Theatre Practices

Speakers and events

Practitioners, Processes, Professions

Theatre Studies runs a strand of workshops/seminars under the title ‘Practitioners, Processes, Professions’. We regularly invite practitioners to discuss their work with students and staff, and often to accompany these discussions with a 3-hour workshop for interested students.

In recent years, visiting practitioners have included:

•     Euan Downey, Polish Laboratory Theatre
•     Nic Green, performance artist/director
•     Guillermo Gómez-Peña, international performance artist
•     Ben Harrison, Grid Iron theatre company
•     Adrian Howells, performance artist
•     Stewart Laing, international director and artistic director Untitled Productions
•     Kira O'Reilly, UK-based artist
•     Tian Qinxin, theatre director, National Theatre of China
•     Anthony Schrag, performance artist
•     Reckless Sleepers, performance company
•     Robert Sturm, Artistic Director of Tanz Theater Pina Bausch Wuppertal

Theatre Studies Research Seminars

The Theatre Studies Research seminars are held three to four times during term-time, and host papers from visiting speakers and distinguished scholars, as well as profiling on-going research by staff from within the Subject group. The seminar series provides a forum within which postgraduate students and staff can meet to discuss and debate current research in the fields of drama, theatre and performance studies. Each session offers an interdisciplinary context for discussion.

Programme for 2011/12:

Wednesday 16th November
Dr Kate Dossett, University of Leeds:
Our Actors May Become Our Emancipators: Race & Realism in 1930’s American Political Theatre

Thursday 1st December
Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer on the Guardian:
Newspapers, criticism and the web: reviewing the arts in the Twitter age

Thursday 19th January
Alexander Weigel, author and former dramaturg at the Berlin Deutsches Theater:
Theatre in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – the Deutsches Theater in Berlin

Thursday  23rd February
Dr Katie Gough, University of Glasgow:
Between the Image and Anthropology: Theatrical Lessons From Aby Warburg's 'Nymph’

Thursday 8th March
Dr Laura Bissell, University of Glasgow:
The Female Cyborg as Grotesque in Performance

Thursday 3rd May
Professor Hans-Thies Lehmann, Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Kent and Professor of Theater Studies, Goethe-University, Frankfurt:
Postdramatic Tragedy without drama?

Lee Hall, playwright and theatre director, author/script writer for Billy Elliott, Spoonface Steinberg and The Pitman Painters, has agreed to talk at one of our seminars in 2012. Date tbc.

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In previous years guest speakers at the Theatre Studies Research Seminar series have included:

Lucy Weir, History of Art, University of Glasgow: In Vogue: The Evolution of 20th Century Contemporary Dance: a lecture/demonstration with Ruth Mills

Professor John Hall, University College Falmouth: Practising and essaying near the sign of Performance Writing

David Grant, Queen’s University, Belfast: ‘Living in the Moment’: time, space, the arts and dementia

Robert Sturm, Artistic Director of Tanztheater Pina Bausch Wuppertal: The Work of Pina Bausch

Dr Anna Birch, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RCS): Repetition and performativity: multi layered fresco as living monument

Professor Elinor Fuchs, Yale School of Drama: Postdramatic theatre and its discontents: the future of a theory

Dr. David Williams, Royal Holloway, University of London: Lone Twin Theatre’s Catastrophe Trilogy