Members are warmly invited to join us to support the inaugural symposium of the Society for Theatre Research’s (STR) New Researchers’ Network (NRN) on the theme of ‘Emergence’.

Theatre history constantly encounters moments of ‘emergence’. New evidence and new perspectives emerge through archival research. These new findings cause new approaches to emerge as they contribute to existing knowledge, bringing new debates, theories and themes to the fore.

The process of emergence also helps us think about the ephemerality of theatre and performance. This ephemerality raises a range of historiographical questions which must be met by emerging and traditional approaches.

More personally, as emergent scholars and practitioners, we have a heightened awareness of the difficulties facing both academia and the Arts in society as a whole.

The symposium will begin with a keynote address by Dr. Abigail Rokison of the Shakespeare Institute, and will feature panels including: “Examining Amateur Performance”, “Querying Evidence”, “Lost Histories”, and “Reconstructing Performance”.

Schedule

10am Registration at The Theatres Trust, 22 Charing Cross Road

10.30am Welcome and Opening Remarks
10.35am Keynote Address by Abigail Rokison

11.30am Coffee Break

11.45am Panel 1: Examining Amateur Performance
Sarah Penny (University of Warwick): Crossing the Line: Rites and Rituals in the Royal Navy
Eleanor Massie (Queen Mary University, University of London) Emerging:
Amateurs, Professionals, and the In Between

1pm Lunch provided

2pm Panel 2: Querying Evidence
Miranda Welby (University of Warwick): The Photographic Fictions of Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Macbeth in 1898
Cath Badham (University of Sheffield): What Emerges: Gleanings from interviews undertaken for a study of the plays of Philip Ridley

Panel 3: Lost Histories
Eve Smith (Royal Holloway, University of London): An Accumulation of Absences: the collector of theatrical ephemera
Clare Siviter (University of Warwick): Methodological Emergence: The Case-Study of Napoleonic Tragedy

3.30pm Coffee Break

3.45pm Panel 4: Reconstructing Performance
Kim H. Carrell (Clark University, Massachusetts): “My assurance bids me search”: Towards a New Understanding of “Original Practices”
Kerrie Reading (Aberystwyth University): Emerging from the past: insights from re-constituted performance

4.30pm Closing Remarks and Dinner for Informal Closing Discussions

5:00pm Informal New Researchers’ Network Dinner in Bloomsbury

7:00pm Please join us for the Society for Theatre Research’s Annual General Meeting
and the Annual Address, ‘Indoors and No Heavy Lifting: 50 Years of Theatre Research’ presented by Prof. Richard Foulkes.

After the symposium we plan to have an informal dinner before attending the STR’s Annual General Meeting. London