Category: Researchers

Photo Special: The Great Yiddish Parade – Part of Being Human Festival

Our very own Dr Nadia Valman was a key organiser of the ‘The Great Yiddish Parade’, which took place on 19 November 2017.

The event was a re-enactment of an 1889 protest march by Jewish immigrants in Victorian Whitechapel. That year, strikes were erupting all over the East End, and demonstrators demanded better conditions and wages for all East End workers. 

The Great Yiddish Parade of 1889 used the medium of music, song and oratory to build solidarity and attract others to their cause. Their protest songs, in Yiddish — the language of Jewish immigrants — were recreated by a band of klezmer musicians and singers. At Mile End Waste, a strip of green space in Whitechapel where political rallies were held in the nineteenth century, speakers addressed the audience of participants and locals with oratory taken from East End political activists. In the photos below see east London’s forgotten heritage of protest being brought to life in poetry and song.

Thanks to the Being Human festival of the Humanties and QMUL Centre for Public Engagement. Photographs by Ralph Hodgson.

 

Nadia Valman and Julie Begum in Aldgate

Singer Brendan McGeever with the Great Yiddish Parade song sheet

Vivi Lachs and Julie Begum in Whitechapel

Lucie Glasheen gives song sheets to passersby

The parade passes Aldgate East station

The parade at Middlesex Street

Watching the parade in Whitechapel High Street

Passersby read the song sheet

A shopkeeper watches as the parade passes

Musical director Sarha Moore and musicians

The parade in Whitechapel

Watching the parade in Whitechapel Road

The parade approaches Mile End Waste

Oratory by the statue of William Booth, Mile End Waste

Carrie Hamilton as anarchist orator Emma Goldman

Julie Begum as investigative journalist Olive Christian Malvery

Rabbi Janet Burden of Ealing Liberal Synagogue

Organisers Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs at Mile End Waste

Applications for Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship Scheme Open for 2018

Early career researchers seeking support for their application to the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship scheme are invited to get in contact with us from now [deadline 12 noon, 12 January 2018].

The School of English and Drama invites early career researchers seeking support for their application to the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship Scheme to submit to us:

  • An outline research proposal including
    • title
    • abstract (250 words)
    • statement of past and current research (250 words)
    • a two-page (A4) project outline
  • Up to one page of major publications (organised as published, submitted, and in preparation)
  • An academic CV of not more than 2 pages to demonstrate your research stature.

Please send the above to Dr Huw Marsh, Research Manager, at: sed-research@qmul.ac.uk by no later than 12 noon on Friday 12 January 2018.

Full scheme details including eligibility criteria can be found on the Leverhulme Trust’s website: https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/funding/grant-schemes/early-career-fellowships

All outline proposals will be considered by a School committee and applicants will be notified of the shortlisting outcome in the week of Monday 22 January 2018. Shortlisted candidates will be put forward for approval by the Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty Executive, who will report their decisions by early February. The final deadline for submission of approved applications is 1 March by 4pm.

The School recommends that applicants make clear the following in applications (CVs and proposals):

  • the strength of your academic record (e.g. classifications, awards, time taken to complete your PhD, etc.)
  • the strength of your research record (e.g. publications; presentations; research leadership; if you make practice as research, indicate how it is research; etc.)
  • what research you will publish/disseminate through the fellowship
  • the importance of doing your fellowship in the School of English and Drama at QMUL (e.g. synergies with staff and research centres)
  • your proposal’s importance, originality, methods, critical contexts, resources, structure and outputs.

People’s Palace Projects – October Events

Efêmera play – Southwark Playhouse

In Brazil and the UK violence against women and girls is on the rise; recent research suggests that the majority of Brazilian migrant women have experienced gender-based violence. Efêmera introduces us to two women with a story to tell. They may have the courage to share it with you, they may not. A powerful and delicate piece about how to hold on when life falls apart.

Based on interviews conducted by researchers from the Department of Geography at King’s College London (and previously at Queen Mary University of London), this is a verbatim piece with a twist. It will be performed in London as part of the 10th anniversary of CASA Festival at the Southwark Playhouse and in Rio de Janeiro.

The research is directed by Professor Cathy McIlwaine and co-directed by Professor Paul Heritage in partnership with People’s Palace Projects and the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS) and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the Newton Fund. You can read further about the research here.

Efêmera will be presented as a scratch performance as part of CASA Festival 2017.

Tickets can be bought at Southwark Playhouse website.

Cast & creative team: Gaël Le Cornec, Angie Peña Arenas and Rosie MacPherson

Efemera (as part of Casa Festival 2017)
9.30pm on Thursday and Friday 5th and 6th October 20175pm on Saturday 7th October 2017.

Southwark Playhouse, 77-85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD

Note: There will be a discussion panel hosted by Cathy Mcllwaine after the 5pm showing on the 7th.

 

No Feedback free public performances

No Feedback is a theatrical event highlighting the gentle pull of discrimination that tears at the fabric of everyday life. Offering an insight into human nature, it is set against the backdrop of catastrophes both historic and contemporary. By taking Genocide Watch’s ground-breaking research as the backbone of the production, No Feedback intelligently and sensitively asks audiences to consider their own place on the spectrum of how we relate to one another.

Come and play your part in this new kind of theatre experience at two public performances happening in October. Booking is essential.

This project is produced in partnership between People’s Palace Projects and No Feedback Theatre Company.

17th October , 7.30pm –  Mulberry and Bigland Green Centre

15 Richard Street

Commercial Road

London

E1 2JP

 

Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/no-feedback-performance-at-mulberry-and-bigland-green-centre-tickets-37121864496

 

24th October, 7pm – Studio 3 Arts Boundary Road

Barking

London

IG11 7JR

 

Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/no-feedback-performance-at-studio-3-arts-tickets-38140374888?aff=erelpanelorg

 

Discussion Exploring Cultural Value in the Creative Economy

 

Peoples Palace Projects will be hosting a research discussion exploring cultural value and the creative economy as part of the AHRC-funded Relative Values project. It will be an opportunity to meet Prof. Leandro Valiati, one of Brazil’s leading cultural economists, who takes up a post as Visiting Professor in the Economy of Culture at QMUL from beginning of December.

 

Monday, October 30th, 10.00, at Queen Mary University Mile End Campus, Bancroft Building, room 3.40. 

Please reserve your place here. 

 

The conversation will focus on Relative Values, an AHRC-funded research project led by Prof. Paul Heritage in partnership with Prof. Valiati. Bringing together academic and non-academic partners, the research asks how we can measure and strengthen practices and policies that maximise the social and economic value of the arts to individuals and society, particularly in peripheral urban environments. The project aims to contribute to understandings about cultural value and to enable the four participating UK and Brazilian arts organisations to collaborate on testing effective ways to show how the arts can be incubators for creative economy initiatives that develop resilient, low-stress communities.

 

About Professor Valiati

Leandro Valiati has been responsible for setting up research Observatories of the Creative Economy across five different regions in Brazil, developing a series of indicators on a range of economic development and social welfare criteria. His experience includes teaching, consultancy and research in Economy of Culture in national and international institutions, including Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, UNESCO, Brazil’s Economics and Statistics Foundation, the Organisation of Ibero-American States (OEI)  and the University of Valencia in Spain. Leandro is the leading researcher of the Creative and Cultural Economy Study Centre at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and member of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).  He is collaborating with Paul Heritage at People’s Palace Projects on two current research projects.

 

From 1 December 2017, Leandro will take up an Honorary Visiting Professorship at Queen Mary University of London for 2 years, in addition to honorary posts at the Sorbonne and other European institutions.

 

Meet our new teaching staff: Mojisola Adebayo, Zara Dinnen, Patrick Flanery, Ella Finer, Charlotta Salmi and David Schalwyk

We are delighted to welcome our new teaching staff starting this semester!

We asked them for a quick introduction to their work and expertise, feast on the results below…

Mojisola Adebayo – Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance

I’m a London born performer, playwright, director, producer, facilitator and teacher. I specialise in Theatre of the Oppressed and hold an MA in Physical Theatre. I have worked internationally in theatre, television and radio for over twenty-five years, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. My work has ranged from being an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company to co-founding VIDYA, a slum-dweller’s theatre company in Ahmedabad, India.

My theatre productions include Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (Lyric Hammersmith), Muhammad Ali and Me (Ovalhouse) and I Stand Corrected (Artscape, Cape Town). Publications include Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One (Oberon), 48 Minutes for Palestine in Theatre in Pieces (Methuen) and the co-written Theatre for Development Handbook (Pan). My (QMUL) PhD thesis is entitled Afriquia Theatre: Creating Black Queer Ubuntu Through Performance.

I am currently compiling Plays Two and working on her next production, STARS, a play, installation and club night with community based intergenerational workshops with women and girls that explores sex and space travel, orgasm and outer space, the pleasure and power of female sexuality. I am looking forward to working creatively and critically with QMUL to reflect and include the multiple identities of London, in every way. See www.mojisolaadebayo.com for more.

 

Zara Dinnen – Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature

I’m joining QMUL having spent four years lecturing at University of Birmingham. Whilst I was there I was working with great colleagues to develop our teaching and research into contemporary literature and culture, and I’m excited to do more of that work here at QMUL with new great colleagues. My own research is about digital media. I am interested in how literature and popular culture tell stories of everyday life lived with new technologies, and how those stories shape the ways we live our digital lives. I write about literature, film, TV, comics, and teach with these different media too. At QMUL I am looking forward to term starting, to new teaching and new spaces and new people.

I am currently watching: all of Netflix.

I am currently reading: Paper Girls vol.3 and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

 

Patrick Flanery – Professor of Creative Writing

In the past five years, I have published three novels, the most recent of which, I Am No One, appeared in 2016. I grew up in the U.S., in California and Nebraska and New York, but have lived in the U.K. for the past sixteen years, having come to do a masters and doctorate in English at Oxford. My first degree, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and Television Production, was from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Before joining Queen Mary, I spent three years as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Reading and several years before that I was a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, where I taught Contemporary and Modern Literature and Literary Theory.

At QM, I look forward to building the SED’s Creative Writing pathway into a rich and varied programme that will give students wide latitude to experiment with different kinds of writing over the course of their degree. The guiding principle for the pathway will be to foster a space in which experimentation is valued, and engagement with the world around us—in Mile End, in the East End, in London, in Britain, in Europe more broadly—is celebrated.

 

Ella Finer – Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance

I’m looking forward to being a part of this extraordinary department and school for the next year: collaborating on, discussing and sharing research, as well as teaching on modules I wish I had taken as an undergraduate. I was an undergraduate myself in Glasgow, where I also did an MPhil researching the gendering of photographic space, resulting in turning a theatre into a camera obscura, a camera and a dark room in succession. I moved back to London to study at Roehampton for a PhD researching materialities of the female voice in performance.

I make work with sound and have installed/performed this work in galleries (including Bloomberg Space, Raven Row, Focal Point, Ikon, Baltic 39) and as part of symposia of my own and others making. My interest in archival practices and “caring for the continuous” has resulted in an event curated for the upcoming British Library’s Season of Sound. Selector Responder: Sounding out the Archives will take place on December 8th with speakers including David Toop, Larry Archiampong, Holly Pester and Nina Power. I look forward to meeting more of you in classrooms and corridors and all best wishes for the new year.

 

Charlotta Salmi – Lecturer in English

I’m the new lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literature. I’ve just finished a 3 year British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham, working on violence, advocacy and protest in graphic narratives from around the globe.

In addition to my work on comics, I am finishing a book on borders and conflict in literature from partition areas.

Before starting my postdoc I held a temporary lectureship at QM and I’m delighted to be back in the department!

 

David Schalwyk – Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Centre for Global Shakespeare at QMUL

I am Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Centre for Global Shakespeare at QMUL.  I was formerly Academic Director of Global Shakespeare at QMUL and the University of Warwick.  Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly, and  before that Professor of English and Deputy Dean at the university of Cape Town. I have published some 150 essays and chapters in books, and my monographs include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge, 2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (Delaware, 2004), Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge, 2008), Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (Arden Shakespeare, 2013), The Word Against the World: The Bakhtin Circle (Skene, 2016). My latest monograph, Shakespeare, Love and Language is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2017.  My translation of Karel Schoeman’s Afrikaans novel, ‘n Ander Land (Another Country) will be published in a new edition in 2018.

I am interested in Shakespeare’s afterlives across the world, love and service in Shakespeare, and literary theory and philosophy, especially the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Stanley Cavell and the theory and history of emotion.  I also have an interest in South African prison writing.

Since I have been at Queen Mary for three years already, having moved into SED this year from Global Shakespeare, I’m looking forward to working in the strong academic and research community that constitutes SED and working with a range of students.

 

 

Queen Mary at Edinburgh Festivals 2017

This year we’re delighted to see so many of our students and friends up at the world’s biggest arts festival.

QMTC

This year Queen Mary Theatre Company is taking 4 shows up to Edinburgh Fringe for 2017 until 26 August 2017.

  • Dead Men Tell No Tale: Join Captain Dreadfist and his crew as they attempt to awaken the mighty Titan of the Depths from his slumber.
  • Space Dogs The true story of Russian stray dogs, Strelka and Belka, lifts off in this historical comedy-drama chronicling the Space Race during the Cold War.
  • WAGGO The bizarre high-school experience no-one can relate to…WAGGO is an energetic, absurd, coming-of-age comedy.
  • Givin’ It Some ‘Givin’ It Some’ is a fun, fast-paced, dirty, edgy, enlightening insight into the taboos of sex – today.

More info here

Students, Alumni, Staff and Friends

  • Figs in Wigs are back with their show Often Onstage.
  • Elf Lyons is up with her wonderfully weird show Swan.
  • Sh*t Theatre are at the festival celebrating Dolly Parton in their latest piece.
  • Jerry Brotton talks about the links between England and the Islamic world at Edinburgh Book Festival.
  • Wardrobe Ensemble present their new show about education.

Meet our Honorary Graduate and Fellows 2017: Peggy Shaw, Kazi Ruksana Begum, Virginia Simpson and Daljit Nagra

At graduation we honour the work of people in our field with Honorary Degrees and Fellowships.

This year there were a record four people given these honours:

Kazi Ruksana Begum – Fellowship

Kazi Ruksana Begum is the producer of A Season of Bangla Drama, a dazzling festival of Bengali culture. Working with QMUL she has helped the university connect with the local Bengali community and form partnerships with students, researchers, policymakers and artists.

Peggy Shaw – The award of Doctor of Letters (DLitt)

New York born Peggy Shaw (Actor, writer and producer) is one of the most important feminist and lesbian perfomance makers of the 20th and 21st centuries. She and Lois Weaver (QMUL) have made work together since the 1970s including the WOW (Women One World) festival and with their theatre company Split Britces.

Virginia Simpson – Fellowship

Virginia (Gini) Simpson is an arts strategist who hot houses new artists through initiatives such as ‘The Sick of the Fringe’. She was Head of Learning and Participation at the Barbican, Head of Media Arts at SPACE in Hackney and has been a pioneer in bringing new-media arts to the forefront of the creative industries.

Daljit Nagra – Fellowship

Daljit is one of contemporary Britain’s most successful, well-known, and critically acclaimed poets. His fourth collection British Library, was published by Faber and Faber in 2017.

See some of Daljit’s work with QMUL’s English department here

 

Find out more about the School on our website here

Refuge/e art project at M.I.A.’s Meltdown at Southbank Centre in June 2017

I’m in the second year of my PhD at Queen Mary’s SED and a Teaching Associate. I have been balancing my PhD work on portraiture and radicalism with researching and creating project refuge/e which has so far toured to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Millennium Gallery in Sheffield, BALTIC centre for contemporary art.

Next week the installation is coming to London’s Southbank where it will be part of M.I.A.’s Meltdown Festival from 13-18 June.

The project originated in Lebanon. I was driving with my partner from the mountains in the north back to Beirut. We saw encampment after encampment of makeshift Syrian refugee shelters stretching across the Bekaa Valley. In Lebanon, 1 in 4 people is a refugee. This recent arrival of Syrians has added to the refugee communities of Palestinians, Iraqi and Afghani refugees to which the country already host. It was like nothing I had ever seen. Many of these structures had been standing for five years. They were built by the families which lived in them.

The shelters, barrikea, were made from ramshackle materials, wood and plastic sheeting provided by UNHCR as well as found items to improve and weatherproof the structure: advertising boards, corrugated iron, at least ten tyres to hold down the plastic on the roof. Between 8 to 14 people lived in a 7m x 4m space. The land the each shelter stood on was rented for around $100 a month. The architecture of the shelters tells us about the political situation in Lebanon and the social and economic pressures the whole county is under. The government’s policy is to make life sufficiently uncomfortable that Syrians will not be able to stay long term. The kit that Syrians are given on arrival is flimsy and short-term, designed to allow them to build themselves a shelter that will last a year or two at the most. It reminds you of the £55 per week asylum-seekers in the UK are expected to live on – as it is impossible to live on that with dignity, it is supposed to be a sop to domestic voters and to put people off coming if possible.

We wanted to show people in the UK what is going on in Lebanon, to counter the myth that refugees could just stay in their neighbouring countries. refuge/e is a reconstruction of one of these typical Syrian refugee shelters found in Lebanon. With funding from Art Fund and The British Council, we planned with UNHCR Lebanon an extensive research and material gathering trip in November 2016.  We learned first-hand how people coped with this challenge, then shipped a shelter kit and local materials back to the UK. We then crafted sculptures in plaster and brass of  of possessions found in these homes. As you walk around the installation you can listen to refugees speaking about their daily experiences of living for years in tents or shells of buildings, struggling for normality in displacement. Hassan and Birra, two young men resettled to Sheffield from Syria and Ethiopia respectively, will be in the installation everyday acting as our guides and experts by experience.

Each day there are live link ups to emerging refugee DJs from around the world at 18.30 most evenings and a talk on the role technology has played in the refugee crisis. There will be Iftar each evening too.

More details can be found at www.projectrefugee.co.uk

And you can follow us on twitter @amp_art_uk or on Facebook

Bernard Schwartz and Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes at London Review Bookshop 07.03.17

“I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive”

“The Thought-Fox” encapsulates Alice Oswald’s view that Ted Hughes did not perform the poem as he read, but that “the poem performed him.” Hughes, she thought, was being played by his own music.

This event, organised by Peter Howarth of the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University, London, was devised by Bernard Schwartz, director of the Poetry Center at 92Y in New York, which has been known for its recordings of poets for the past seventy years. Schwartz, a visiting fellow at Queen Mary, had wondered if it would work to have a live evening with a current poet listening and commenting on the recording of a past poet, and hence Alice Oswald was asked to speak about Hughes’ recordings from 1971 and 1986.

The first recording was from 1971 with Hughes introducing and reading “The Thought-Fox” as the first poem he felt was worth keeping. He tells us that he wrote it about two years after his infamous “departure from studies in academic English” when he dreamt that a “burnt fox” warned him that his studies were “killing us.” Two other foxes were also described – one from his childhood and another from a Swedish film. Oswald then talked about how she came to Hughes; as an undergraduate she felt she was, “narrow minded about poetry” but like Hughes she stopped her academic studies and looked for a looser style, but one which still meant that, “every brick” would count. Finding this in Hughes she called it his “compulsory inner music.” He was not a Nature poet in her opinion; rather, by fusing the different foxes, from one of which, who had human hands, the poet created a mythic fox, a metaphorical fox, Hughes was a “preternatural poet.”

“Pibroch” came next, Oswald placing it in a Beckettian world, where there were stones and wind and “A tree [that] struggles to make leaves” reminding us of Waiting for Godot. Redeeming us from this nihilism, Hughes’ “upbeat sound”, the colours of red and black and the “nobility of humans” speak of “the gift of life.” We then heard “Littleblood”, one of the Crow poems, given to Crow by an eskimo. Hughes seems to have brought together disturbing images, but finishes with hope, so after, “Sucking death’s mouldy tits”, comes, “Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.” It felt strange therefore that Oswald did not read at all; it would have been uplifting to hear the voice of the dead, speaking in the living. Hughes’ legacy to us is surely, not only what we have from the past, but what it stirs within us for our lives and literature now and in the future.

“How Water Began to Play” followed where water is mineral, a universal element and not a geographical feature. In a fascinating break from Hughes, there came a reading from the actress Irene Worth, who Schwartz told us appealed to Hughes not to read her any more Crow poems as she found them terrifying. Worth played Phèdre speaking to Theseus in a 1999 recording made in memory of Hughes. Other testimonies followed, first from Peter Brook who said that Hughes had the “ability to reach the active language” and then Derek Walcott who remembered that he had been in Lorca’s house when he had heard that Hughes had died.

Finally we reached the 1986 recording of “October Salmon”. Hughes had explained that when his father was dying, he stayed with him and they would walk in and around the village. The customary walk revealed the fish and through this introduction, the poem becomes yet more powerful in its observation of the great laid low; of the closeness of death, even at birth. One cannot but remember, as you listen, Hughes’ own life, the “Aurora Borealis/Of his April power” comes finally back to his October death and that “epic poise.”

Di Beddow is speaking at the Huddersfield University Ted Hughes Network Symposium in June; she is presenting on the Cambridge of Ted Hughes. Anyone interested in either the Ted Hughes Network, or joining the Ted Hughes Society should contact these links:

https://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchcentres/tedhughes

thetedhughessociety.org

People’s Palace Update: Opportunities and Events in 2017

Rosie Hunter from People’s Palace Project has been in touch with some key projects from People’s Palace Projects an independent arts charity based at Queen Mary University of London

 

Upcoming events in London and Brazil

 

Xingu Artistic Exchange: 10th-24th May 2017

including two seminars in Rio:

  1. 22nd May, Federal University of Rio – Jerry Brotton and Mércio Pereira Gomes – Anthropology and the History of Discovery
  2. 23rd May, Museum of Tomorrow – Indigenous Utopias

Paul Heritage and Jerry Brotton are bringing together an exciting artistic research collaboration between one of the world’s leading companies in digital mediation, artistic preservation and conservation and the Indigenous Kuikuro Association of the Upper Xingu.  Adam Lowe (Factum Arte http://www.factum-arte.com/ind/142/Factum-Arte-Projects ) and a team of specialist artists and technicians will travel with Jerry and Paul to the remote region of Brazil’s Upper Xingu Indigenous Reserve, where PPP’s Associate Artist and internationally-established filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro is based in a small village, 15 hours’ travel from the nearest town.  The team will travel by air, road and river to reach the Ipatse village and will be carrying scanners, sound recording equipment and a drone as well as sensible shoes, insect repellent and substantial paperwork!

In 2015, Takumã undertook a residency in London with PPP that resulted in a short film about London from the perspective of an indigenous visitor http://www.peoplespalaceprojects.org.uk/en/projects/london-as-a-village/.  Now this new collaboration will explore ideas of Utopia and the ways in which we make our worlds, and how new technologies can be exploited in the preservation and passing on of material and immaterial culture.  The project is funded by AHRC under the Newton Fund as part of “Social Change through Creativity”’s follow-on extension for further impact.

The aim of the project

The aim is to build transformative dialogues through digital technologies that enable the Kuikuro people to create 3D maps of their territories and cultures that explore new ways for indigenous peoples to bring the evolving experiences of first millennial ways of life to contemporary debates about Brazilian economic and social development in the third millennium. Lowe will advise representatives of the Xingu peoples on how digital technologies may be used to maximize potential future commercial initiatives without putting their culture at risk.

 

With 1 Voice First Anniversary Event, 5th May 2017

With One Voice

The With One Voice/Uma Só Voz choirs in Rio that PPP set up last year working with Streetwise Opera (and with the support of Gulbenkian Foundation, British Council Brazil and Macquarie Group Foundation) as part of the With One Voice Brazil project will be celebrating their 1st anniversary on 5th May.

Rather excitingly the celebration will take the form of a concert they will give at the iconic Theatro Municipal, the first time in history that homeless people will have been given a platform in this important building. As you can imagine, the choir members are over the moon.

And that’s not all – at the event, Rio City Council Department of Social Development will be publicly pledging their support for the choirs practically and logistically and will also pledge that arts and creativity are important in the support of homeless people.

It is highly significant to have a City Council attaching this kind of value for arts/creativity as part of homelessness support – we’re seeing it emerge in Manchester and elsewhere, and it’s one of With One Voice’s goals to encourage this kind of integrated approach to arts and homelessness support at a local government level.

9th May-9th June: “Designing Respect” exhibition @LSE

Opening: 9th May 7pm, LSE Atrium Gallery, Old Building

http://theatrum-mundi.org/activities/designing-politics-exhibition/

 

PPP worked with Theatrum Mundi to facilitate the project’s 3rd annual competition, in Rio de Janeiro.  The 3rd image in their Gallery is of the Rio project, at the Museum of Tomorrow.

 

2.       Reports on recent events

Scene Change exhibition 26th-28th April, Brazilian Embassy in London, Cockspur Street

Photos here:

Opera inspiring young minds at the Embassy of Brazil in London

This exhibition provided a flavour of some of the world’s favourite operas – Madame Butterfly, La Traviata and Lo Schiavo – through the artistic output of students involved in the cultural exchange programme ‘Scene Change’, run by the British Council and People’s Palace Projects in association with Creative and Cultural Skills.

As part of the project, students from technical colleges in the UK and Brazil embarked on a three year imaginative journey into film-making, costume-design, set-design and marketing, inspired by these three famous operas and have produced a rich collection of work, now on display at the Embassy of Brazil in London, celebrating a successful end of the project.

The exhibition, supported by the British Council and People’s Palace Projects is designed and mounted by a group of Brazilian and British students, supervised by internationally acclaimed designer and art director Gringo Cardia and photographer Ellie Kurttz. Special thanks to Miriã, Valdemar and Ismael, students at Spectaculu – Escola Fábrica de Espetáculos for coming all the way from Rio to help us mount the work, as well as to the Embassy of Brazil in London for hosting the exhibition.

 

Innovation and Co-creation: London – Sao Paulo Conference, 3rd May 2017

3rd May, all day event, Biblioteca Parque Villa Lobos, Pinheiros, São Paulo, Brazil

a collaboration between Creativeworks London, Escola Politécnica-USP and People’s Palace Projects (Queen Mary University of London – QMUL).

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (QMUL)

Innovation and Co-creation: London – Sao Paulo Conference

Creativeworks London São Paulo is a collaboration between Creativeworks London, Escola Politécnica-USP and People’s Palace Projects (Queen Mary University of London – QMUL). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (QMUL)

The aim of this pilot project has been to examine the ecosystem of creative and cultural hubs in São Paulo; and foster collaborations between university researchers and creative and cultural small businesses, organisations, collectives and charities. We wanted to create outcomes of significant value to the innovation ecosystem in Sao Paulo.

 

3.       Project news

QMUL AfroReggae Santander bursaries 2017

 

We will be holding the selection interviews this week for the 2017 QMUL Santander AfroReggae trip bursaries, 6 lucky recipients (QMUL students) will go to Rio de Janeiro to spend a week with AfroReggae in July 2017.

Santander/Afroreggae Grant: Applications now closed!

 

The Verbatim Formula

Maggie Inchley has just had confirmation of a research funding award from AHRC to support 3 years of work on the project.  (total fEC: £249,993)

The upcoming July residency “No Dream Is Too Big” (1-3 July at QMUL) in collaboration with QMUL Widening Participation will support a group of around 8 young people aged 14-18 and with experience of social care to explore drama and life at University.  Social workers or young people who would like details of the opportunity should contact renata.peppl@peoplespalace.org.uk (applications close 20th May).

About the project

The Verbatim Formula is an applied performance research project which is currently working with looked after children and young people. It records the words of participants and shares them through performance. The process is being developed by Dr Sylvan Baker, Dr Maggie Inchley and Dr Sadhvi Dar at Queen Mary University of London’s Drama Department and produced by People’s Palace Projects, in partnership with the Greater London Authority Peer Outreach Team.

We believe that there is a strong case for using applied practice not only in supporting looked after young people in articulating their experiences and in shaping a sense of their own identities, but in order to open meaningful dialogue and listening with adults responsible for their care.

The ultimate aims of the project are:

  • To create spaces where adults working at all levels in the UK social care system engage with children, listen to children’s voices and talk to children about their concerns.
  • Looked after children have happier lives, with better educational and social outcomes.
  • To develop an understanding of the potential of verbatim practice as a research, evaluation and dissemination tool in a children’s social care context.
  • To develop a performative inquiry practice that takes aesthetics as seriously as it does rigour.

Relative Values

Paul Heritage has been successful in a grant application to the AHRC’s Cultural Value Follow-On highlight for a project called “Relative Values” which will work with Battersea Arts Centre, Contact Theatre (Manchester), 2 Brazilian cultural NGOs specialising in socially-engaged arts work, and a Brazilian Economics research centre to produce a toolkit for cultural organisations to map the value they generate in their local communities.  The award is worth a total of £96,729 (fEC).

Call for Papers: Queer Fun at Royal Vauxhall Tavern on 10 June 2017

Queer Fun: an ivory-tower vaudeville from Duckie and QMUL

Royal Vauxhall Tavern

Saturday 10 June 2017, 3-7pm

Fun is a wide-ranging experience that has rarely been taken seriously by the academy or society. This is changing, with the publication of monographs on fun in the fields of sociology (Ben Fincham) and cultural studies (Alan McKee), and the realisation of projects such as Fun Palaces and the British Library’s There Will Be Fun exhibition.

Fun can be a powerful engine for feelings, thoughts and actions with many political and ethical implications. But where does fun sit in relation to queerness? Does queer experience entail exclusion from some kinds of fun and access to others? What might queer fun look or feel like?

This half-day conference aims to explore queer fun at a historic site of queer fun, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Eight-minute presentations by academic researchers, contemporary queer performers and others will be showcased in a format inspired by the Olivier Award-winning C’est Duckie! show. Conference attendees are also welcome at Duckie’s club night at the RVT later that evening.

The event emerges from doctoral research being carried out by Ben Walters under a Collaborative Doctoral Award granted to Queen Mary University of London’s Department of Drama and queer performance collective Duckie. The subject bears directly but far from exclusively on performance studies (particularly socially-turned performance) and queer theory (particularly affect, relationality and futurity).

Questions for consideration might include:

  • Why take fun seriously?
  • What kind of fun is queer fun?
  • How your fun (un)like my fun?
  • What are the politics of fun?
  • Queer fun vs gay fun
  • Is there a time and place for fun?
  • Fun? 😉
  • What happens when the fun ends? (And what if it doesn’t start?)

Relevant subjects might include abjection, affect and relationality; high and low status; temporality and futurity; normativity; care; pleasure; happiness; socially-turned performance; relief, resistance and rehearsal.

We invite proposals for presentations of eight minutes incorporating the first-hand exhibition of an object (or image, sound, gesture, taste or smell) that illustrates the point you would like to make about queer fun. Presentations can be academic in nature, or performance-based, or in other formats. Proposals in formats other than eight-minute presentations will also be considered, particularly ambient or installation-based ideas. PowerPoint presentations (or equivalent) are discouraged.

Proposals of up to 150 words (or audio/video files of up to one minute), along with a brief biography and a picture of your selected object, should be sent to queerfun1@gmail.com by Aprila 14 2017. Please specify any particular technical requirements. Applicants will be informed of decisions by April 21 2017. Please feel free to contact the organiser, Ben Walters, at queerfun1@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Tickets for the event cost £10, which includes entry into that night’s Duckie club night, and are available at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/queer-fun-an-ivory-tower-vaudeville-tickets-32726784694. Successful applicants who aren’t salaried to produce such work or are not in receipt of academic funding will receive a fee of £200. We regret that there is no funding to support travel or accommodation.

Two Projects Led by SED Staff Win Engagement and Enterprise Awards

We were delighted that two projects led by our School staff have won awards at the QMUL Engagement and Enterprise Awards on Tuesday 7 February 2017.

We caught up with Maggie Inchley and Morag Shiach to talk through their award-winning projects.

 

Maggie Inchley gives us insight into The Verbatim Project, which won a Public Engagement Award for Influence:

‘Right now, according to the system, kids have become just another number, another statistic, and it’s not whether a child is being cared for it’s whether they’re being dealt with. And that’s not the same.’

This is part of a testimony given to us by a 14 year-old care experienced girl as part of our applied theatre research project,  The Verbatim Formula.

It’s powerful material, especially when perfomed anonymously to the adults who are responsible for children in care.

Verbatim makes them stop. And listen.

This week , the project – a collaboration with Maggie Inchley, Sylvan Baker, Sadhvi Dar and People’s Palace Projects – won the 2017 Centre for Public Engagement Award for Influence.

We’re thrilled – and hope it helps the project develop further. If you’re studying at QMUL and interested in working with young people or applied theatre do get in touch  with Maggie (m.inchley@qmul.ac.uk). We’ll be running another workshop in the summer.

More information about the project is available here

 

Morag Shiach tells us about the impact of the Creativeworks London project, which won an award for Academic Innovation in Non-Commercial Enterprise:

Since its launch in 2012 Creativeworks London has transformed the landscape of collaboration between arts and humanities researchers and the creative economy in London. Through more than a hundred funded collaborative and co-created research projects and other research activities, and also through partnership in London Creative and Fusion, Creativeworks London has significantly increased the number of small and micro creative businesses working with research institutions in London. It has built capacity for collaboration with the creative economy across a wide range of arts and humanities disciplines, and significantly raised the level of engagement and investment in this activity by partner universities. It has enabled the development of significant new networks that will have a major impact on the future growth and success of the creative economy in London.

Fourteen of the projects supported by CWL have had outputs that are ‘spin outs’, and the range and diversity of innovation and research assets generated by the project is a clear indication of the power of the collaborations it enabled and supported. Other outputs have included new products and services, apps, performances and exhibitions, new business models, evaluation reports, films, software, training in creative skills, policy reports and more than fifty publications.

Recently Creativeworks London has begun working in Brazil, in partnership with People’s Palace Projects. The focus of this work is on the development of creative hubs in the State of Sao Paulo. A volume of essays exploring collaborations supported through Creativeworks London’s creative voucher scheme has recently been published by Palgrave Macmillan: Morag Shiach and Tarek Virani (eds.), Cultural Policy, Innovation, and the Creative Economy: Creative Collaborations in Arts and Humanities Research (2017).

SED Drama Professor Jen Harvie Launches New Theatre Podcast

We’re excited to see that Jen Harvie has launched her new podcast series, which explores contemporary arts and culture with the people who make it.

The first episode which you can listen to below is with Sh!t Theatre (QMUL graduates too!) who are currently performing at Soho Theatre until 11 February.

Topics covered in the podcast range from from love to death, gentrification, friendship, money, and cardboard comets.

Find out more about Jen Harvie
Find out more about Sh!t Theatre

Sounding Victorian: Swinburne, Tennyson, salons and the musical play of childhood

Digital project brings together research from Queen Mary, Saint Louis University, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, the University of Illinois, Indiana University East, and the University of Cambridge

As I began my research last year into the relationship between the poetry of Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) and the operas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), I became aware that the British Library held a number of musical settings of Swinburne’s verse. Very little research had been done on his affinity with Victorian and Edwardian composers – despite being thought of as one of the most musical of poets – and so, with this in mind, I started to look through whatever was available. The first items, some of the earliest musical settings from the 1860s (Swinburne’s first, notorious collection, Poems and Ballads, was published in 1866), excited my interest. I called up more, and soon these few pieces of music had turned into well over a hundred and much of it displayed a range and quality that far surpassed my expectations.

 

The resulting catalogue (which is still growing, song by song) now potentially charts a different reception history for Swinburne’s verse (well into the 1920s and beyond). It suggests not only an extraordinary artistic enthusiasm for Swinburne’s poems as music but also has implications for an analysis of Swinburne’s wider cultural impact. The material is rich and varied, from simple domestic piano and voice settings to unaccompanied part-songs, theatre songs, incidental music (for Swinburne’s plays), cantatas and orchestral extravaganzas. There are very well-known names amongst the catalogue, such as Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry, and Arthur Sullivan. But there are also many little-known figures who deserve far greater attention, such as Adela Maddison (1862-1929), who adapted Swinburne eight times, including an elemental and boundary-shaking version of his ‘Triumph of Time’ (available on my website here).

 

So that the music can be heard, I have been transcribing pieces from the original scores into notation software. In doing so, the effect has been revelatory. There is a sense, as a piece takes shape, of bringing back the dead. A good example is this rendition of ‘The Hounds of Spring’ from the 1906 production of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (1865) at the Crystal Palace or this version (apparently the Victorian equivalent of a ‘hit song’) of ‘The Oblation’, by the bizarre Theophilus Marzials, who (it is claimed) also wrote some of the worst poetry ever published.

 

My work is now to become part of the new Sounding Victorian consortium – an initiative of Phyllis Weliver of Saint Louis University – which will be a group of digital projects that create an experiential way of exploring archives that document sound (music and literature) in nineteenth-century Britain. My own website will change and form Sounding Swinburne and sit alongside Sounding the Salon (which will investigate the Victorian salon as an alternative musical space, with historically-informed performances and archival texts), Sounding Childhood (studying the sound of children’s play through recreational songs, religious pieces and hymns), and the well-known Sounding Tennyson. This site currently showcases sonic and textual versions of Tennyson’s poetry, including the first recordings of Emily Tennyson’s piano and vocal settings of ‘Break, Break, Break’, made in the drawing room at the Tennysons’ restored home, Farringford, using Queen Victoria’s piano.

 

All the groups under the Sounding Victorian banner will eventually use the ind ustry standard for machine-readable music (Music Encoding Initiative). Sounding Tennyson is already the first project worldwide to add sound to an International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a standard that will also be extended to all members of the consortium. As the Sounding Victorian website states, each of the projects will be freely available, allow for concordance searching, bring together items found from scattered archives, alongside short, scholarly essays to situate the material, and bybuilding digital tools, help students, scholars and the public engage with the material, whether or not they read music.

 

It is, to say the least, an exciting time for my research. If you have a moment, please take a look at the current page for the Sounding Victorian site, which will give a strong sense of what the project will offer, both within its interdisciplinary field, and as an example of the potential of digital humanities.

 

For more information about the topics covered in this article please visit:

verseandmusic.com

soundingvictorian.org

 

SED explores the new Queen Mary Graduate Centre!

Our roving reporters Jenny Gault (Director of Administration) and Hari Marini (Student Administrator: Research Student Support) have been to explore the new Graduate Centre. The seven-storey building includes 7,700 square metres of new learning and teaching space.

Here’s a quick collage of what they found:

Untitled design (13)

Clockwise from top left:
  1. Jenny outside the front of the new graduate centre.
  2. Hari in her favourite new room the Debating Chamber.
  3. Jenny taking pictures of the grassy roof and wooden roof terrace.
  4. ‘Pretty in Purple’ chairs in the postgraduate common room.

 

We spotted some more lovely pictures of the new building by our student Adam on Twitter:

Here’s another lovely one at dusk of the view from the Graduate Centre:

‘Flights of Oriental Fancy’ by Matthew Mauger

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A print only a few inches wide depicts a man wearing a loose flowing garment and a pointed hat. He reclines against a stone pediment, apparently engaged in romantic conversation with a similarly exotically dressed woman, who holds a fan in her right hand and – like the man – a cup in her left. On the table between them rests an oval-shaped urn. To the right, a labourer waters a bush, whilst on the left – against a background of distant mountains – a many-storied pagoda rises.

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A second print offers a slightly disturbing image of a large insect, with leaf-like wings, crawling across a landscape of rolling hills, with some large chests below bearing markings representing Chinese writing.

 

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A third features an elaborate frame in which are embedded two similar chests, another man in flowing robes and pointed hat, and a cylindrical container marked ‘Finest Plain Green Tea’. The frame wraps around text naming the business of James Randall, who traded at ‘the Golden Lyon on the West Side of Charing Cross’ in the 1770s, and who ‘sells all sorts of fine teas, coffee, and chocolate at the lowest Prices’. Indeed, all three of these engraved designs are eighteenth-century advertisements for London-based grocers selling tea from China.

 

They are ‘trade cards’, typical of the exquisitely illustrated advertisements circulated by metropolitan retailers, many thousand of which survive thanks to the obsessions of collectors such as Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818) and furniture magnate Ambrose Heal (1872-1959), and now housed in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. The mass-printing associated with the newspaper press in the nineteenth century could not accommodate designs of such intricacy, meaning that these beautiful eighteenth century survivals can be seen as an early high-watermark in advertising design, that arguably was not to be seen again until the late twentieth century.

 

Largely dismissed in academic study for much of the twentieth century, the awakening interest in eighteenth century consumer society in recent decades has brought new attention to these unique archives. I have identified over 300 unique cards advertising businesses selling tea, dating from the period 1730-1830. My particular interest here lies in the window these trade cards offer into how eighteenth century consumers encountered tea, a dried leaf which was delivered to London wharves – many thousands of tons a year – via the astonishing mechanics of an international trade overseen by the East India Company. What might these advertisements tell us about the ways in which British consumers were imagined to understand the distant land in which their tea had been harvested and prepared for sale? How do they script the eighteenth-century buyer’s encounter with tea? The idea that I’m exploring here is that these trade cards might be understood as an early site of cultural encounter between Britain and China, distorted through the fabricating lens of product promotion and endorsement… though no less interesting, of course, as a result.

 

Read more on our tea blog or get a copy of our book available at all good bookshops: Empire of Tea: the Asian Leaf that Conquered the World, with Markman Ellis and Richard Coulton

 

All images rights reserved by British Library.