Acts of Commitment: Activist Arts, the Rehearsed Reading, and Documentary Theatre

2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Paget
Keyword(s):  
Research Council ◽  
First Century ◽  
Valuable Resource ◽  
Charitable Organization ◽  
Documentary Theatre ◽  
The Past ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Verbatim Theatre ◽  
To Come

The past two decades have seen a remarkable resurgence in documentary theatre in Britain and America, with a growing emphasis on verbatim material. In this article, Derek Paget examines a distinctively twenty-first-century contribution to the tradition of activist theatre grounded in the last century. Using verbatim material, supporting a specific current cause, and often produced in association with an NGO or charitable organization, the ‘rehearsed reading’ apparently offers little in terms of theatricality even if it is clearly worthy and a valuable resource for activists. Documentary theatre has always been heavily context-based, and so tends to come to the fore in troubled times. In the present conjuncture, work like that of the ‘Actors for Human Rights’ group, analyzed here, seeks to be a force for social change through a focus on single issues and a reliance on verbatim speech. Derek Paget's interest in documentary theatre has featured several times in NTQ and his early intervention on Verbatim Theatre featured in NTQ 12 (November 1987). Research for the article was conducted as part of University of Reading's 2007–2010 ‘Acting with Facts’ project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Derek Paget is Principal Investigator of the project, and Reader in Theatre and Television in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television, University of Reading. The second edition of No Other Way To Tell It, his book on screen docudrama, is due for publication this year.

scholarly journals Advocating Classics Education – a new national project

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (36) ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Edith Hall ◽  
Arlene Holmes-Henderson
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
National Project ◽  
The Past ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
King's College ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Do So

The ‘Advocating Classics Education’ (ACE) project is an initiative led by Professor Edith Hall and Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson, based at King's College London. The project seeks to extend the availability of Classical Civilisation and Ancient History (CC/AH) qualifications to learners in non-fee-paying schools across the United Kingdom. To do so, Professor Hall has been awarded a Leadership Fellowship of £250,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project's full title is ‘Studying Classical Civilisation in Britain: recording the past and fostering the future’ and it runs from 1st May 2017 to 31st August 2018.

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Kun
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
To Come ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
A Current

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

scholarly journals Maritime Memorates and Contemporary Legends of Storm Apparitions and Storm Making in Folklore Traditions of Ireland and Scotland*

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (2 (9)) ◽  
pp. 154-162
Author(s):  
Maxim Fomin
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Scottish Gaelic ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts

The present article examines the folklore genre of maritime memorates of Irish and Scottish origin. It describes the maritime traditions of Gauls when various supernatural creatures and inanimate objects appeared from the sea, as well as the spells and magic tricks producing winds. The article studies contemporary legends which tell about omens and visions bewitching a storm. * This contribution is based upon the findings of the research project ‘Stories of the Sea: A Typological Study of Maritime Memorates in Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic Folklore Traditions’ supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK).

Database Narrative, Spatial Montage, and the Cultural Transmission of Memory

2013 ◽  
pp. 150-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Aston
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
The Past ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses ways in which the database narrative techniques of virtual media can be used to explore the relationship between real-world oral storytelling and embodied performance in the cultural transmission of memory. It is based on an ongoing collaboration between the author and the historical anthropologist, Wendy James, to develop a multilayered associative narrative, which considers relationships between experience, event, and memory among a displaced community. The work is based on a substantial living archive of photographs, audio, cine, and video recordings collected by Wendy James in the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands from the mid-1960s to the present day. Its critical context relates to the ’sensory turn’ in anthropology and to ’beyond text’ debates within the arts and humanities regarding ways in which we can capture and represent the sensory experiences of the past.

scholarly journals The rationale for the DREaM: Developing Research Excellence and Methods Project

2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (110) ◽  
pp. 43-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Hall ◽  
Stephanie Kenna ◽  
Charles Oppenheim
Keyword(s):  
Research Council ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Research Excellence ◽  
The Uk

The article describes the background to the development of the DREaM project, which is aimed at expanding the range of skills of UK-based researchers in the LIS field, and at developing a network of active researchers, both in academia and amongst LIS practitioners. The project, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council involves two major conferences and a number of workshops throughout the UK starting in July 2011. Details of the events, and how the project will be evaluated, are provided.

Deliberations and Predispositions

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Herbert
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Final Approval ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Standing Committee ◽  
Higher Education Act ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Education Act

This chapter discusses deliberations and predispositions that were made before the final approval of the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Council/Board. After the second reading of the Higher Education Bill, the AHRB and the Bill was subjected to a more detailed review. Between February and March, fifteen sittings of the Standing Committee H were conducted to examine the proposal and the legislation clause by clause. Whilst the head of the committee, Alan Johnson declared a seemingly unanimous support for the Bill as no demonstrations against the arts and humanities aspect of the Bill occurred. Many of the members of the committee averted that they needed time to consider and scrutinize every aspect of the bill. In the House of Lords the Bill was warmly welcomed. However, as with the House of Commons and the Standing Committee, some of the aspects of the Bill were met by antagonism. The most serious opposition against the Bill was against Part 1 of the Higher Education Bill which expressed that devolved administrations can perform arts and humanities research on their own. After much deliberation and considerations, on the evening of July 1, 2004, the Higher Education Bill received Royal Assent and was considered as the Higher Education Act.

‘If we Can’t Have a Conversation with our Past, then What will be Our Future?’: HIV/AIDS, Queer Generationalism, and Utopian Performatives in Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (265) ◽  
pp. 100-121
Author(s):  
Louisa Hann
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Great Work ◽  
New Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Utopian Studies ◽  
Queer Politics ◽  
Angels In America ◽  
Hiv Aids

Abstract As the HIV/AIDS epidemic approaches its fifth decade, and emerging generations of queer-identified youth experience and conceptualize the virus in new ways, questions surrounding the memorialization and historicization of queer history have arisen within the arts. In the domain of theatre in particular, as mainstream revivals of crisis-era plays such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991) proliferate, criticisms have arisen that such revivals feed into a narrative of the so-called ‘AIDS nostalgia’, pushing the idea that HIV/AIDS is a thing of the past and ignoring the ways in which the virus continues to shape individual social and sexual experiences. Recently, however, new plays such as Jonathan Harvey’s Canary (2010), the GHP Collective’s The Gay Heritage Project (2013), and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018) have explicitly addressed this issue, conceptualizing a revised queer politics of HIV/AIDS that transcends Angels’ famous call for ‘The Great Work’ to begin. This article explores how The Inheritance in particular problematizes ‘AIDS nostalgia’ and configures novel approaches to the politics of HIV/AIDS in the twenty-first century. Alongside scholarship within the field of queer utopian studies such as José Estaban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009) and Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance (2005), it analyses the ways in which Lopez’s play employs utopian performatives to move towards a new politics of queer heritage.

The Academic Book of the Future

LOGOS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 80-90
Author(s):  
Samantha Rayner
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Research Council ◽  
British Library ◽  
Morte Darthur ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Le Morte Darthur ◽  
Future Project

This paper explores the contexts in which the academic books of the future in the arts and humanities (A&H) are being shaped, with the aim of demonstrating how crucial it is that the communities of practice that produce those books continue to work together to build better bridges of understanding and collaboration. There is particular reference to the Arts and Humanities Research Council/ British Library Academic Book of the Future Project (2014–2017) and to a case study of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.

scholarly journals Performance as Counter-memory:

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-107
Author(s):  
Zane Radzobe
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Documentary Theatre ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Dominant Discourses ◽  
Twenty First Century

The article introduces the topic of Latvian documentary theatre of the second decade of the twenty-first century using Michael Foucault’s concept of counter-memory. The article analyses a series of performances by artists of the Latvian post-Soviet and post-memory generation dealing with history and memory discourses and highlights the main strategies of use of countermemory discourses in the creation of national, cultural, and individual identities; emphasizing memory as a construct and highlighting strategies of its creation and maintenance; emphasizing the oppressive nature of dominant-discourses; a disassociation with the past and memory, both cultural and individual.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document