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'In Time with Shakespeare: Performance, Entrainment, and Jet Lag.' Professor Robert Shaughnessy, University of Kent
Friday 16 November JARMAN STUDIO 2, 5-6.30:
This paper outlines an approach to the production, performance and reception of Shakespeare’s works in relation to entrainment, a concept that has long been familiar to the physical and natural sciences, but which has only recently begun to be applied within the humanities. Understood as the process whereby apparently autonomous rhythmic systems interact, and eventually synchronise, with each other, entrainment has been applied to the study of dance and music as a means of understanding the complex, dynamic and reciprocal processes through which the various rhythms at work within performance (gestural, kinesthetic, auditory, visual, and so on) keep time with audience rhythms (physiological and otherwise) to generate mutualities of effect and affect. In Shakespeare we find a body of performance material that can be defined at almost every level by its strongly rhythmic qualities, from the basic pulse of iambic pentameter to the structural rhythms of dramatic genre, and from the life-cycle of a production within repertory through to the patterns of repetition, return and recurrence that define a play’s afterlives within contemporary culture. As a point of departure, the paper focuses on the relations between Shakespeare, the work of the actor, and jet lag, understood both as a psychophysical state and as cultural metaphor.
Professor Robert Shaughnessy is Acting Director of Drama and Deputy Director of the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance. His most recent book is The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare (2011).
To find out more please contact Nicola Shaughnessy.
4 Oct 2012 12:27