We are now delighted to announce details of the IPS2019 event, taking place on Saturday 23rd November, which this year will be dedicated to the works of Zinnie Harris.
Keynote Speaker: Dr Trish Reid
Featuring: Zinnie Harris in conversation
Working primarily, although not exclusively, across three cities – Edinburgh, Glasgow and London – Harris’s work as a playwright, director and adaptor of classic stage texts has over the past two decades established her as a pre-eminent figure within contemporary British theatre. Her award-winning plays include Further Than The Furthest Thing (2001); Midwinter (2002); The Wheel (2011); How To Hold Your Breath (2015); and This Restless House (2017), an adaptation of Aeschlyus’Oresteia. In 2018, she contributed a piece, Multiples, to the BBC series ‘Snatches: Episodes from Women’s Lives’, curated by Artistic Director of the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone.
We are pleased to invite abstracts for 20 minute papers on any aspect of Zinnie Harris’s contribution to contemporary theatre – as playwright, director and/or adaptor of classic texts for the contemporary stage.
Papers may, for example, analyse specific work(s) dramaturgically and/or thematically; consider Harris’s position within historical traditions and/or contemporary ecologies of British and Scottish theatre; or critically reflect upon stagings of Harris’s work.
Possible topics responsive to Harris’s work might include but are not limited to:
- Europe: borders, territories and frontlines
- ‘Migratory aesthetics’: historical trauma and cultural memory/amnesia
- Agency and the (female) subject
- The ‘State of the Nation’ in an age of globalization
- International (geo)politics, ‘new wars’ and their (theatrical) mediation
- Theatre and apocalypse
- Geology and the environment
- Identity and attachment(s)
- War, terror and survival
- Language, dialogue and community
- Dispossession and in(ter)dependence
- Representing ‘crisis’ and ‘crises’ in representation
- Challenges of/to text, direction and staging
- Narrative/character/generic conventions and their subversion
- Lineages of political/aesthetic influence
- Making theatre in and of Scotland
- Strategies of stage adaptationDeadline for abstracts of 200 words: 1st April 2019.
Please send abstracts (250 words) and a brief biographical note to JBolton@Lincoln.ac.uk and N.O.Holden@Greenwich.ac.uk