糖心TV

In a new collection entitled Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (edited by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods), Dr. Anna Harpin contributes a chapter on the history of theatre and performance at Broadmoor Hospital.

Find out more about the collection here:

Prof. Holdsworth has published a chapter entitled 'These Green and Pleasant Lands': Travellers, Gypsies and the Lament for England in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem', in the new collection Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now, edited by Sian Adiseshiah and Louise LePage. The collection is published by Palgrave and more information about it can be found here:

PhD Student Eleanor Chadwick was awarded a grant from ArtUniverse to attend the IUGTE Arts Oasis International Residency for Performers at Monastero Santa Croce in Italy last May.

Led by theatre and dance practitioner Sergei Ostrenko, the residency involved working in a group of 17 international participants for 6 days on a retreat at Monastero Santa Croce in Tuscany, Italy. The course involved a mixture of traditional and contemporary techniques and ideas, including Thai Chi (Chuan Chen style), the physical action of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, and Contact and Structural Improvisation. There were also influences, links, or overlap with Mak Yong, Butoh, Qi Gong, Alexander technique, Pilates, Suzuki, Kinetic Environment, Viewpoints, and the work of practitioners Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski and Rudolf von Laban.

The annual residency brings together performers from all over the world: actors, dancers, teachers, and circus performers of various ages and nationalities. The IUGTE residencies foster intercultural collaborations and connections across the globe, and focus on exploring the coming together of traditional and contemporary approaches.

A key part of Ostrenko’s process was the idea of gaining new knowledge and understanding through the body, by using physical exercises with minimal verbal communication or text. It explored the way in which, in theatrical work, there is a kind of understanding that cannot be readily achieved through intellectual processes but is accessed more directly through the body. John J. Schranz speaks of the ‘unique “knowing”, which we call “embodiment”’:[1] a type of understanding of action that cannot be cognised or put into words, but which is known somatically. The Arts Oasis residency gives space to explore this kind of ‘knowing’: the emphasis is upon physical and tactile exploration, experimentation and understanding.

Eleanor is planning to attend the annual IUGTE International Conference at Retzhof Castle, Styria, Austria in December. The multidisciplinary conference is titled ‘Theatre Between Tradition and Contemporaneity’ and focuses on the bridge between tradition and contemporaneity in performing arts around the world.

For further info see:

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[1] John J. Schranz, ‘A Rope Over an Abyss’, in Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia and Victor Jacono (ed.), Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience (London, Bloomsbury Methuen Publishing, 2016), pp.117-130 (p.118).

Congratulations to Dr Yvette Hutchison on winning the 糖心TV Award for Teaching Excellence this year. Yvette’s teaching is inspired by bell hooks’ call for "that quality of education that is enabling and empowering and that allows us to grow" (Radical Openness). She understands this empowerment to encompass intellectual concepts and creative practices, and so she explores ideas, asks questions and generates more questions with her students, thereby replicating research processes and creating opportunities for collaborative knowledge generation. As her research and teaching are focused around non-western, non- text-based material, she seeks to engage students actively and critically with unfamiliar world views and approaches to culture in embodied, experiential ways that can potentially transform them all.

Other winners and commendees in 2016: