Theatre & Performance Studies News
In Memoriam - Professor Jim Davis
It is with a very heavy heart that we write to let you know that Professor Jim Davis passed away on Saturday 4th November following a stroke. Everyone who had the pleasure of encountering Jim will appreciate that this is a huge loss for his family, friends, colleagues, collaborators and the wider research community. He was a fantastic scholar and unwavering champion for the discipline and theatre historiography. He was such an important part of the Theatre and Performance family at the University of Warwick and will be missed for his leadership, mentorship, friendship and unfailing sense of fun and mischief.
Jim Davis joined Warwick in 2004 as Head of Department (2004-2009) after eighteen years teaching Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he was latterly Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance. In Australia he was also President of the Australasian Drama Studies Association and member of the Board of Studies of the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Prior to leaving for Australia he spent ten years teaching in London at what is now Roehampton University. He co-organised many conferences including for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) in New South Wales and at Warwick. He convened Historiography Working Groups for both IFTR and for TaPRA. He served as an editor for the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.
He published widely and with considerable critical acclaim in the area of nineteenth-century British theatre. His most recent bookComic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (2015) won the TaPRA David Bradby Prize for Research in International Theatre and Performance in 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2015 TLA George Freedley Memorial Award. His other publications include Theatre & Entertainment (2016), Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens Volume II (2017) and European Theatre Performance Practice Vol 3 1750-1900 (editor, 2014). He was also joint author of a study of London theatre audiences in the nineteenth century Reflecting the Audience: London 1840-1880 (2001), which was awarded the 2001 Theatre Book Prize. He contributed numerous chapters including essays on nineteenth-century acting to the Cambridge History of British Theatre and on audiences to the Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. He also published many articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Notebook, Essays in Theatre, Themes in Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Theatre, Theatre Research International and The Dickensian. He was also responsible for many of the theatrical entries in The Oxford Readers' Companion to Dickens and contributed to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Stage Actors and Acting and the New Dictionary of National Biography. For several years he wrote an annual review of publications on nineteenth-century English Drama and Theatre for The Year's Work in English Studies.
An event to celebrate Jim’s life and work was held on 6 January 2024 12pm-4pm in the Studios in the Faculty of Arts Building on the University of Warwick's campus.
Fat Performance (Studies) Today
Jussara Belchior, Magdalena Hutter, Gillie Kleiman
Wednesday 24th May 4pm-5.30pm on MS Teams
The Fat Performance Reader is to be an edited collection of original artistic and scholarly material discussing fat performance, which we define - for the moment - as performance whose meaning-making is both predicated on fatness and can speak into a conversation about fatness. In this talk, the three editors of this collection will discuss the origins of the project, its aspirations and limitations, and the key themes that have emerged through dialogue with contributors, as well as our individual perspectives on fat performance (studies). We will continue to unpick our understandings of fat performance and its relationship to the disciplines of performance studies and fat studies, unfolding our collaboration in public.
Biographies
Jussara Belchior (Brazil)
Jussara Belchior is a fat ballerina. She also works as a choreographer, a collaborator in other artists’ projects and a researcher of practices and writings in contemporary dance. Her projects deal with fat people, fatness and non-normative bodies. She has a PhD degree in Live Arts. She is currently developing the CAIBA project (Catálogo Imaterial da Baleia - Whale Immaterial Catalogue), alongside that she is a part of the MANADA and the Escrita Performativa collectives. She is interested in poetics and politics of movement and positioning yourself through dance.
Magdalena Hutter (Germany/Canada)
Magdalena is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. Her projects frequently deal with themes of belonging, ranging from documentary film to installations and interactive documentaries. In addition to her own projects, she also works as a DoP and consulting producer on other documentary films. She is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal/Canada, doing research-creation about fatness in dance and developing frameworks for Fat ScreenDance.
Gillie Kleiman (United Kingdom)
Gillie Kleiman works with and in dance and choreography, creating performances, texts, events and pedagogical encounters. Gillie’s work has a persistent interest in both the figure and the activity of the non-professional, and many of her projects have involved participation of non-professional collaborators or of the audience; this was the topic of her PhD project (completed in 2019). In 2020, Gillie initiated a new cycle of thinking and working about fat and fatness. Alongside her artistic practice, she is Head of Higher Education at Dance City, an adviser to Jerwood Arts, a Trustee of People Dancing, and external examiner at the Danish National School of Performing Arts. She is a member of the trade union UVW-DCW and is an accredited trade union representative. Gillie lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Mourning Theatres: Pandemic Grief and Queer Performance
Fintan Walsh
Wednesday 3rd May 12pm-1.30pm on MS Teams
Grappling with extraordinary loss and its political denial, theatre and performance during the pandemic innovated forms and approaches to support the work of mourning. In particular, queer practices drew on their deep reservoirs of grief to make room for it in the bewildered present. This paper explores how some of this work intervened the social and cultural climate of the coronavirus pandemic, and how the pandemic enabled queer theatre and performance to reanimate and repurpose its own archives of loss.
Scene Painters who became Artists, Artists who became Scene Designers: Artists and the Theatre in Nineteenth Century Britain
On behalf of our Friends Association, please find below details of their first fundraising event of 2022.
We are delighted that Professor Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick, has kindly agreed to give a talk (via Zoom)
'Scene Painters who became Artists, Artists who became Scene Designers: Artists and the Theatre in Nineteenth Century Britain'
Tuesday 26th April 2022
6.00pm BST. Finish approx 7.15pm including time for questions & discussion
Open to EVERYONE
Register for FREE Ticket and make DONATIONS via Eventbrite here:
The 21 Day Voice Over Challenge is a chance to create a positive working habit, learn something new and record your voice every day for 21 days.
No matter if you’re an experienced voice over artist, just plugging in your mic or anywhere in between this will give you daily challenges that will help you grow your talent, creativity and focus.
If you have a studio, perfect but not essential as the challenge can be recorded on any phone.
It’s jam packed with different areas of the voice over world including character work, accents, gaming, audio books and much much more!
Here’s the website where you can find out more and the social media handles are @voiceover_tribe