Past Events

Dr Meg Mumford on Rimini Protokoll

Event Date: 6 December 2010

Location: Rehearsal Room A, Royal Holloway University of London.

Chair: Chris Megson.

Since their establishment as a directorial cluster at the beginning of the millennium, Germany’s Rimini Protokoll have garnered world-wide recognition for their groundbreaking Theatre of Everyday Experts. Rimini Protokoll’s integration of everyday experts can be related to the marked interest of all three directors – Stefan Kaegi, Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel – in encountering unfamiliar (and insufficiently familiar) phenomena from the contemporary world. In this paper, Meg Mumford turns attention to their fascination with such encounters through a focus on the following questions: what sort of encounters with the culturally strange and unfamiliar does Rimini’s staging of real people offer its theatre participants? How are social power relations between participants of different cultures, and the power of bourgeois theatre culture, negotiated? And finally, in what ways can their theatrical framing of living everyday experts help us to address our complex polycultural worlds? The paper draws on Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters (London: Routledge, 2000) and Wolfgang Welsch’s ideas about culture, as well as recent interviews with company members, Cargo Sofia footage, and her own experiences of Rimini’s latest work, Mr. Dağacar and the Golden Tectonics of Trash.

An MP3 recording of the evening is available here.

Leading London Theatre Critics In the Spotlight

Event Date: 26 February 2010

Location: Studio Theatre, Royal Holloway University of London.

Participants: Kate Bassett (The Independent on Sunday), Lyn Gardner (The Guardian), Mark Shenton (The Sunday Express), and Ian Shuttleworth (Financial Times), chaired by Sheryl Hill and Karen Fricker.

This event brings together leading London theatre critics for an evening of conversation about the changing craft of theatre criticism. How is the decline of print media and the rise of Web 2.0 affecting 21st century theatre criticism? How do these critics understand the relationship between themselves, their readers, and the theatre industry? What advice can they offer to the next generation of critics and theatre practitioners? A panel discussion will be followed by question-and-answer session with a primarily student audience.

An audio recording of the event is available here.

‘Theatre of Action?’ Panel

Event Date: 10 February 2010

Location: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building, London School of Economics.

Chair: Chris Megson

A discussion between a playwright (Matt Charman) and director (John Caird) on whether contemporary drama still aims to challenge audiences followed by a performance of extracts from ‘reactionary’ drama. Part of the LSE Literary Festival.

Further information and an audio recording of the event is available here.