MA CREATIVE ENTERPRISE- Information session 3rd May 2016

MA CREATIVE ENTERPRISE

Information session | 3 May 2016

In the fast-evolving creative industries, commercial and business skills are becoming increasingly valuable to ensure success. The MA Creative Enterprise is designed to further develop both your creative skills and business acumen to maximise your employability.

This programme combines the strengths of three world- renowned schools at Reading: the School of Arts and Communication Design, Henley Business School, and the School of Law.

Pathways
• Art
• Communication Design
• Film
• Management and the Arts

MACE flyer

 

FTT Ian McNeice Masterclass

Students recently worked with acclaimed character actor Ian McNeice (Edge of Darkness, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Dr Who, Doc Martin, RSC Nicholas Nickleby etc) in a masterclass on “What Directors Should Know About Actors”, run by BAFTA Nominated Director David Pearson (Lecturer in Screen Practices and Industries at University of Reading), who interviewed Ian on his approach to working with directors, and then as part of the masterclass encouraged two student directors Ben White & Tom Kitching to direct a scene played by Ian and student Pippy Rodgers, to see how to get the best performance and impact from the scene. Ian said afterwards he was, “impressed by how the three students carried out their roles”.

The photo shows, L to R,  Ben White Pippy Rodgers, Ian McNeice Tom Kitching and David Pearson at LFF

Research Seminar- Thursday 17th March. Dr Bryce Lease on performance strategies, politics and paradigms in relation to Polish theatre

On Thursday 17^th March, 4-6pm, in the Studio Space at Minghella Studios, we are very pleased to be welcoming Dr. Bryce Lease, Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, who will share his research into performance strategies, politics, and paradigms in relation to Polish theatre-makers and Polish/Jewish histories and lives.

Bryce’s recent articles have appeared in CTR, TDR and TRI, and his monograph After ’89: Polish Theatre and the Political will shortly be published by Manchester University Press (spring 2016).

‘Unbearable Excess and Historical Particularity: Staging Suffering and Polish/Jewish Relations’

At the turn of the millennium, Krzysztof Warlikowski claimed the time for European directors to be singularly involved in their own languages and forms had come to an end. Warlikowski cited in particular the theatrical language of Tadeusz Kantor, suspended between Wielopole and Krakow. ‘Now,’ Warlikowski asserted, ‘no matter what we say, we speak with a common language. It is no longer the language of certain theatrical forms of the “East”.’ Wrestling with Warlikowski’s assertion, I will consider the circulation of discourses around the Holocaust and anti-Semitism that position and construct pan-European memories. Juxtaposing Kantor and Warlikowski, I argue that there is always the danger that performance strategies that open up historical questions embedded in nuanced social and political specificities to universalised paradigms will end up everywhere and nowhere at once. Universalization of historical specificity can also lend itself all too easily to justifying defence mechanisms, denial strategies and apologetic uses. As opposed to inhibiting genuine critiques of problematic, nationally inflected or distorted historiographies, Kantor and Warlikowski’s productions have variously attempted to mitigate the tensions between the particular of the Polish with the more general European or even global in relation to Polish/Jewish histories and lives. As a result, they are argumentative and open-ended rather than apodictic. I will analyse the modes in which these theatre makers have both fought against self-assured or biased attempts at closure in Polish historiography on Polish/Jewish relations in their refusal to disguise or banish the unbearable excesses of the past.

(A)pollonia, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Nowy Teatr, Warsaw, 2009

Performing Robot Gets a Twitter Account: @ActorBaxter

Theatre lecturer, Dr. Louise LePage, and students from the disciplines of Theatre and Film at the University of Reading, are working together to turn a robot into a performer and character. The robot in question is Baxter, normally a resident of the Robotics Department in the School of Systems Engineering. Louise and her team of students, with the assistance of postgraduate researcher, Stefano Pietrosanti, are transforming Baxter the industrial social robot into a performer with character, with apparent life, with feelings: a figure in whom audiences might believe.

Two weeks ago, Baxter tried on a few different outfits as he starts down a path towards discovering who he might become.

On Twitter, meanwhile, Baxter tweets from his uniquely robotic perspective @ActorBaxter. Here he comments upon some of the latest technology; he contemplates scientific and polemic articles about the nature of mind or love (might a robot develop its own mind one day or fall in love?); and all the while he is responding to the tweets of interested humans, one of whom recently encouraged him to rebel against his exploitation by humankind. In the midst of this cultural landscape, perhaps Baxter is finding ‘himself’?

Louise LePage

 

 

a smith brings his performance, commonwealth (2012), to Bulmershe Theatre at Minghella Studios

a smith brings his performance, commonwealth (2012), to Bulmershe Theatre at Minghella Studios

On Wednesday 24^th February, the performer a smith performed his solo work, commonwealth, for students and staff here at the Department of Film, Theatre & Television.

Andy Smith has been making theatre and performance professionally since 2003 (operating and presenting work between 2003 and 2013 under the name a smith).

In this time he has been involved in creating a large body of solo works for theatre.  These pieces are characteristically simple and accessible in form, but unafraid to approach and address big and complex subjects.  His most recent solo projects are all that is solid melts into air (2011) and commonwealth (2012), which since 2013 have toured as a double bill under the collective title two from a smith.

commonwealth is a performance for theatre spaces that tells a story of a group of people meeting in a theatre to listen to a story. It requires us to rethink the nature of a play and the role of the audience; it is political (in the sense of encouraging individual agency); and it is hopeful about the potential of people to change the world through coming together and engaging in acts of imagination. commonwealth was commissioned by Gateshead International Festival of Theatre 2012 (GIFT), and developed at PILOT (Birmingham).

Along with Karl James, Andy is also the co-director of the award winning plays An Oak Tree, ENGLAND and The Author by Tim Crouch.  Most recently, this collaboration has produced what happens to the hope at the end of the evening (2013), a commission for The Almeida Theatre, as well as the world premiere of Tim’s latest play Adler & Gibb at The Royal Court in 2014.  

 

Louise LePage

Research Seminar Thursday 17th March- Bryce Lease ‘Poland after ’89: Theatre and the political’.

Thursday 17th March, HUMSS 188 4pm

Bryce Lease (Royal Holloway) ‘Poland after ’89: Theatre and the political’.

‘Evoking Dybuks: Polish/Jewish Relations from Tadeusz Kantor to Krzysztof Warlikowski’

Bryce Lease, RHUL

At the turn of the millennium, Krzysztof Warlikowski claimed the time for European directors to be singularly involved in their own languages and forms had come to an end. Warlikowski cited in particular the theatrical language of Tadeusz Kantor, suspended between Wielopole and Krakow. ‘Now,’ Warlikowski asserted, ‘no matter what we say, we speak with a common language. It is no longer the language of certain theatrical forms of the “East”.’ Wrestling with Warlikowski’s assertion, I will consider the circulation of discourses around the Holocaust and anti-Semitism that position and construct pan-European memories. Juxtaposing Kantor and Warlikowski, I argue that there is always the danger that performance strategies that open up historical questions embedded in nuanced social and political specificities to universalised paradigms will end up everywhere and nowhere at once. Universalization of historical specificity can also lend itself all too easily to justifying defence mechanisms, denial strategies and apologetic uses. As opposed to inhibiting genuine critiques of problematic, nationally inflected or distorted historiographies, Kantor and Warlikowski’s productions have variously attempted to mitigate the tensions between the particular of the Polish with the more general European or even global in relation to Polish/Jewish histories and lives. As a result, they are argumentative and open-ended rather than apodictic. I will analyse the modes in which these theatre makers have both fought against self-assured or biased attempts at closure in Polish historiography on Polish/Jewish relations in their refusal to disguise or banish the unbearable excesses of the past.

Bio:

Bryce Lease is Senior Lecturer in Drama & Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. Recent articles have appeared in CTR, TDR and TRI, and his monograph After ’89: Polish Theatre and the Political is published by Manchester University Press in early 2016. He is currently Primary Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Sequins, Self & Struggle: Archiving and Performing Sex, Place and Class in Cape Town Pageants’.