Performing Landscapes: Mountains, Ruins, Ice
This event has passed
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, and the University of Glasgow
Professor Dee Heddon and Professor Sally Mackey invite you to a virtual Panel Discussion: Performing Landscapes: Mountains, Ruins, Ice.
Nearly two decades ago, theatre scholar Una Chaudhuri proclaimed that ‘On the theoretical scene of landscape, the theater makes a belated entrance’ (2002, 11). The context for Chaudhuri’s criticism was the critical territory of landscape studies, which she perceived as lively, heated and cross-disciplinary. However, theatre criticism was notably absent from the scene; an absence that Chaudhuri and Eleanor Fuchs sought to address through their ground-breaking edited collection, Land/Scape/Theater (2002). Bringing theatre and performance into the landscape debate, their collection of essays explored landscapes represented in theatre as backdrops, metaphors, allegories, as well as material referents, alongside explorations of the relationship between form and landscape – landscape dramaturgy and landscape aesthetics. More recent encounters with ‘landscape’ have extended the discussion again, this time through pressing debates engaging with environmentalism and climate crises. These discussions challenge not only representational theory and analysis through attention to the phenomenological, affective, kinaesthetic, haptic, audile, somatic, sensuous and material, but also interrogate the conjunctions, separations and weavings of nature-culture and human-nature relations, moving towards post-human and post-anthropocene critical positioning.
In this panel discussion, which chimes with the new series from Palgrave Macmillan, Performing Landscapes (series editors Dee Heddon and Sally Mackey), we focus on three landscape environments - mountains, ruins and ice - to explore, variously:
- how performance scholars might approach, encounter and engage landscapes;
- how particular landscapes ‘perform’;
- how we humans act within landscapes and how specific landscapes are ‘performed’ through theatrical performance;
- the roles and functions that particular landscapes have in performance and the tropes which emerge;
- the influence of landscape performances on our knowledges of, and encounters and practices with, the environment.
Speakers
- Professor Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds), author of Performing Mountains (Palgrave 2020)
- Dr Simon Murray (University of Glasgow), author of Performing Ruins (Palgrave 2020)
- Dr Carolyn Philpott, Professor Elizabeth Leane (University of Tasmania), co-editors (with Professor Matt Delbridge) of Performing Ice (Palgrave 2020)
Respondent
- Professor Una Chaudhuri (New York University)
Biogs
Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement. She is a pioneer in the fields of eco-theatre and Animal Studies. Her recent publications include Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (co-edited with Holly Hughes) The Ecocide Project: Research Theatre and Climate Change (co-authored with Shonni Enelow), and The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooësis and Performance. Chaudhuri participates in collaborative creative projects, including the multi-platform intervention entitled Dear Climate, and is a founding member of CLIMATE LENS.
Elizabeth Leane is Professor of English and Associate Dean Research in the College of Arts, Law and Education, University of Tasmania. She is Arts and Culture editor of The Polar Journal and a past recipient of an Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship. She has published three monographs, most recently South Pole: Nature and Culture (2016), as well as articles in a wide range of journals, including Performance Research, New Theatre Quarterly and Theatre Notebook. Performing Ice is her fourth co-edited collection.
Simon Murray teaches contemporary theatre and performance at the University of Glasgow. He has a background in sociology and was a professional performer and theatre maker between 1985 and 1996. Before arriving in Glasgow in 2008 he was Director of Theatre at Dartington College of Arts. He has published widely on Jacques Lecoq, Physical Theatres, collaboration, lightness and WG Sebald. His book, Performing Ruins, was published by Palgrave in August 2020.
Carolyn Philpott is Senior Lecturer in Musicology and Associate Head – Research at the University of Tasmania’s School of Creative Arts and Media, as well as Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart, Australia. She has published widely on music and place in the fields of musicology and Antarctic studies, including in The Musical Quarterly, Musicology Australia, Popular Music, Organised Sound, The Polar Journal and Polar Record. In the last couple of years, she has published a monograph on the music of Australian composer Malcolm Williamson with Lyrebird Press (University of Melbourne) and has been the lead editor of the volume Performing Ice, co-edited with Elizabeth Leane (UTAS) and Matt Delbridge (Deakin University) and published in Palgrave Macmillan’s Performing Landscapes series in September 2020.
Jonathan Pitches is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Head of the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. He specialises in the study of performer training, environmental performance and blended learning. He is founding co-editor of the journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training and has published several books in this area including Vsevolod Meyerhold (2003/18), Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (2006/9), Russians in Britain (2012) and Stanislavsky in the World (with Dr Stefan Aquilina 2017). He is sole editor of Great Stage Directors Vol 3: Komisarjevsky, Copeau, Guthrie (2018) and author of Performing Mountains (Palgrave 2020), supported by the AHRC.