Shakespeare Performance Research Seminar: Thursday 11 February

Hear Here: Shakespeare’s Sound and Collective Listening

This combined workshop and seminar will explore the ‘score’ of Shakespeare’s texts; how, for example, pitch, speed, meter and collisions of prose and verse influence our sensory reception, how this aural reception is integral to the making of meaning. We will be exploring sound and meaning through excerpts from a performance of a durational version of a scene from The Winter’s Tale. At the same time, the workshop will be a practical experiment in the culture of listening at the Globe (in February admittedly one a bit on the chilly side) and of cultures of listening both early modern and contemporary that form around the event of performance. While the seminar will reflect on the practical experiments in the theatre, those who cannot attend the workshop are welcome for the talk.

P. A. Skantze is a director, scholar and writer. Currently a Reader in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at Roehampton University, London, she is the author of Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (Routledge 2003) and articles about sound, reception and the senses, gender, race, dance, gift exchange and performance practice. A founding member of the performance group Four Second Decay, her radio play All that Fell has been staged as an ‘experiment in physical radio’ at Glasgow and will be staged in New York City in April 2010. She has performed with the group in Rhode Island, Copenhagen, London and Zagreb. Her second book, Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle combines a methodology modeled on W.G. Sebald about staging memory, attentive wandering with the proposition that gathering ‘a body of spectating, listening and seeing’ might come to furnish something very like our more customary notions of accumulating a ‘body of knowledge.’ Her next project directing Get Thee to a Gallery, a durational performance of The Winter’s Tale, will be staged at a gallery in London in 2010.

The Theatre History Seminar provides a forum for theatre historians, actors, directors and postgraduates to share current research into early modern theatre.

Time: 18.00 – 20.00

Venue: Nancy W. Knowles Lecture Theatre

Tickets: This research seminar is open to research students, theatre practitioners and academics.

For further information and to reserve a place, please contact ed.events@shakespearesglobe.com.

Farah Karim-Cooper

Head of Research & Courses

020 7902 1439