Empire, Extraction and Power in the Festivals of Britain of 1951 and 2022
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Please join us at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre for a celebration and discussion of Empire, Extraction and Power in the Festivals of Britain of 1951 and 2022. Caoimhe will be joined by Shane Boyle (QMUL) and Martin Young (Birkbeck) for a conversation chaired by Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal (QMUL), followed by refreshments.
Caoimhe’s Element compares the 1951 Festival of Britain with the 2022 Unboxed Festival to explore both continuities and shifts in the British state's relationship to empire, power and extraction as expressed in celebrations of national culture. The ideological projects underpinning these governments, distanced by more than seventy years, might be seen as fundamentally opposed. Yet approaching this comparative study through a conjunctural analysis focusing on the narrations of British identity and both events' wilful intertwining of technology and art reveals the continuities between both periods, especially as they pertain to historical practices of the imperial state and its far-reaching consequences.
Caoimhe Mader McGuinness is a senior Lecturer in Drama at Kingston. Her research and publications focuses on the specific histories of Western imperialism and its liberal afterlives as these apply to cultural production and reception in contemporary Britain and France. Further interests are social reproduction in feminist performance, the 1951 Festival of Britain and Marxist approaches to theatre and performance. She has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research, Studies in Theatre and Performance and the edited collection Rancière and Performance.
Martin Young is Lecturer at the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck and a member of Birkbeck's Centre for Contemporary Theatre. His publications have focused primarily on questions of labour in the theatre industry, and in particular in the backstage work of stage management and technical theatre. This work is generally based in historical archives and considers the relationship between labour and theatre's organisational systems, industrial character, and technological advances. He is currently developing a monograph historicising the commodification of theatrical performance. His most recent work has turned to the theme of the policing and the state, including editing a forthcoming special issue of Performance Research titled 'On State Violence'.
Shane Boyle is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London. His books include The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism (Stanford 2024) and the co-edited collection Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Methuen Bloomsbury 2019).
Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on performance and work, with a particular interest in questions of emotional labour, theatrical production and actor training. She completed her doctorate at Birkbeck, with the thesis ‘Serving the Self: authenticity, performance and emotional labour’, which used primary data gathered from British workplaces to expand and develop an understanding of the theatrical and performative influence in contemporary service and hospitality work. Prior to joining Queen Mary she was an associate lecturer at Birkbeck, where she taught across Theatre, Liberal Arts and Management courses. As a playwright, she has worked with Old Vic New Voices and Kali Theatre and my work has been performed at the Old Red Lion, Brighton Fringe, RADA and VAULT festivals.
Contact name: Molly Flynn
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