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Some Previous Lectures
Professor Vanalyne Green, University of Leeds
Life is So Very Messy
"Always committed to art driven by ideas, emotions and social history, my videos have examined hierarchies of meaning where sex and privilege cross paths and have explored the paradoxes of American citizenship within such social practices as addiction, sports, sexuality, and, most recently, prayer."
Vanalyne Green has screened her work extensively in the United States and abroad, including The Whitney Biennial, American Film Institute, Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Videotheque de Paris, The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, The Guggenheim Museum and many other museums, universities and film festivals. She has received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, as well as grants from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts, and a Prix de Rome. Her work has been covered in the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Weekly, The Chicago Reader, and Artforum. Publications by and about, and interviews with, Green also can be found in Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties and Women of Vision, in addition to M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism. Green's videotape "A Spy in the House that Ruth Built" was listed as one of the 1,000 best films ever made by film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum.
Green studied art at Fresno State University in the first feminist art program started by Judy Chicago and then at California Institute of the Arts with Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. She is currently a member of the collaborative group Feel Tank Chicago.
Professor James Elkins
Art Institute of Chicago and University College Cork
How do animals see the world?
Professor Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow
"Society under siege" - the shift to melodrama in the aesthetics of EastEnders’
This paper argues that British soaps, and EastEnders in particular, have been moving away from the realist aesthetic which has traditionally been their claim to distinction and respectability. It argues that there has been a shift to more melodramatic modes which are affecting the organisation of narrative and the representation of women in particular. Drawing on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, the paper suggests that this melodramatic shift is driven by profound doubts about the possibilities of community - doubts which work against the programme's 20 year history and its overt rationale.
Professor Christine Geraghty is Chair of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at University of Glasgow. She is the author of the classic Women and Soap Opera (Polity, 1991); and British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (Routledge, 2000), as well as co-editor (with David Lusted) of The Television Studies Book (Arnold, 1998). Her detailed study of the British film, My Beautiful Laundrette, was published by I B Taurus in 2004. She has recently been working on essays updating her study of soap opera and is currently writing a book on Screen Adaptations.
Dr David Barnett, University College Dublin
The Freedom and the Constraints of the Postdramatic Text
This lecture will introduce students to issues of postdramatic theatre by examining two texts of the 1990s, Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis and Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life. Neither play contains any character attribution and thus they pose fundamental questions to those realizing the them. I shall be making connections between the characterless plays and their content, revealing two different sets of effects generated by seemingly similar dramaturgical strategies. I shall then discuss both the remarkable space created for an audience by such an unusual form and the more limiting implications for theatre makers who seek to retain the openness of the texts.
David Barnett is Lecturer in Drama at University College Dublin. He has published books on Heiner Müller (Literature versus Theatre, 1998) and Fassbinder (Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre, 2005), the latter as a Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation. Research interests include contemporary, political and postdramatic theatre.
Francis Klingender [1907-1955]: A Marxist Art Historian Out of Time
This lecture will profile aspects of the life and intellectual legacy of the Marxist Art Historian Francis Klingender (1907-1955). It follows research undertaken in the MI5 archives, the Stadt Archiv Goslar, the LSE and from interviews with surviving contemporaries. Known principally for his pioneering books Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947), Marxism and Modern Art (1943) and Goya in the Democratic Tradition (1948), Klingender also authored work under the auspices of the British documentary film movement as well as being active across a range of Comintern networks and organisations.
Francis Klingender: An Iconographer Out of Time, is to be published by the Marx Library in 2007.
Dr Ben Thomas, University of Kent
Van Dyck Pinxit: The Artist and The Print
This talk accompanies the exhibition of seventeenth and eighteenth-century prints after Van Dyck that opened in Keynes College on 1st March 2006.
I have two aims in curating this exhibition. The first is to engage creatively through the practices of collecting and curating with the concept of "research as practice", and what this might mean for an art historian working on the Old Masters. Secondly, I want to examine, through the particular example of the Flemish, seventeenth-century artist Van Dyck, a broad research field: the role prints played in shaping our concept of the artist and consequently of art history. Multiple, widely disseminated and collected, and often reproductive, prints were instrumental in establishing the individual artist as author of a coherent oeuvre identifiable by characteristic stylistic traits that were comparable (through prints) with those of other artists. The exhibition explores these phenomena in relation to the functional role of the print as a means of communicating an exactly repeatable visual message, and also employs techniques of traditional print connoisseurship - the identification of states and copies etc - to complicate (if not to deconstruct) the tidy art historical narrative implied above.
Derek Paget, University of Reading
Giving Voice: Performance and Authenticity in the Documusicals of Brian Hill
This paper examines four ground-breaking 'documusicals' made over the past eight years by director Brian Hill and his main collaborator, the poet and novelist Simon Armitage. Working with various musicians, and in a series of provocative settings, they have established a challenging new hybrid form that vividly illustrates the present 'radical dispersal' [John Corner] of an inherently unstable documentary category. Research for the paper has included interviews with Hill, Armitage and Simon Boswell.
Derek Paget is part-time Reader in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading, UK. Once a theatre worker in London (notably for Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East, and for Soho Theatre at the Kings Head Islington), he is the author of two books – True Stories?: Documentary drama on Radio, Screen and Stage (1990) and No Other Way To Tell It: Dramadoc/docudrama on Television (1998). He researches and writes on Documentary Theatre (Theatre Workshop’s 1963 play Oh What a Lovely War being a special interest) and on docudrama on film and television. He is currently preparing a second edition of No Other Way To Tell It.
Professor Michael Renov, Professor of Critical Studies and Associate dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Southern California, School of Cinema-Television
First Person Films: Some Theses on Self-Inscription
This seminar will be of interest to those working on autobiography, film and video, documentary and visual anthropology.
Michael Renov is Professor of Critical Studies and Associate dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Southern California, School of Cinema-Television. His most recent book is The Subject of Documentary (2004) and his research interests include documentary theory, autobiography in film and video, video art and activism, and representations of the Holocaust. He is also the author of Hollywood's Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology (1988), and editor of Theorizing Documentary(1993) and co-editor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1996) and Collecting Visible Evidence (1999).
Steve Purcell, University of Kent
'Shakespeare The Panto': Audience Participation and the Dual Level.
An objection that the performance was too much ‘like a pantomime’ seems to be a stock complaint in the newspaper theatre critic’s repository of put-downs for questionable Shakespearean productions. The comparison is usually meant to imply amateurishness, or a lack of depth: this paper, however, suggests that modern Shakespearean performance has much to learn from this centuries-old popular theatre form.
I will suggest that an element of audience participation and self-reflexivity is implied in the texts themselves, and that these performance features have, over the course of the centuries, been written out of the repertoire of ‘legitimate’ theatre and relegated to the ‘illegitimate’. Now almost inextricably linked with plebeian or ‘lowbrow’ entertainment forms such as variety, children’s theatre, or reality TV, audience participation is frequently constructed (particularly in newspaper criticism) as incompatible with 'serious’ art. My paper questions the assumptions behind such attitudes, looking at the hegemonic interests served by a passive, non-participatory audience and at the potential political and artistic advantages to the disruption of what has become the conventional actor/audience relationship.
My paper looks at the different ways in which audiences have been asked to ‘participate’ in Shakespearean performances in recent years, and suggests reasons for some of the various successes and failures with which such productions have met. Questions of liveness, deconstruction, empowerment, ‘communitas’ and the ‘dual level’ are among those which will be explored.
Dr Jon Kear, University of Kent
Fantin Latour and Wagnerian Painting
Often referred to as the Vermeer of French Painting, Fantin Latour is commonly known for his many still life paintings and portraits. However, Fantin considered these to be mainly a way of making a living and aspired to be an artist in the mode of la grande peinture. Much of his artistic production was devoted to musical subjects taken from the operas of Wagner. This paper explores Fantin's use of Wagnerian motifs in the broader context of the reception of Wagner in Europe where the novelty of his music made his work a touchstone for artists who felt that contemporary academic conventions had become a fetter to artistic expression. Wagner's music thus served as a key reference point for artistic debates ranging from specific issues about the role of melody in music and the incorporation of technologies of spectacle into musical performance, to larger ones about the nature of creative imagination and the relation of music to the visual arts. Through looking at the reception of Wagner's work in France, the paper explores how Fantin responded to Wagnerism both thematically but also compositionally and examines the terms of particular 'Wagnerian' readings made of his work.
The paper co-incides with the inaugral exhibition of the History & Philosophy of Art's print collection, The Awakening (Keynes College) which features one of Fantin's Wagnerian lithographs, Le Réveil,1886.
Dr Su Holmes, University of Kent
‘Torture, Treacle, Tears and Trickery’: This is your Life in the 1950s
My research has mainly focused on aspects of popular British television in the 1950s, and contemporary television programming – such as quiz shows and Reality TV. The research into This is Your Life is part of a wider research project which examines the BBC’s construction of ‘popular’ television in the 1950s, and the ‘beginnings’ of a number of generic forms (such as soap opera, quiz shows and magazine programming). The interest in the construction of celebrity is part of this focus.
Drawing on both written and audio-visual archival sources, this paper examines what was one of the most controversial programmes on British television in the 1950s: the BBC’s version of This is Your Life. In popular memory, This is Your Life stands as a rather reverential celebration of the famous. But in the institutional and cultural contexts of its early circulation (primarily 1955-1962), it carried very different meanings. Although a very popular programme with a regular audience of 12-14 million, the programme elicited huge debate in the press, where it was variously described as ‘Torture-by-TV’, ‘a voyeuristic feast of invasive exploitation’, to ‘a great gooey meringue’. While the programme was very important to the BBC, its reception equally created institutional conflict, and the Corporation consistently worried about what they called ‘the politics attached to the programme’. In aiming to reconstruct the meanings of this controversy, it is these ‘politics’ that I want to address here. How does this programme intersect with debates about celebrity privacy, agency and power, and reflect on television’s emerging role as an apparatus for celebrity circulation? How was this shaped by the particular aesthetic qualities of television (liveness was crucial here), as well as debates about the ‘Americanisation’ of British broadcasting? What connections can be made between now and then - given that the spectacle of celebrity emotion permeates the contemporary media landscape? I argue in this paper that This is Your Life is a programme which brings together a number of key debates about the past and present of celebrity culture.
‘The Way of Butoh': documenting performance processes on DVD
Professor Paul Allain and Frances Barbe, University of Kent
We will be showing extracts of this DVD, which is an investigation into how to document Frances Barbe's practice-as-research dance work. We will discuss the process of its development and creation in relation to technical, artistic and organisational questions and parameters. Our presentation will also ask how you can use new technologies and publishing formats to document live performance events and performance processes.
Commanding all the sounds of the universe: Post-production Sound and Sound Design in Hollywood's Studio Era
Dr Helen Hanson, University of Exeter. This sounds a bit ambitious, but I'll mostly be focusing on the discussions of sound post-production by engineers from journals like the JSMPE, and trying to argue that sound in the period post-transition to sound and the early 1950s does have interesting and inventive things going on, rather than being 'static', as per most of the technological history accounts. I'll be illustrating with some egs. probably from Universal horror films and some of the RKO Lewton 'horror' unit - particularly the Lewton Unit's use of sound sequences to build suspense (Cat People, Seventh Victim, I Walked with a Zombie).
The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy
Dr Ollie Double, University of Kent
Stand-up comedy is an immensely popular art form, yet is vastly under-explored. When it is written about (which is rarely), it tends to be discussed in terms of broad historical trends or biographies of individual performers. My new book attempts to map out the key features of the form, concentrating on personality, the performer's relationship with the audience, improvisation, performance techniques, and methodology. This seminar will be a whistle stop tour of the main themes of the book.
Contemporary Flemish Theatre
Ronald Geerts, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels
The lecture will start with a short introduction on contemporary Flemish theatre and continue on a more theoretical level with some very practical research problems presented by recent developments in Flemish theatre (but not exclusively Flemish): the impossibility of an objective approach when dealing with certain shows/performances.
Ronald Geerts teaches Theatre Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Screenwriting at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and History of the Screenplay in the Master Writing (Rits filmschool, Brussels). His research focuses on contemporary Flemish theatre in an international context and on the use of narrative strategies in film and television. Most recent publications: Book: "Willen jullie in zo'n wereld leven?" Brussel: Vubpress, 2005 (ed. and different articles on the work of David Mamet). Forthcoming: articles on the work of Peter Weir and on the use of subjectivity in narrative structures in film and television.
Is it 'curtains' for acting in an age of celebrity?
Professor Paul Allain, University of Kent
Open inaugural lecture
The lecture explores the following questions: what might acting be in a postmodern age; has the performer replaced the actor; is it 'curtains' for acting or is that just doom-mongering; and can celebrities act?
Paul Allain will also examine how the spectacle of celebrities acting on stage has devalued the voice, sexualised the body, and turned the actor into a commodity in the commercial theatre. Moving on from Madonna and Nicole Kidman in the West End, he will then analyse the other extreme of acting practices: laboratory investigations in the work of Jerzy Grotowski and Gardzienice, in which the voice is dominant and the body is also 'exposed', but where the performer looks to personal exploration rather than public display.
Paul Allain's main research and teaching interests include physical approaches to actor training and performance craft; contemporary East European and Polish theatre; and Japanese and cross-cultural performance.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a performance practitioner, his publications include: The Art of Stillness - The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki; a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on Polish Theatre; and the Cambridge Companion to Chekhov (as co-editor). His Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (co-authored with Dr Jen Harvie) is due out in November. Working in one of the best research and teaching departments in the UK, Paul Allain is regularly invited to give workshops, including for the National Theatre's Education department. Recent invitations to speak about his research have taken him to Poland, Austria, Bulgaria and Italy. He has worked as a Movement Director at the Royal Court, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Neo-Impressionist naturalism: A reappraisal of Neo-Impressionist technique
Dr Michael Newall
HPA Work in Progress Seminar is a Staff/Student research forum for the discussion of theories, debates and issues in the visual arts and related disciplines.