Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Theatre & Performance Studies News

In Memoriam - Professor Jim Davis

Prof Jim DavisIt 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.

Show all news items

PhD Student Eleanor Chadwick awarded grant to attend IUGTE Arts Oasis International Residency

PhD Student Eleanor Chadwick was awarded a grant from ArtUniverse to attend the IUGTE Arts Oasis International Residency for Performers at Monastero Santa Croce in Italy last May.

13411886_1088857434515062_7846428798648909397_o.jpg

Led by theatre and dance practitioner Sergei Ostrenko, the residency involved working in a group of 17 international participants for 6 days on a retreat at Monastero Santa Croce in Tuscany, Italy. The course involved a mixture of traditional and contemporary techniques and ideas, including Thai Chi (Chuan Chen style), the physical action of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, and Contact and Structural Improvisation. There were also influences, links, or overlap with Mak Yong, Butoh, Qi Gong, Alexander technique, Pilates, Suzuki, Kinetic Environment, Viewpoints, and the work of practitioners Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski and Rudolf von Laban.

13403933_1088858911181581_2848210136306361759_o.jpg

The annual residency brings together performers from all over the world: actors, dancers, teachers, and circus performers of various ages and nationalities. The IUGTE residencies foster intercultural collaborations and connections across the globe, and focus on exploring the coming together of traditional and contemporary approaches.

13418500_1088859641181508_3456513006793522784_o.jpg

A key part of Ostrenko’s process was the idea of gaining new knowledge and understanding through the body, by using physical exercises with minimal verbal communication or text. It explored the way in which, in theatrical work, there is a kind of understanding that cannot be readily achieved through intellectual processes but is accessed more directly through the body. John J. Schranz speaks of the ‘unique “knowing”, which we call “embodiment”’:[1] a type of understanding of action that cannot be cognised or put into words, but which is known somatically. The Arts Oasis residency gives space to explore this kind of ‘knowing’: the emphasis is upon physical and tactile exploration, experimentation and understanding.

13442489_1088859951181477_5943784596078729921_o.jpg

Eleanor is planning to attend the annual IUGTE International Conference at Retzhof Castle, Styria, Austria in December. The multidisciplinary conference is titled ‘Theatre Between Tradition and Contemporaneity’ and focuses on the bridge between tradition and contemporaneity in performing arts around the world.

For further info see: http://www.iugte.com/projects/theatretradition

13416983_1088857321181740_2915146476634279524_o.jpg

[1] John J. Schranz, ‘A Rope Over an Abyss’, in Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia and Victor Jacono (ed.), Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience (London, Bloomsbury Methuen Publishing, 2016), pp.117-130 (p.118).

Tue 09 Aug 2016, 12:14 | Tags: Postgraduate