes the sense of loneliness in cinema, and discusses how this impacts the wider notion of cinematic childishness and maturation. Dealing with questions of presence and absence, with space and frame, and with youth and ageing, it aims to contribute to a review of twentieth century postwar thematics of childhood in a twenty-first century crisis of child migration.

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is Professor and Head of the School of the Arts, University of Liverpool. She is a recent Professorial Future Fellow (UNSW) and a CI on the Child, Nation and Film Network (Leverhulme). Her current project on child migration in world cinema, The Dorothy Project, will be published by IB Tauris in 2017. www.stephaniedonald.info