Special SCA postgraduate seminar

The School of Creative Arts is very pleased to announce a unique opportunity for postgraduates to hear respected international scholars Elaine Aston, Geraldine Harris and Birgit Haas.

Monday 18th September 11 – 1pm
Venue: Foundation Life Members Room, SGS
Please RSVP to alyson@unimelb.edu.au

Women's Writing for Performance Process and Practice.

Elaine Aston

Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, UK. She has published extensively on feminist theatre and performance. Her major works include An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1997) and Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003).  With Gerry Harris she leads the AHRC funded research project on ‘Women’s Writing for Performance’.
Elaine Aston will start as associate editor of the official IFTR Journal
this Fall.  She will serve a three-year term as associate and then serve
three years as senior editor.

Geraldine Harris

Geraldine Harris is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University.  She has published widely on female performance and performativity including Staging Femininities (1999). Her most recent book Beyond Representation focuses on the politics and aesthetics of television drama. Dr Harris also works as a devisor, writer, director and adapter.

Methodology in theatre research

Birgit Haas

Dr Birgit Haas is an internationally recognised Germanicist and a leading scholar in the field of German and English-language German Theatre Studies. Dr Haas has held a number of distinguished appointments including as a DAAD Lecturer at the Universities of Keele and Bristol from 1999-2004, as Lecturer at the Germanistische Seminar at the University of Heidelberg, as well as her present appointment at the University of Exeter. She completed her doctorate on ‘The Theatre of George Tabori,’ which was published by Peter Lang in 2000.
Major publications include: The Theatre of George Tabori (2000), Modern German Political Drama 1980-2000 ( 2003), German Drama and 1989 (2004),  The Theatre of Dea Loher (2006). As editor: Power – Performance, Performativity and Political Theatre since 1990 (2005); forth. (ed): The Postfeminist Discourse.

Further information on the Women’s Writing for Performance Project Lancaster University, UK

Over the last three years this project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has initiated a networked series of workshops and events led by contemporary artists and performance practitioners, including comedian, author, actress, and radio personality Jenny Éclair; performance storyteller and film and television performer Vayu Naidu; stage and television writer, poet and novelist Jackie Kay; award winning performance company Split Britches; writer for theatre, television and radio Sarah Daniels; performance company Curious; and playwright Rebecca Prichard.

The aim has been to investigate how women ‘write’ themselves into the performance frame, through text and other ‘vocabularies’, such as body, space, technology. The two main research questions have been:

• What strategies are employed by women in their writing processes?
• What are the implications of these strategies for the contestation of gender representation in performance practice?

Further information can be found on the project website at:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/theatre/womenwriting/