Arts & Humanities Festival
10–21 October 2016
Welcome to the 2016 Arts
& Humanities Festival at
King’s College London. The
Festival takes place over
two weeks in October at the
university’s Strand campus,
and features a variety of talks,
performances, workshops
and exhibitions. These events
give a sample of the range of
research being carried out
in our Faculty, and give a
sense of the creativity and
innovative thinking at King’s.
What is the role of play
in the realm of the arts
and humanities? Is it an
expression of freedom? Or
is play unthinkable without
rules? Play is often presented
in opposition to work or
seriousness. Do we think that
human play must always have
a serious purpose or serious
effect? Or do we value it for
its resistance to these things?
Is there always an element of
make-believe? Or can we play
as ourselves? What is play’s
biological – or evolutionary
– purpose? How is play
marketed to children, and to
adults? How is it regulated?
And how should it be?
‘Play’ is one of the oldest
English words, and has
acquired extraordinary
richness of idiom and
metaphor, covering most
aspects of living. We play by
the rules, play fair, play our
cards right, play it safe, play
into someone’s hands, play
the field, play on words, play
for time, play hard to get, or
play dead. It is unusually rich
in phrasal verbs too: we play
along, play up, play down,
play back, play out, play off,
play at, play with, and play up
Most events are free but will be ticketed
To book go to www.kcl.ac.uk/ahfest
All details correct at time of print – for latest programme information please visit our website.
to; we play around, and
play about.
With this richness in mind,
the 2016 Arts & Humanities
Festival will consider
play not only in terms of
theatre (though in the year
of Shakespeare400 we
certainly shall be thinking
of it in its dramatic sense),
but will address all forms of
performance – music, poetry,
comedy, talk, sport – and
many other themes besides:
games and gaming, video and
cinema, effects of light and
water, humour, jokes, tricks,
fantasy, amorous or sexual
play, recreation, and freedom
of movement.
Professor Max Saunders
Director of the Arts & Humanities
Research Institute and
Director of the Festival
Arts & Humanities Research Institute
The Arts & Humanities
Research Institute (AHRI)
is a hub to foster innovative
interdisciplinary research across
the Faculty of Arts & Humanities
and beyond. It co-ordinates the
Faculty’s twelve interdisciplinary
Research Centres and their
projects; organises its own
research activities; and provides
a platform for public engagement,
showcasing the dynamism,
intellectual rigour, and creativity
of Arts and Humanities research
at King’s College London.
2 The AHRI provides
administrative support for the
research centres’ wealth of
conferences, seminars, lectures
and other public events. It
organises the annual Arts &
Humanities Festival, which
engages the broader public with
the pioneering research and
artistic creations of today. It
also organises a programme of
inaugural lectures in the Faculty.
The AHRI works to connect
Arts & Humanities with other
Faculties (including Social
Science & Public Policy, Natural
& Mathematical Sciences, and
Life Sciences & Medicine)
through various initiatives,
including a series of themed
interdisciplinary workshops.
It also facilitates collaborative
practice – between researchers,
artists, and cultural partners –
through its close relationship with
the Cultural Institute at King’s.
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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The Research Centres
Camões Centre for Studies
in Portuguese Language &
Culture was founded in 2010
by Portugal’s Instituto Camões
to draw together Portugueserelated studies (at university
level) across the UK. The Centre
cultivates an understanding
of Portugal by developing
knowledge of its culture, history,
politics, and encouraging
learning of the language.
Centre for Digital Culture
is an interdisciplinary research
centre promoting scholarship
and debate on digital culture. It
explores the new social practices
and interactions, world-views,
values, organisational and
institutional forms that are
emerging in the age of the
Internet, smartphones and social
media.
Centre for Early Modern
Studies was established in
2015 to promote research
in the early modern period
(broadly speaking, 1400-1700).
The Centre is committed
to promoting a historical
understanding across a range
of cultures and thinking, as
well as cultivating innovative,
historically-informed
interdisciplinary projects.
Centre for Enlightenment
Studies was created to
consolidate and give a higher
profile to the existing 18th
century research strengths
across the Faculty of Arts &
Humanities, drawing on a
range of expertise in the fields
of literature, cultural and
intellectual history, music,
languages and philosophy.
Centre for Hellenic
Studies is committed to
promoting knowledge and
understanding of Greek history,
culture, and language of all
periods, and not least of the
Hellenic contribution to the
world of today.
Centre for the Humanities
& Health works to overcome
the distinction between the Arts,
Humanities, and Health in its
programme of cross-disciplinary
research.
Centre for Late Antique
& Medieval Studies was
founded in 1988. It is unique in
Britain in its range of subjects
and chronological span. Close
relations with the Centre for
Hellenic Studies also provide
a combination of Eastern and
Western Medieval Studies
without parallel nationally and
internationally.
Centre for Life-Writing
Research is a pioneering group
producing some of the most
innovative work in the field.
Established in 2007, it enables
experts and students to share
research and exchange ideas on
the theory, history, and practice
of life-writing.
Centre for Modern
Literature & Culture was
established in 2013. It is a forum
for academics, writers and artists
to explore, interrogate, dismantle
and reinvent the notion of the
‘modern’.
Queer @ King’s is an
interdepartmental and
interdisciplinary research group
that has been operating in the
Faculty of Arts & Humanities
since 2003. It is an important
feature in the research culture
of the University of London,
drawing together colleagues
interested in gender and
sexuality.
London Shakespeare
Centre is devoted to research,
learning and teaching in
Shakespeare and early modern
English literary studies. The
Centre has an extensive network
of partnerships, including
Shakespeare’s Globe and the
British Library, as well as 23
additional partners who form
the Shakespeare400 consortium
that celebrates the Shakespeare
Quatercentenary.
Menzies Centre for
Australian Studies is the
lead Australian studies centre
in Europe, promoting an
understanding of Australian
history, society and culture
throughout Britain and beyond.
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Events
throughout
the Festival
Game playing sessions The Language Resources Centre is
transformed into an international house of games – Monday 10,
Tuesday 11, Wednesday 12 & Thursday 13 October 2016
Installation One Easy Step – Monday 10 - Friday 21 October 2016
Guided walking tour Mr Punch in Fleet Street – Tuesday 11 &
Tuesday 18 October 2016
Performance & workshop discussion Radical Opera:
Dido & ... – Wednesday 12, Thursday 13 & Friday 14 October 2016
Movement workshop Freedom from form: playing with
movement – Wednesday 12 & Friday 21 October
Installation Three King’s – Thursday 13 & Friday 14 October 2016
Practical art workshop Life drawing – Friday 14, Tuesday 18,
Wednesday 19 & Friday 21 October 2016
Workshops, exhibition & symposium Playing with medieval
visions, sounds and sensations – Thursday 13, Monday 17 &
Friday 21 October 2016
Film screening & exhibition A Civil Soldier – Monday 11 - Friday
21 October 2016
International house of games
The Language Resources Centre (LRC) invites you to come and join
us in playing games as the Centre is transformed into an international
house of games. Alec Redvers-Hill will lead each session. You will
learn to play iconic games enjoyed by millions in China, Japan and
Korea and, at the same time, be able to practice the relevant language.
Jan Ken Pon
Xiangqi (Chinese Chess)
Monday 10 October 2016
Wednesday 12 October 2016
Jan Ken Pon is the Japanese
variety of the game ‘rock, paper,
scissors’, but with a few added
dimensions. In this game playing
session, participants will learn
the rules and words used to play
Jan Ken Pon, as well as other
‘rock, paper, scissors’ variants
from around the world. They
will then play Jan Ken Pon using
the Japanese language words
and phrases learned in the initial
presentation.
Xiangqi is a form of chess unique
to China. While Go and Shogi
are interesting for the virtually
limitless possibilities they
present, Xiangqi is, by contrast,
restricted. Unlike Western chess,
the board is not flat, but has its
own topography with a central
river, and each king is housed in
its own fortress.
Participants will learn the
Chinese names of each of
the pieces and the characters
used to write them. All will
have the opportunity to play
Xiangqi using free online
software accessed from the LRC
computers.
Go/Weiqi/Baduk
Tuesday 11 October 2016
Go is an incredibly complex
board game that has been both
popular and iconic in Chinese,
Japanese and Korean society for
centuries. It has become even
more popular over the past few
years, not only as a result of
increasingly nativist policies and
tendencies in these countries,
but also due to certain media
involvements. The anime series
Hikaru no Go, and the efforts of
AI-development researchers to
produce computer programs that
can beat human champions at
Go (as Deep Blue defeated Garry
Kasparov at chess) have had a
particularly positive impact. The
session will begin with a basic
introduction of the game and
its impact on Chinese, Japanese
and Korean society, especially in
terms of language. Participants
will have the opportunity to use
‘Atari’, a training game used to
teach beginners the basics of Go.
ALEC REDVERS-HILL is currently the
Resources Officer at the LRC having
joined King’s from New Zealand where
he taught Japanese. He regularly
supports the events offered by the
Japan Foundation at the LRC and is
an expert of Asian popular culture.
Shogi
Thursday 13 October 2016
Shogi is a form of chess unique
to Japan. Unlike the western
version of chess, pieces are not
eliminated, they are ‘captured’
and can be placed onto the board
later and played as one of the
captor’s pieces. In addition, each
piece has a specific ‘promotion’
that can be activated when
they reach the end of the board,
which may not necessarily be
advantageous. Participants will
learn the characters and words
used for each of the pieces, as
well as idioms and proverbs that
have entered Japanese language
based on the game. You will
be given the opportunity to
play either against each other
or a computer (with variable
difficulty).
Image: Phil Sayer
Game playing sessions
17.00-18.00 Monday-Thursday 10-13 October 2016
Language Resources Centre, King’s Building (K-1.072), Strand Campus
Presented by the Modern Language Centre
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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One Easy Step
One Easy Step is an installation
in the Quad that explores ways
to play within the space. From
painted patterns on the ground
to three-dimensional objects, it
prompts passers-by to find their
own playful interactions, inviting
the invention of temporary
rulesets with friends or alone.
The different shapes of the
installation take inspiration
from the past of this space,
in particular the geometrical
elements of the eighteenthcentury gardens which stretched
down to the river.
The final installation has been
developed following two weeks
of research and iteration. During
this period different shapes and
objects were installed in the
Quad, and users of the space
were observed responding to
and interacting with them. This
helped to build up a vocabulary
of play that those who use the
Quad understand and respond to
without explicit instructions.
Alongside the installation
Matheson Marcault are also
producing a report (available as
a free pdf on mathesonmarcault.
com) summarising their findings.
It addresses questions like: what
does it mean for a space to be
playful? How can designers of
a space get people to behave
playfully within it? What games
and game-like experiences can
we get people to take part in
without having to explain rules,
solely through colours on the
ground or the position of a flag?
MATHESON MARCAULT, led by HOLLY
GRAMAZIO and SOPHIE SAMPSON,
make projects with culture, history and
physical space. They use game design
to engage people with places and ideas.
Their work fits in museums, in public
squares, at arts festivals and online.
One Easy Step installation by Matheson
Marcault has been co-commissioned
for the 2016 Arts & Humanities Festival:
Play by the Arts & Humanities Research
Institute and Cultural Programming at
King’s.
InstallationTalk
09.00-20.00 10-21 October 2016
19.00-20.30 Tuesday 11 October 2016
Quad, Strand Campus
Anatomy Museum, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Image: Matheson Marcault
Presented by the Arts & Humanities Research Institute and Cultural Programming at King’s
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Mr Punch on Fleet Street:
walking through Punch’s social &
political influence
This guided walk will explore
the impact and legacy of the
celebrated satirical magazine
Punch, which was based on Fleet
Street for most of the Victorian
era, until its move to nearby
Bouverie Street. We follow the
familiar processional route along
the Strand, before dashing down
side streets in pursuit of a hidden
history of scandal and satire.
Celebrating its 175th anniversary
in 2016, Punch magazine was
founded in 1841 by a group
of journalists, printers and
engravers, among them its first
editor Mark Lemon and the
pioneering urban explorer Henry
Mayhew. From its Victorian
heyday to its role on the Home
Front of two world wars and
after, Punch’s legendary staff of
artists and humourists persecuted
politicians, scandalized
celebrities and ridiculed royalty.
Occasionally radical, more often
reactionary, Punch was embedded
in the complex print, theatrical
and political networks (and the
gossip and slander) of Victorian
London. Come and learn how
Punch reflected and informed
public perceptions of key events,
from the expansion of empire to
the emergence of feminism, from
rebellion in India to Irish Home
Rule, and from the trial of Oscar
Wilde to the rise of Hitler.
LED BY
BRIAN H MURRAY is Lecturer in
Nineteenth-Century English Literature at
King’s. He has recently published articles
on Dickens’s travel writing, the literature
of African exploration, and the reception
of early Christian martyrdom in Victorian
Britain and Ireland.
HELEN WALASEK works for Punch Ltd
and was curator of the Punch Archive
and Collection until its sale to the British
Library. She has edited a number of
books of Punch cartoons, including the
bestselling The Best of Punch Cartoons,
and regularly speaks on the history of
Punch.
Image: © Punch Ltd
Guided walking tour
16.00-18.00 Tuesday 11 & Tuesday 18 October 2016
Nelson’s Column, facing towards Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, London
Presented by the Department of English and Punch Ltd – www.punch.co.uk
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Radical opera: Dido & ...
To bring radically new meaning
to a play is a virtue, to do it to
a musical score is sacrilege. But
why? Why shouldn’t musicians
be as creative as actors?
Radical Opera present – over
three nights – a reimagined
reading of Purcell’s Dido &
Aeneas as Dido & Belinda. These
performances and following
workshops will show what is
possible and why it’s thrilling
for musicians and audiences to
experience musico-dramatic
re-interpretations of well-known
opera. Purcell’s score will be
unchanged, and yet will take on
radically new meanings simply
by the way the notes are played
and sung. Each evening, different
facets of the musical performance
will be discussed and explored
in depth after the performance.
Audience/performer discussions
and contributions will be
an essential ingredient, as
performers respond to audience
feedback. The idea that opera
may be inventive on stage, but
not in the pit, will be turned on
its head.
There will be a cover show
matinee by a King’s cast on
Friday 14 October and post-show
discussion events chaired by the
production team after each of
the evening performances, and
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson,
Professor of Music at King’s.
Performance & workshop discussion.
19.30-21.30 Wednesday 12 October 2016
19.30-21.30 Thursday 13 October 2016
19.30-21.30 Friday 14 October 2016
LEO GEYER is a composer and
conductor. His music has been
performed worldwide and broadcast on
BBC Radio 3. Recent projects include
works for the BBC Singers, Opera North
and the Rambert Dance Company.
He is Cover Conductor for The Royal
Ballet, and conductor for Khymerikal
and Artistic Director for Constella
OperaBallet.
ELLA MARCHMENT is artistic director
of Helios Collective and Constella
OperaBallet. Directing credits include
Alexander Goehr’s Tryptich at Mariinsky
II, an opera–ballet production of
Stravinsky’s Renard, Sir Peter Maxwell
Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King,
Verdi’s Macbeth, and An Evening with
Lucian Freud starring Cressida Bonas.
Ella is co-founder of Theatre N16,
and is the first director to receive an
International Opera Awards Foundation
Bursary in 2015.
Image: from the poster for Dido & Belinda, with thanks to Ella Marchment
15.00-16.00 – cover performance – Friday 14 October 2016
Please note each performance will have a 20 minute interval
Great Hall, King’s Building, Strand Campus
There is a charge for this event, and a special offer price for those who wish to attend all three evenings. Please see the event
webpage for booking information
Presented by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, the Music Department, and
Helios Collective, and with support from the King’s Principal and Cultural Programming at King’s
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Freedom from form:
playing with movement
The Nia Technique merges
mindful movement with cardiodance workout. In this dynamic
workshop, we will explore Nia
based choreography to challenge
our usual physical and mental
patterns of behaviour. Even
when the choreographic move
is simple, already known, or
easily acquired, play with music,
imagery, pace, and shape allows
us to break out of our everyday
habits of movement and thought.
By playing the Nia way we will,
in a supportive environment,
break out of our conventional
modes and experience the infinite
possibility of play, initiating new
freedoms.
Please wear clothes that you feel
comfortable to move in. In Nia
we work bare-foot but soft-soled
shoes are a good alternative. This
‘playshop’ is suitable for people of
all ages, abilities and fitness levels
– the Nia Technique encourages
you to move in your body’s way.
Differently-abled people are
encouraged to attend.
PHILLIPA NOWELL is a bodyworker
with two decades of experience in
the therapeutic and mind/body field
including work as a hypnotherapist with
the Nia Technique, and massage. She is
passionate about living life to the full and
encouraging others to do the same.
Image: pixabay
Movement workshop
17.30-19.30 Wednesday 12 October 2016 & Friday 21 October 2016
Chapters, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Arts & Humanities Research Institute
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Three King’s
Three King’s is a documentary
installation by site-specific artists
Forster & Heighes. It revisits
and imaginatively consolidates
materials from the partnership’s
three recent King’s based
projects.
Over the last six years, in
association with Professor
Alan Read, The Performance
Foundation, and The Twentieth
Century Society, Forster &
Heighes have undertaken an
intriguing examination of some
of King’s’ familiar and less
familiar buildings. This project
aimed to shift perceptions of
the university’s estate beyond
pragmatic rationales of supply
and demand, procurement and
construction, and to create a
different sort of ‘recreational area’
- a ‘playground’ in which missing,
abandoned, unclassifiable and
wilder aspects of King’s and its
history could be safely exercised.
The first of these projects,
Revenue (2011), included rare
images of the East Wing,
Somerset House, taken during
the final weeks of occupation
by the Inland Revenue, before
its transformation into the
School of Law. The second,
Plant Science (2013), examined
the performative legacy of the
redundant teaching spaces of
the former Department of Plant
Sciences, Herne Hill. The
most recent, Is this Your Life?
(2014) was a consideration of
22 Kingsway, now the Virginia
Woolf Building, home of the
Faculty of Arts & Humanities,
a 1960’s office block with a
‘permissive’ character and an
extraordinary history.
Three King’s brings together film
and photographic elements from
the three previous works to create
an atmospheric installation,
which, combined with a series of
talks and discussions with invited
speakers around areas of heritage,
value, identity and preservation,
will highlight both the diversity
of the built environment of King’s
and the intriguing bonds and
similarities that have helped to
shape its identity today.
EWAN FORSTER and CHRISTOPHER
HEIGHES are makers of site-specific
performance and installation. For
more than twenty years they have
been developing new methodologies
of performance in relation to the
built environment. Their early works
involved the retelling of often forgotten
or neglected architectural histories.
More recent commissions in the UK
and abroad have been developed out
of complex networks of research using
arcane presentational devices that
challenge architectural orthodoxy. They
have presented work at The London
Festival of Theatre (LIFT); Hebbel
Theater, Berlin (HAU); Liverpool Anglican
Cathedral, and the Cultural Institute at
King’s. Forster & Heighes are Creative
Research Fellows at The University of
Roehampton.
Please see the Festival website for more
information on the series of talks and
discussions www.kcl.ac.uk/ahfest
Image: Forster + Heighes
Installation
11.00-21.00 Thursday 13 and
10.00-17.30 Friday 14 October 2016
Talks
18.00-20.00 Thursday 13 October 2016
Alan Read: In the ruins of the university
plus conversation with Forster & Heighes
15.00-17.30 Friday 14 October 2016
Discussion in collaboration with 20th Century Society
and Director, Catherine Croft
With thanks to King’s
English Department
Creative Seed Fund.
Council Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of English
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Drawing life: playing poetically
Drawing is a fundamental part
of the human experience. It
is one of the richest and most
spontaneous aesthetic activities
since the beginning of the human
journey on earth. Drawing is an
inquiry – an exploration – a quest
into the unknown. It is a living
creative process. A journey into
life – a reflection – an essence of
existence. Drawing is becoming!
Acclaimed Indian artist Dilip
Sur will be leading a series of life
drawing workshops. Participants
will explore various drawing
techniques, allowing them to
engage with and experience
the existential energies of this
artistic practice. For Dilip Sur,
life drawing isn’t an attempt to
turn representing the human into
an academic set of rules. It is
about drawing life and is as much
to do with expressing the life of
the person holding the pencil or
charcoal, as it is about the person
being drawn.
The classes will feature a live
model, though participants will
be free to draw other subjects.
The sessions will take place in the
Anatomy Museum. Participants
will be able to draw upon the
history of this room. Everyone
is welcome to join in the play of
lines, even if you haven’t picked
up a pencil in years!
DILIP SUR teaches at the Royal College of
Art, exhibits at the Grosvenor Gallery in
London, and collaborated with the King’s
research project on John Berger, which
was exhibited in the Inigo Rooms during
our 2012 Festival.
Image: Strange Darkness 2006 (with Dilip)
Practical art workshops
15.00-17.00 & 18.00-20.00 Friday 14 October 2016
19.00-21.00 Tuesday 18 October 2016
19.00-21.00 Wednesday 19 October 2016
15.00-17.00 & 18.00-20.00 Friday 21 October 2016
Anatomy Museum, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Arts & Humanities Research Institute
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Playing with medieval visions,
sounds & sensations
Discover the complex and
beautiful physical and aural
properties of two medieval poems
– The House of Fame and Dream of
the Rood – in this series of events
produced by current King’s
researchers.
Two workshops will explore
Chaucer’s The House of Fame;
a fourteenth century poem
composed in Middle English,
which follows a dreaming
narrator as they encounter Lady
Fame’s mystical palace, located
somewhere between heaven
and earth, where reputations are
made and broken. We will find
inspiration in its shifting sonic
architecture and strange signs.
Two workshops will focus on the
Old English Dream of the Rood.
Preserved as a complete poem
only in the 10th century Vercelli
Book, lines of the poem are
also found carved onto the 8th
century Ruthwell Cross, a huge
stone sculpture still standing in
Dumfriesshire, Scotland. The
mysterious voice of the Rood and
the runic writing of the Ruthwell
Cross reveal the various ways
early Christians imagined their
God.
This is an opportunity to make
creative work across 2D, 3D
and audio and video media,
completely open to all creative
and technical abilities. Learn
how to speak Old and Middle
English aloud, and create written,
visual, and spoken responses to
these medieval poems. You’ll be
guided through text translations,
collage and drawing techniques,
3D-making, and video and audio
recording.
An exhibition will bring
together the work created in
these workshops. Examples of
contemporary creative works
that reinvent the middle ages will
also be on display, along with
a temporary library for you to
explore at your leisure. Artists,
writers, and translator-poets
will be on display, as well as new
discoveries from the King’s
archive, on show for the first time.
A symposium on the range of
medieval and creative work that
inspired ‘Playing with Medieval
Dreams’, will be led by King’s
researchers. This symposium
(open to members of the public
and workshop participants)
will include readings of new
compositions made during the
workshops, along with readings
in Old and Middle English.
CHARLOTTE RUDMAN is a PhD candidate
in the English Department at King’s. Her
research focuses on sound and sound
representations in Medieval dream vision
poetry.
FRAN ALLFREY is a PhD candidate in
the English Department funded by the
London Arts and Humanities Partnership
(LAHP/AHRC). Her research explores
how contemporary artists and cultural
institutions represent the early medieval.
FRANCESCA BROOKS is a PhD candidate
in the English Department funded by the
London Arts and Humanities Partnership
(LAHP/ AHRC). She uses new archival
evidence to illuminate the influence of
Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon
culture on twentieth century poet and
artist, David Jones.
CHARLOTTE KNIGHT is a PhD candidate
in the English Department, exploring
the poetics of the bedchamber in late
medieval literature.
CARL KEARS was awarded his PhD last
year. He is currently working on a project
looking at instances of creative use of
Old English in the King’s Archives.
BETH WHALLEY is a PhD candidate,
funded by the Rick Trainor Scholarship
and the Canals and River Trust. Her
research explores the different ways we
understand water and waterways in past
and present culture.
See the event page on the Festival
website for full details of this series of
events, www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/
eventrecords/2016-2017/Festival/Playingwith-Visions.aspx.
Workshops
14.30-17.00 & 18.00-20.30 Thursday 13 October 2016
Anatomy Museum, King’s Building, Strand Campus
14.30-17.00 & 18.00-20.30 Monday 17 October 2016
River Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Exhibition 12.00-19.00 Friday 21 October 2016
River Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Symposium 17.30-18.30 Friday 21 October 2016
River Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of English and the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies CLAMS)
12 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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The Annual TOEBI Conference, hosted by King’s College London
Performance,
Pedagogy &
the Profession
10.00-19.00 Saturday 22 October 2016
Council Room and Old Committee Room,
King’s Building, Strand Campus
Image: Rathaus, Köln, WM Pank
The professional organisation of Teachers of Old English in Britain
and Ireland (TOEBI) aims to promote and support the teaching of
Old English in British and Irish Universities, and to raise the profile
of the Old English language, Old English literature and AngloSaxon England in the public eye.
Join us for the annual TOEBI conference, where we will explore
new directions in teaching, translating, re-working and performing
Old English texts, as well as reflecting upon critical practice.
See www.toebi.org.uk for details on how to book.
This conference is also supported by the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies (CLAMS) and
the Department of English.
Image: Fran Allfrey
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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13
A Civil Soldier
A Civil Soldier is the title of an
ongoing artistic visualisation
of a dense and complex archive
collection belonging to Brigadier
Edmund Paton Walsh. This
archive is housed in The Liddell
Hart Centre for Military
Archives (LHCMA), part of
King’s College London Archives
Services. The LHCMA manages
hundreds of unique collections
relating to the history of modern
warfare, which are used for
teaching, research and public
engagement.
Charlotte Cullinan (of artists duo,
Cullinan Richards) is researching
these archives alongside Head of
Archives, Geoff Browell, with
the artistic purpose of unpacking
a very dense catalogue compiled
by Brigadier Paton Walsh, the
artist’s maternal grandfather,
and presenting it with a new
set of perspectives from the
point of view of an artist. The
broader artistic aim is to question
how knowledge creation is
visualised in new, playful, and
innovative ways and how it
can be disseminated to a wider
audience.
Together with the artist’s
son, Louis Masters, Charlotte
Cullinan will present three small
films which they co-directed,
in an evening event. The
material for these short films was
collated during research trips
to Nuremberg in October and
November 2015 on the occasion
of the 70th anniversary of the
Nuremberg Trials. The films mix
material found in the LHCMA
archives with found footage
and still photography taken on
trips to Nuremberg city and The
Nuremberg Palace of Justice. The
films will be presented alongside
two cabinet exhibitions in the
main entrance to the King’s
Building.
CULLINAN RICHARDS was established
in 2006. Their multi-faceted practice
involves many different layers and
elements with painting central to their
art making. Recent exhibitions include:
Paradigm Store, Howick Place, London
(2014); STAG, Dispari&Dispari project,
Italy (2014); and DORA (2015). In 2006
they established the Savage School
Window Gallery using the window of
their studio on Vyner Street, London, as
a platform to display texts by writers,
artists and curators. In 2014 this space
became 4COSE, an Italian grocery store
and exhibition space.
Cullinan Richards run the MA Fine Art
programme at Kingston University.
Image: items from the Paton Walsh Collection
Exhibition
09.00-22.00 10-21 October 2016
Display Cabinets, Entrance Hall, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Film screening
18.30-20.00 Tuesday 11 October 2016
River Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the King’s College London Archive Services & Cullinan Richards
14 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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You may also like
The Infinite Mix:
Contemporary
Sound & Image
Hayward Gallery off-site exhibition
in association with The Vinyl Factory
Attendees of the Arts and Humanities
Festival are invited to attend this
exhibition for free between the
following dates, Tuesday 11 October –
Friday 21 October. There will also be
a talk about this exhibition, as a part
of the Festival. Please see the Festival
website for more information.
Exhibition
Friday 9 September –
Sunday 4 December
12.00 – 20.00 Tuesday to Saturday
12.00 – 19.00 Sundays
The Store, 180 The Strand, WC2R 1EA
Hayward Gallery moves north of the river for a one-off pop-up show
The Infinite Mix brings together major video works from leading
international artists that revolve around performances related to
music, dance and the spoken word. Both soulful and audacious in
their exploration of wide-ranging subjects, these works foreground
the role of sound whilst expanding and amplifying the nature of our
encounter with images. Spanning a range of approaches and formats
from cinema-style 3D video to holographic-like projections and
multi-screen installations, the works in the exhibition address us in
ways that are conceptually as well as emotionally immersive.
The Infinite Mix presents UK premiers of audio-visual artworks
by leading international artists Martin Creed (UK), Jeremy Deller
(UK) with Cecilia Bengolea (Argentina), Stan Douglas (Canada),
Cyprien Gaillard (France), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (France),
Cameron Jamie (USA), Kahlil Joseph (USA), Elizabeth Price (UK),
Ugo Rondinone (Switzerland) and Rachel Rose (USA).
The exhibition is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph
Rugoff, and is presented by the Hayward Gallery in association with
the Vinyl Factory. An independent British music and arts enterprise,
The Vinyl Factory collaborates with artists and musicians to create
boundary pushing audio-visual experiences. Founded in 2001,
the group encompasses a record label, vinyl pressing plant, gallery
spaces, record shop and music magazine.
Image: Kahlil Joseph, stills from the film m.a.a.d 2014, photography Chayse Irvin, courtesy of the artist.
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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15
Monday
10 October 2016
17.00-18.00
Games playing sessions
19.00-20.00
Talk “Just write it, I’ll make it
work” – Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner
Jan Ken Pon see p5
20.00-22.00
Film screening
The Madness of King George
‘Just write it, I’ll make it work’:
King George III through the eyes of
Alan Bennett & Nicholas Hytner
King’s College London is
working in partnership with the
Royal Collection Trust as the
Georgian Papers Programme
to digitise, provide academic
interpretation and make publicly
available some 350,000 papers
that make up the King George III
archives. With only 15% of the
archives having been accessed
before, they contain a wealth of
material that has not yet been
the focus of academic study and
offer the prospect of revised
interpretations of many aspects
of 18th and early 19th century
political, social, and economic
history, both of Britain and the
early United States.
We are very excited to be able
to explore King George III
through the eyes of Alan Bennett
and Nicholas Hytner, in a talk
chaired by Professor Alan Read.
Their collaboration as playwright
and director started 25 years
ago with Bennett’s adaptation
of The Wind in the Willows for
the National Theatre, and was
quickly followed by The Madness
of King George III, which was their
first stage to film production.
Join us as they discuss
researching archives to write
The Madness of King George III,
the challenges of translating an
acclaimed stage show to a multiaward winning film, and how
they see George III. ‘Just write it,
I’ll make it work’, said Hytner to
Bennett. Here, we explore their
mutually inspired confidence and
remarkable collaboration.
The talk will be followed by a
screening of The Madness of
King George.
ALAN BENNETT has been one of our
leading dramatists since the success
of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His
television series Talking Heads has
become a modern-day classic, as have
many of his works for the stage including
Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A
Question of Attribution, The Madness of
George III (together with the Oscarnominated screenplay The Madness
of King George), and an adaptation of
Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the
Willows. At the National Theatre, London,
The History Boys won numerous awards
including Evening Standard and Critics’
Circle awards for Best Play, an Olivier
for Best New Play and the South Bank
Award. On Broadway, The History Boys
won five New York Drama Desk Awards,
four Outer Critics’ Circle Awards, a New
York Drama Critics’ Award, a New York
Drama League Award and six Tonys. The
Habit of Art opened at the National in
2009; in 2012, People, as well as the two
short plays Hymn and Cocktail Sticks,
were also staged there. His collection
of prose Untold Stories won the PEN/
Ackerley Prize for autobiography,
2006. Recent works of fiction are The
Uncommon Reader and Smut: Two
Unseemly Stories.
NICHOLAS HYTNER FKC was the Director
of the National Theatre from 2003-2015,
where he directed Henry V, Much Ado
About Nothing, Timon of Athens, Othello
and new plays by Alan Bennett, Richard
Bean, David Hare and John Hodge. His
films include The Madness of King George,
The History Boys and The Lady in the Van.
His new theatre will open in September
2017 on the river, opposite the Tower of
London.
Image: still from The Madness of King George, with thanks to Film4
Talk: 19.00-20.00 Monday 10 October 2016
Film screening: 20.00-22.00 Monday 10 October 2016
Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
This event will be followed by
the Festival opening reception:
20.00-21.30 Monday 10 October 2016
Presented by the Georgian Papers Programme, King’s College London Great Hall, King’s Building, Strand Campus
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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17
Tuesday
11 October 2016
17.00-18.00
Games playing session Go/Weiqi/Baduk
see p5
17.30-19.30
Guided walking tour Mr Punch on
Fleet Street see p7
17.30-19.00Talk What’s wrong with classical music?
18.30-20.00
Film screening A Civil Soldier see p14
19.00-20.30Talk Playing in Public
19.00-20.30
Inaugural lecture Life as melodrama,
history as play
19.30-20.30Recital Canons & variations
(...after Bach)
19.30-21.30
Poetry reading & panel discussion Not
another bloody poet: what is poetry
doing coming out of its “ghetto”?
What’s wrong with classical music?
Young musicians are taught
how each score is intended to
be performed so as to generate
the expressive qualities it is
supposed to convey to listeners.
Performances that fail to
produce the musical character
expected are often held to be
incorrect. Teachers, examiners,
adjudicators, critics, agents,
concert managers, festival
programmers and record
producers work in harmony
to ensure that standards and
styles of performance are strictly
maintained. Playing ‘out of style’
denies performers work.
Classical musical performance
is policed and self-policed more
rigidly than theatre, where
new readings of old texts are
encouraged and provide a
powerful incentive for audiences
to attend new productions.
Nowhere is this contrast more
obvious than in opera, where
innovative work on stage
struggles to combine plausibly
with deliberately conventional
performance in the pit. Yet no
one, in that situation, asks why
the musical performance cannot
be as innovative as the stage
directing.
In this talk, Daniel LeechWilkinson scrutinises classical
music ideology. What damage
does it do? What alternatives
does it evade? What might
happen if its beliefs were undone?
This illustrated talk will offer
playful and provocative answers
in equal measure. It acts as a
prequel to the Helios Collective’s
transgressive version of Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas, which they will
be presenting on 12, 13, and 14
October at the Festival.
DANIEL LEECH-WILKINSON is Professor
of Music at King’s. His current research
critically examines the politics of classical
music performance, in particular the
policing of performance norms, and
explores creative alternatives. Books
include The Modern Invention of Medieval
Music (2002), The Changing Sound of
Music (2009) and, Music and Shape, coauthored with Helen Prior (2017).
Image: Henry Purcell by John Closterman – variations
Talk
17.30-19.00 Tuesday 11 October 2016
Council Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Music
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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19
Playing in Public
Join Holly Gramazio of
Matheson Marcault for a talk
about the physical design of play
and games. As part of the festival,
the King’s Quad is currently
home to One Easy Step: a series
of interventions to encourage
physical play, simply through
colours and shapes in the space
itself.
This talk will explore the issues
Matheson Marcault encountered
in their development of One Easy
Step, as well as the broader issues
of designing physical places
for play. As well as sharing her
own process of development,
Holly Gramazio will draw on
insights from a range of other
artists interested in physical
play, including architects, game
designers, playground designers
and installation artists.
She will also look at some of the
most intriguing work done in
this area over the last ten years,
addressing questions like: what
makes a place feel playful? What
makes it feel playful not just
for children but also for adults?
What sort of interventions can
prompt play without the need
for a facilitator or signs? And
when public play so often feels
transgressive, what are the
difficulties around encouraging
play without encouraging
behaviour beyond the bounds
of what was intended by the
designer?
MATHESON MARCAULT, led by HOLLY
GRAMAZIO and SOPHIE SAMPSON,
make projects with culture, history and
physical space. They use game design
to engage people with places and ideas.
Their work fits in museums, in public
squares, at arts festivals, and online.
HOLLY GRAMAZIO is a game designer
and curator of playful events. After
completing her PhD in Interaction and
Fiction she worked as Lead Game
Designer at Hide&Seek before starting
Matheson Marcault with Sophie Sampson
in 2015. Her games range from quiet tiny
things for solo play to large-scale games
for parks and cities.
Image: Matheson Marcault
Talk
19.00-20.30 Tuesday 11 October 2016
Anatomy Museum, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Arts & Humanities Research Institute & Cultural Programming at King’s
20 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Life as melodrama, history as play
Inaugural lecture by Erica Carter
In December 1933, the Nassau
Development Board launched
The Nassau Magazine, an
illustrated monthly showcasing
the British colony of the Bahamas
to international visitors. ‘Poets,’
one article suggested, ‘have
returned in ecstasy from a trip
among the Exuma Cays. Riotous
with blues, greens, silver strands,
and palms, the scene is enhanced
by little hill ranges…Even hardhearted men who shake the stock
exchanges with a nod have been
rendered inarticulate with delight
and wonder’.
The Nassau Magazine’s dramatic
prose evokes a melodramatic
heightening of social experience
that was characteristic of
postwar Nassau’s hectic white
leisure culture. In this inaugural
lecture, Erica Carter will show
how fashion parades, beach
barbecues, dances, the cinema,
and calypso music engaged white
tourists and expatriate residents
in repeated re-enactments of
life as melodrama. At the same
time, these melodramatic forms
reinvented ideas of race, class,
and gender in late colonial
society.
Focussing on the biographies of
two post-war Bahamas nurses
– Austrian émigré and colonial
nurse Erna Felfernig, and the
archipelago’s first black nursing
sister, later its first hospital
Matron, Hilda Bowen – this
lecture explores the interlocking
historical experiences that these
dual life histories evince. The
lived colonial melodrama of
Erna Felfernig’s Bahamian life is
contrasted with Hilda Bowen’s
photographs, scrapbooks, and
archived memorabilia. Bowen’s
accounts, it is suggested, rewrite
the melodrama of Bahamian
life, recasting its conventions,
and opening perspectives on
vernacular history-writing as
performance and play.
ERICA CARTER is Professor of German
and Film at King’s. Her publications
include How German is She? Postwar
West German Reconstruction and the
Consuming Woman (1997); The German
Cinema Book (2002, co-edited with Tim
Bergfelder and Deniz Göktürk); Dietrich’s
Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful
in Third Reich Film (2004); and Béla
Balázs: Early Film Theory (2010). She
currently runs the UK German Screen
Studies Network, and is co-director with
Lara Feigel of the Centre for Modern
Literature & Culture at King’s.
Image: Hilda Bowen with English nurses, with thanks to the Hilda Bowen Library, Nassau
Inaugural lecture
19.00-20.30 Tuesday 11 October 2016
Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of German & the Department of Film Studies
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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21
Canons & variations (... after Bach)
Bach’s Goldberg Variations of
1741, while considered one of
the masterworks of the High
Baroque, is also an anthology
of character pieces doubling as
canons and variations. Pianist
Rob Keeley has selected a
number of these character
pieces to perform. Three 20th
century composers, Dallapiccola,
Donatoni and Copland, all
of who considered Bach an
essential influence, will be
represented by analogous
collections: Copland’s steely
modernistic Piano Variations of
1930, Dallapiccola’s exquisitely
lyrical and dramatic ‘Quaderno
Musicale di Annalibera’ from
1952, and, from more recent
times, a selection from ‘Francoise
Variationen’ by Franco Donatoni,
each a variation, or ‘re-reading’ of
its immediate predecessor.
ROB KEELEY is Senior Lecturer in
Composition in the Department of Music
at King’s. He studied composition with
Oliver Knussen at the Royal College of
Music and later with Bernard Rose and
Robert Saxton at Magdalen College
Oxford. In 1988 he studied at the
Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome with
Franco Donatoni, and at the Tanglewood
Summer Music School, where he was the
Benjamin Britten Fellow in Composition.
Before joining King’s in 1993 Rob worked
as a freelance pianist and repetiteur,
working for Opera Factory, Almeida
Opera and Garsington Opera. He gives
frequent recitals (both solo and with
singers) covering a wide range, but with
a particular interest in exploring out-ofthe-way repertoire.
Image: details from JS Bach by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, 1748
Recital
19.30-20.30 Tuesday 11 October 2016
St Davids’ Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Music
22 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Not another bloody poet:
what is poetry doing coming
out of its “ghetto”?
The teaching of Creative Writing
exploded across UK universities
between 2001 and 2005. Twelve
years on, how has this affected
contemporary UK poetry?
‘Not another bloody poet’ was
supposedly said last year by
one of the literary cognoscenti
when yet another book of poems
won a prize normally seen as
reserved for other books. In 2015
two young poets, Sarah Howe
and Andrew McMillan, won an
unprecedented number of prizes
with their debut collections
including some previously won
only by novels and biographies.
Sarah won Sunday Times Young
Writer of the Year as well as the
TS Eliot Prize, Andrew won
Guardian First Book Award as
well as the Fenton Aldeburgh
First Collection Prize.
They will be joined by
distinguished poet Ruth Padel,
who has won the National Poetry
Prize, and whose books 52 Ways
of Looking at a Poem and The Poem
and the Journey chart the rise of
poetry in Creative Writing in UK
universities, and Parisa Ebrahimi,
alumna of King’s English
Department and one of today’s
most successful poetry editors.
The event will be chaired by
Declan Ryan, editor of Ambit
poetry magazine and King’s
international online poetry
journal Wild Court, whose first
poetry pamphlet came out
from Faber last year. The poets
will read from their work and
discuss with Parisa Ebrahimi,
of Chatto & Windus, what the
new generation of poets is doing,
why so many new audiences
are enjoying poetry today, and
why poetry is winning prizes
previously won only by other
genres. Does this surge of interest
in poetry across the UK spring
from the meteoric rise of Creative
Writing courses? Poetry is
sometimes called, by people who
don’t read it, ‘difficult’, ‘elitist’ or
‘a minority pursuit, like Morris
dancing’. Is it now coming out
of a “ghetto”, where people who
don’t read it prefer to keep it?
What does the public really think
of poetry today?
PARISA EBRAHIMI is commissioning
editor in poetry and fiction at Chatto &
Windus.
SARAH HOWE is a British poet, academic
and editor. Her first book Loop of Jade
won the 2015 TS Eliot Prize and Sunday
Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year
Award. She is founding editor of Prac
Crit, an online journal of poetry and
criticism, and is Leverhulme Fellow in
English at University College London.
ANDREW MCMILLAN’s Physical (2015),
was the first ever poetry collection to
win the Guardian First Book Award; it
also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First
Collection Prize and a Northern Writers’
Award. He lectures in Creative Writing at
Liverpool John Moores University.
RUTH PADEL is Reader in Poetry at
King’s, and is Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature. Chatto & Windus will
publish her tenth collection, Tidings – A
Christmas Journey in November.
DECLAN RYAN is Visiting Lecturer at
King’s and founder editor of King’s online
poetry magazine Wild Court. He is poetry
editor at Ambit. His pamphlet, ‘Faber
New Poets 12’, came out in 2014.
Image: with thanks to Ryan McGuire
Poetry reading & panel discussion
19.30-21.30 Tuesday 11 October 2016
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of English
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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23
Wednesday
12 October 2016
14.00-17.00Workshop Level unlocked:
facilitating women’s access to careers
in the games industry
17.00-18.00
Games playing session Xangqui (Chinese
Chess) see p5
17.30-19.30
Movement workshop Freedom from
form: playing with movement see p9
18.00-19.30
Panel discussion Patriotism & the ‘great
game’: the impact of Wilfred Owen’s
poetic testimony
18.00-19.30
Talk & performance At play in the
early modern tavern
19.00-21.00
Film screening & Q&A Mitote: a
documentary exploring the conflict of
protest & celebration in Mexico City
19.00-20.30
Panel debate Shift happens:
A panel debate about exclusion &
inclusivity in the games industry
19.00-20.30Lecture Constructing the ‘creative’ self
19.30-21.30Performance Radical Opera – Dido & ...
see p8
Image: Morris Dancers’ bells, iStock.
24 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Level unlocked:
facilitating women’s access to
careers in the games industry
The video game industry
is notoriously perceived as
exclusionary and intolerant,
particularly of women and others.
‘Re-Figuring Innovation in
Games’ (ReFig) is a collaborative
research project that addresses
the urgent need for equity and
diversity in order to stimulate
innovation and greater inclusion
in this significant domain of the
creative industries.
This workshop will feature case
study materials from initiatives
aimed at supporting women’s
access to the games industry in
Canada, Ireland and the UK.
It will feature presentations by
key ReFig games industry and
games education researchers
and will be supported by young
women currently working in
games design. We welcome those
interested in accessing the games
industry at all levels as well as
those wishing to support this
access, for example educators at
secondary, tertiary and beyond;
advocacy groups; employers
seeking guidance on inclusive
recruitment strategies and
structures; and academics.
All the workshop facilitators are
researchers on the Re-Figuring
Innovation in Games project.
SARAH ATKINSON is Senior Lecturer in
Digital Cultures at King’s.
HELEN KENNEDY is Head of Media at the
University of Brighton.
APHRA KERR is Senior Lecturer at the
Department of Sociology at Maynooth
University, Ireland.
CAROLINE PELLETIER is Senior Lecturer
at London Knowledge Lab, Institute of
Education.
ALISON HARVERY is Lecturer in Media
and Communication at University of
Leicester.
ReFig
This workshop is one of three events in this festival that is inspired by the issues and
aims that fuel ReFig. For more information about this five year international research
collaboration, and its approaches to diversity and equity in the global games industry and
games culture, please visit their website at www.refig.ca
Image: games console, pixabay
Workshop
14.00-17.00 Wednesday 12 October 2016
River Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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25
Patriotism & the ‘great game’:
the impact of Wilfred Owen’s
poetic testimony
This panel will discuss
Wilfred Owen’s devastating
accounts of the conditions of
war during World War One
and his denouncement of the
patriotism that persuaded an
entire generation of young men
to ‘step in line’ and play the ‘great
game’ of war. This patriotic call
to arms was a global affair, as
can be seen in the first verse of
A Lockhead’s poem, (reproduced
in part below), published in both
the Times and The Poverty Bay
Herald, New Zealand on 26th
January 1915.
This discussion serves as an
introduction and accompaniment
to the performance of ‘The Pity
of War’, which will take place on
Thursday 13 October (see p31) in
King’s Chapel. Penny Rimbaud
will perform the war poems of
Owen accompanied by Liam
Noble and Kate Shortt on piano
and cello with visuals by Gee
Vaucher. Both panel discussion
and performance seek not to
glorify victory, but to remember
the terrible darkness brought by
war.
PENNY RIMBAUD is the author of
countless books, both of poetry and
polemic, as well as a founding member of
the iconic group Crass.
PHIL SUTCLIFFE is the editor of Nobody of
Any Importance: A Foot Soldier’s Memoir
of World War I, his father Sam’s account
of his personal experience at Gallipoli,
the Somme, Arras and eight months as a
prisoner of war.
JAN WILLEM HONIG is Senior Lecturer in
the Department of War Studies at King’s.
His best known work is Srebrenica:
Record of a War Crime.
ORKEDEH BEHROUZAN is a physician,
medical anthropologist, and lecturer
in the department of Global Health
and Social Medicine. She is the author
of Prozak Diaries: psychiatry and
generational memory in Iran and has
experience as a cultural consultant in
areas of health and education in the US
and the UK.
This panel discussion is chaired by
PENELOPE QUINTON.
Above: Poverty Bay Herald, Volume xlii, Issue 13596, 26 January 1915, source: National Library of New Zealand
Image: Step into your place / poster printed by David Allen & Sons Ld., Harrow, Middlesex, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 1915; Library of Congress
Panel discussion
18.00-19.30 Wednesday 12 October 2016
River Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by King’s Doctoral Training School, in partnership with the School of Global Health &
Social Medicine and the Arts & Conflict Hub in the Department of War Studies.
26 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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At play in the early modern tavern
The early modern tavern was
a place for play. Card games,
play performances, conjuring,
and gambling were common,
alongside more unusual events
such as transvestite births,
mumming, and masking. Inns
and taverns were venues for
plays, opportunities for making
a quick profit at the expense of
the foolish, and for playing with
identity and even sexuality. They
were hybrid places, halfway
between the public space and the
domestic interior. They were not,
however, ‘private’ places in the
modern sense of the term, and
anyone who treated them as such
would soon be disabused.
In this event, we invite you to
a recreation of an early modern
tavern, with an emphasis on
its songs, performances, and
gambling games. In a series of
short talks and performances, we
will explore the games, songs,
and plays that early modern
drinkers may have experienced
in the tavern. Singers from King’s
Music Department and readers
from English and History will
perform the ballads and plays
of the early modern tavern, and
early modern playing cards will
be provided for some period card
games.
EMILY BUTTERWORTH is Senior
Lecturer in French. Her research
focuses on scandal, slander, and
other forms of deviant and excessive
speech in the early modern period.
LAURA GOWING is Professor of
Early Modern British History. Her
research focuses on the history
of sex, gender, language, and the
body in the early modern period.
GABRIELLA INFANTE is a PhD
student. Her research explores
textuality and performativity in
English Restoration drama.
LUCY MUNRO is Reader in Early
Modern English Literature. Her
research interests include early
modern drama and archaism in early
modern English literary culture.
Image: detail from ‘Win at First, Lose at Last’, Houghton Library EBB65, EBBA 35056.
Talk & performance
18.00-19.30 Wednesday 12 October 2016
Tutu’s, Macadam Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Centre for Early Modern Studies
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
27
Mitote: a documentary exploring
the conflict of protest & celebration
in Mexico City
Mitote – a native Mexican
word – translates variously as ‘a
loud performance or dance; an
unbridled celebration; a brawl; an
uproar’. When Mexicans call for
one another to ‘armar un mitote’,
they signal a protest as much as
they do a large-scale party or
game. Eugenio Polgovsky’s third
feature-length documentary,
Mitote (2012), provides a unique
experience of this pointedly
Mexican clash of the frantically
ludic with the deadly serious.
The documentary is set in 2010
and focusses on Zócalo, the
enormous square at the heart
of Mexico’s overpopulated
capital. At this time, Mexico
City was teeming with events
commemorating the 200th
anniversary of the nation’s
Independence and the centenary
of its Revolution. As well as the
usual mass of tourists, vendors
and peddlers, the square
attracted hordes of football fans,
drawn by the large ‘Televisa’
sponsored screens showing
the South African World Cup.
Zócalo is also a site of protest,
however, and, in response to
the government takeover of
the national grid, workers from
the Union of Energy Labour
occupied the square. As jubilant
fans jostle against marginalised
hunger strikers, Mitote explores
the juxtaposition of celebration
and turmoil.
Forgoing the use of a narrator,
Polgovsky lets the people do the
talking. This intimate narrative
reveals the paradoxical make-up
of the culture of the square, as it
oscillates between a festival and
a wake; between modernity and
what little was left of the original
Mexico before the Spanish
conquest. The film screening will
be followed by a Q&A session
with the director, Eugenio
Polgovsky.
EUGENIO POLGOVSKY is an independent
visual artist and film director, editor,
cinematographer, sound designer,
producer, and founder of Tecolote Films.
He has made various documentaries,
including Tropic of Cancer (2004), The
Inheritors (2008), Mitote (2012), and
A Leap of Life (2014). He also makes
video art works, notably Lightbyrinth,
inspired by James C. Maxwell’s research
on colour, light and film. Polgovsky’s
films have been featured in New York’s
MoMA (2006) and the festivals of
Cannes (2005), Venice (2008), Berlin
(2009), and Rome (2012). He has
received over thirty awards worldwide,
including the 2005 Joris Ivens prize in
the Festival Cinema du Réel (Paris),
and four Mexican Academy Awards.
Image: stills from Mitote © name?
Film screening & Q&A
19.00-21.00 Wednesday 12 October 2016
Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Centre for Mexican Studies UNAM-UK
28 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Shift happens: a panel debate
about exclusion & inclusivity in
the games industry
The games industry has
the capacity to deliver rich,
meaningful, creative and
stimulating cultural experiences
that can also contribute new
tools for education and new
avenues for economic prosperity.
A diverse, inclusive and
representative workforce will
ensure that it achieves this with
opportunities for all. However,
the current landscape is very
far from this ideal. To give this
ambition any chance of success
we will need the industry,
academics, advocacy groups
and educators to work together
on a diverse range of tactics and
strategies and to collaborate
on initiatives that contribute to
this transformation. Although
the focus here is on the games
industry these are challenges
faced by many other science and
technology based domains and
successful approaches developed
here would and should be
applicable elsewhere.
This panel will provide the
platform for a meaningful debate
between representatives from
the games industry seeking
to employ and address a
more diverse community and
representatives of advocacy
groups or initiatives which seek
to support the access of girls and
young women. The panel will
feature invited contributions from
women working in the games
industry, games press, and games
research. The discussion will
be chaired by Helen Kennedy,
one of the project leaders of
‘Re-Figuring Innovation in
Games’ (ReFig), a collaborative
research project that addresses
this urgent need for equity,
diversity and innovation. Not
only will this discussion highlight
the existing activity already
in place, it aims at stimulating
greater participation and wider
understanding of the enormity
of the challenges ahead and
the cultural and economic
significance of what is at stake in
this endeavour.
Please see the event webpage for more
information on the speakers
ReFig
This panel discussion is one of three
events in this festival that is inspired by
the issues and aims that fuel ReFig. For
more information about this five year
international research collaboration, and
its approaches to diversity and equity
in the global games industry and games
culture, please visit their website at
www.refig.ca.
Image: minecraft landscape, pixabay
Panel debate
19.00-20.30 Wednesday 12 October
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
29
Constructing the ‘creative’ self
Radical Animal: what play tells us about culture, evolution, human potential and
societal change
We live in a society which
obsesses about ‘creativity’ and
‘innovation’. Creativity is seen
as the special ingredient that
can improve any organisation
or institution in our lives –
something to be sprinkled over
otherwise grey and moribund
situations, somehow unlocking
reserves of motivation in
routinised employees.
Yet what so many of these
initiatives fail to understand
are the genuine and enduring
conditions of human creativity,
and what they imply for how we
design our productive and civic
lives. Evolutionary psychology,
ethology/primatology and
affective neuroscience all point
to the behaviours and capacities
gathered under the title of ‘play’
as the true seat of our creative
lives.
Educationalists (and every
parent) knows how inexhaustible
the appetite for play is in
children’s lives. Educational
reform (for example, calls for a 3-7
play-based kindergarten system)
is amassing multidisciplinary
evidence to show how much
later learning depends on a
vigorous play-life at this crucial
developmental stage.
But the same mind and body
sciences also show that our
‘neotenic’ human natures –
where we maintain youthful
responsiveness throughout our
adult life-span – afford many
more opportunities for play (or its
adult manifestations in culture,
sports, technology, science, and
so on). We are ‘radical animals’,
in that sense. But are we radical
enough about the societal
structures that could support this
‘well-becoming’?
In this lecture, its title taken
from his (and Indra Adnan’s)
forthcoming book, Pat Kane
will draw connections across a
range of disciplines to make a
different case for the ‘creative
and innovative’ society – one
that fully answers the powerful
evolutionary call of play.
PAT KANE is a musician, writer, activist
and consultant. His 2004 book The Play
Ethic (www.theplayethic.com) became
the basis of a global consultancy on
issues of creativity, innovation and
the power and potential of play. He
was Rector of Glasgow University
in the early 90s, a founding editor
of The Sunday Herald newspaper in
1999, a leading figure in the Scottish
independence campaign of 2012-14,
and is currently curator of FutureFest
in London (www.futurefest.org). He
writes, sings and plays with his brother
Gregory in the band ‘Hue And Cry’.
Image: Pat Kane by Martin McCready
Lecture
19.00-20.30 Wednesday 12 October 2016
Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Arts & Humanities Research Institute
30 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Thursday
13 October 2016
11.00-21.00Installation Three King’s see p10
14.30-17.00 Workshop Playing with medieval visions,
sounds & sensations see p12
17.00-18.00
Games playing session Shogi see p5
18.00-19.30Workshop Playing with medieval visions,
sounds & sensations see p12
18.00-20.00
Talk & in conversation In the ruins of the
university: instition in personal &
public history
18.30-20.00
Panel discussion Life gamified: practices
of the quantified self
18.30-20.30Performance The pity of war
19.30-21.30Performance Radical opera – Dido & ...
see p8
In the ruins of the university:
institution in personal & public history
‘Goethe: genius [is] posthumous productivity. All institution is in this sense genius.’
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 1955
Alan Read, writes:
‘The title for my talk is a
conflation of two sources that
would appear to mark two ends
of a cycle between promise
and petrification. The first a
bowdlerization of Bill Readings’,
now two decade-old work, The
University in Ruins published
after his untimely death. The
second, the title of a course
taught by Maurice MerleauPonty at the College de France
in 1954-1955 shortly before Bill
Readings, and I, were born.
In my talk I would like to put this
lecture within a University, and
this book about a University, to
work to explore the relationship
between the very new and the
very old aspects of our everevolving institution. I will
draw on a recent collaboration
between the Performance
Foundation (which I direct)
and theatre makers Forster &
Heighes whose triptych, Three
King’s, has just been screening as
part of the Arts & Humanities
Festival in the Council Room
(see page 10). Three King’s is a
project that explores the familiar
and less familiar spaces of King’s,
encouraging new ways of looking
at the (literal and figurative)
architecture of institution.’
ALAN READ is a writer and broadcaster
and currently Professor of Theatre at
King’s and Director of the Performance
Foundation. His is the author of Theatre
and Everyday Life, Theatre Intimacy and
Engagement, and Theatre and Law.
Image: Plant Sciences, King’s College London, Herne Hill, 2013, with thanks to Alan Read
Talk, followed by ‘in conversation’ with Forster & Heighes
18.00-20.00 Thursday 13 October 2016
Talk repeated as performative lecture
18.00-19.00 Monday 17 October 2016
Council Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of English and the Arts & Humanities Research Institute
32 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Life gamified:
practices of the quantified self
Self-measurement and tracking
have become commonplace
practices in recent years. Spurred
by movements such as the
Quantified Self, an increasing
number of people around
the world are embracing this
culture of self-quantification
and monitoring in the spirit
of improving their health and
wellbeing, and charting their
fitness progress. With the
explosion of apps and devices
enabling the data capturing and
evaluation of the individual’s
everyday activities, behaviours
and habits, we are becoming ever
more reliant on such technologies
to manage and assess various
spheres of our lives including
work, leisure, health and even
sex. Life itself is increasingly
gamified.
In this panel discussion, we
will address the rising trend of
self-tracking and quantification,
examining their applications
as well as implications, and
highlighting the ways in which
the boundaries between work
and play, leisure and labour,
private and public are becoming
increasingly blurred as a result of
the infiltration of smart wearable
technologies in everyday
practices.
BTIHAJ AJANA is Senior Lecturer in
Culture, Digital Humanities and Creative
Industries at King’s College London.
She is also Associate Professor and
Marie Curie Fellow (COFUND) at the
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies
where she is currently undertaking a
research project on self-tracking and
the Quantified Self culture. She is the
author of the book, Governing through
Biometrics: The Biopolitics of Identity
(2013).
PAOLO RUFFINO is Lecturer in Media
Studies at the University of Lincoln, and
is the author and editor of numerous
publications, including the book
Rethinking Gamification (2014) and a
special issue of the peer-reviewed
journal GAME on the topic of ‘Video
game subcultures’ (2014). He is also
a founding member of the media art
collective IOCOSE.
FEDERICA LUCIVERO is a Marie
Curie Fellow at the Global Health and
Social Medicine department at King’s
College London. Her current project
investigates the ethical challenges
of digital technologies in healthcare,
specifically looking at mobile apps and
personal health records. She serves
as King’s representative in the Working
Group on mHealth guidelines at the
European Commission.
Image: Colourbox
Panel discussion
18.30-20.00 Thursday 13 October 2016
Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Departments of Digital Humanities and Culture, Media & Creative Industries
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
33
The pity of war
In Penny Rimbaud’s performance
of the war poems of Wilfred
Owen he will be accompanied by
Liam Noble and Kate Shortt on
piano and cello, with visuals by
Gee Vaucher.
This performance is in memory
not of victory but of the terrible
darkness brought by war; in
remembrance of those on both
sides of the divide who died for
their leaders and the illusions that
they were fed during the patriotic
war games of the First World War.
Penny Rimbaud writes: ‘I was a
war baby who, like many, didn’t
meet their father until they were
three or four, which too often was
too late. My father brought the
war home with him. He never
much spoke of it, rather he was
imbued with it; it seeped from
his every pore. He was distant,
absent and cold, and he made
me feel fearful. Then how was
I to know what horrors had so
muted him, horrors which in
his imaginings and his dreams
would forever be present? He
would speak of “the real world”
and how he’d fought for my
freedom, but as I grew older I
became increasingly cautious
of the conditional nature of that
freedom. I’d seen pictures of the
death camps, knew about atom
bombs and was aware of the
carnage, but, beyond a sense of
uninformed sorrow, I grew to feel
loathing and contempt for what
seemed be the utter senselessness
of it all. My father’s war and his
real world had to me become
synonymous.
In my late teens I was introduced
to the poetry of Wilfred Owen
and from one line in his “Strange
Meeting” I was awoken to an
entirely new way of being – “I
am the enemy you killed, my
friend” – no malice, no terrible
vengeance, only love; a true
expression of human possibility
beyond the bitter brutality
of jingoistic cant. In Owen’s
selfless tenderness I had at last
found something that made
sense within the madness of
the warring material world; we
are no more, no less than the
other, divided only by the fall
from grace. It was from this
illumination that I became an
active pacifist committed to the
promotion of peace and love.
It is, then, only natural that
I chose to commit myself
to present Owen’s poems
throughout the centenary years
of the euphemistic ‘Great War’.
In doing so I am able to honour
the great gift that he gave
through his life, his works and his
untimely death.’
PENNY RIMBAUD is the author of
countless books, both of poetry and
polemic, as well as a founding member of
the iconic group Crass.
LIAM NOBLE is Lecturer in Jazz at
Birmingham Conservatoire and Trinity
College of Music. He has published
4 volumes of transcriptions of the
Bill Evans Trio, and a book of original
compositions, Jazz Piano: An In Depth
Look at the Styles of the Masters.
KATE SHORTT is a pianist, cello player,
and songwriter. She won Performer of
the Year award at the London Palladium.
GEE VAUCHER started gaining
recognition designing politically
outspoken record covers and
newsletters for anarcho-punk band
Crass in the 80s. Her work became a
strong influence for protest art as well
as the punk and anarchist aesthetic of
her time.
Image: ‘Penny Rimbaud in the long grass’ by Pennie Quinton
Performance
18.30-20.30 Thursday 13 October 2016
Chapel, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Chaplaincy at King’s College London in partnership with the
King’s Doctoral Training School, the Arts & Conflict Hub in the Department of War Studies,
organised by Global Health & Social Medicine PhD candidate Penelope Quinton
34 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Friday
14 October 2016
10.00-17.30Exhibition Three Kings see p10
13.00-14.00Games Child’s play: translation games –
run and jump games
15.00-17.00 Practical art workshop Drawing life: playing poetically see p11
15.00-16.00
Cover performance by King’s students
Radical opera: Dido & ... see p8
16.00-17.00Games Child’s play: translation games –
word games
18.00-20.00
Practical art workshop Drawing life:
playing poetically see p11
18.00-18.00
(24hr)
Games Jam XX+ Games Jam London
18.30-19.30
Games & film screening Child’s play:
translation games
18.30-20.00
Panel discussion Is it only a game?
19.00-21.00
Film screening & talk Play time:
the day off, from Maupassant to Renoir
19.30-21.30Performance Radical opera: Dido & ...
see p9
19.30-21.00
Musical & poetic performance Tragic
play: music in the face of death
Child’s play: translation games
Is there a difference between
Hopscotch, ‘Rayuela’ and
‘Himmel und Hölle’? When
Venezuelan children play ‘Pollito
Inglés’ (little English chick),
Spanish children play ‘Escondite
inglés’ (English hide and seek)
and children in the Dominican
Republic play ‘Mariposita es’ (It’s
a little butterfly), do they all play
the same game?
Games played by children
often follow similar rules across
cultures, but not always and,
when they do, there are often
subtle but not insignificant
differences. The Translation
Games project has created an
international archive of child’s
play based on the multicultural
microcosm of King’s College
London. Memories of childhood
games played by British and
international students and
staff, and individuals beyond
the university were collected.
The names and rules of these
games have been archived and
translated: translated into the
English language, and translated
into their English equivalent
game. The project also conducted
a series of interviews and ‘game
sessions’; these have been made
into a short film to be screened in
the evening.
In this dynamic event, the
findings of the Translation
Games project will be presented
to the public for the first time.
We will play selected games in
multiple languages, including a
new multilingual game, designed
especially for the festival. Games,
their rules and translations will
be available on fliers throughout
the festival with an invitation
to play. During the course of
the afternoon, there will be
two sessions of game playing,
followed by the film screening.
Participants are not obliged to
attend all sessions, and are free
to join in with whichever one(s)
they fancy.
RICARDA VIDAL is a translator, curator,
and Lecturer in the Department of
Culture, Media & Creative Industries at
King’s. She is the author of Death and
Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of
Romantic Futurisms (2013) and recently
co-edited (with Ingo Cornils) Alternative
Worlds: Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900
(2014).
CAROLIN HUTH has an MA in Cultural and
Creative Industries. She has worked as a
policy consultant for urban development
in Berlin and produced a performance
project within Berlin’s liberal arts scene.
She is currently research assistant on
the Child’s Play project.
MARIA-JOSÉ BLANCO is Lecturer in
20th-century Spanish literature, language
and translation. Recent publications
include Life-writing in Carmen Martín
Gaite’s Cuadernos de todo and her Novels
of the 1990s (2013), and Feminine Singular:
Women Growing up through Life-Writing in
the Luso-Hispanic World (2016).
TRANSLATION GAMES was launched at
King’s College London in 2013 and is led
by Ricarda Vidal. This project explores
the theory and practice of translation
within literature, the fine arts, and
textile design as well as across these
disciplines via rule-based games,
www.translationgames.net.
Image: Maria-José Blanco
Games & film screening
Friday 14 October 2016
13.00-14.00 – run and jump games and an installation by Matheson Marcault
Quad, Strand Campus
16.00-17.00 – word games
18.30-19.30 – introductory talk, film screening, and games with strings
River Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries
and the Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies
36 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
XX+ Games Jam London
We are inviting 24 women
to come together over 24
hours to collaborate in small
interdisciplinary teams to
conceive, design and prototype
a computer game. This
event will be taking place in
London but participants will
be part of a global all female
games jam which will be be
staged simultaneously in other
international locations including
Brighton, Bristol, Toronto, and
Montreal. The XX+ games jam
is taking place during the period
around Ada Lovelace Day and
forms part of a global grass
roots infrastructure of activities
which celebrate women’s
creative participation in science,
technology, engineering and
mathematics.
The resulting games will be
judged by a panel of experts
drawn from the games press,
industry and advocacy groups.
There will be a series of
sponsored prizes in each location
as well as one major award for the
most outstanding game overall.
The judging and prize giving will
be streamed in each location.
ReFig
This Games Jam is one of three events
in this festival that is inspired by the
issues and aims that fuel ReFig. For
more information about this five year
international research collaboration, and
its approaches to diversity and equity
in the global games industry and games
culture, please visit their website at
www.refig.ca.
We are actively seeking 24 participants
for our London event. To take part,
please submit 100 words to h.kennedy@
brighton.ac.uk outlining why this
opportunity would be of benefit to you
and what skills you would bring to a
collaboration. Deadline for submissions
is: 30 September. You will be notified of
your participation within 48 hours of the
close of submission. Judging will take
place and results will be announced in the
afternoon of the following day.
If you would be interested in participating
in any of the other locations contact
Helen Kennedy:
[email protected]
The UK events are coordinated by:
Sarah Atkinson, Helen W Kennedy and
Constance Fleuriot.
Image: Gemma Thomson
Games Jam
18.00 Friday 14 October 2016 – 18.00 Saturday 15 October 2016 (24hr)
Small Committee Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
37
Is it only a game?
Sports and games play a central
role in many people’s lives.
But what exactly is their place
in the scheme of things? Are
they a species of play, a way of
taking time off from meeting
the necessities of life? Or are
they more important, expressing
human values that go beyond
that? Join a panel of philosophers,
political theorists and sports
lovers to discuss whether it is,
ultimately, only a game.
LED BY
SACHA GOLOB is a Lecturer in
Philosophy. From 2009 to 2012 he was a
Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse,
Cambridge. He has published extensively
on modern European Philosophy.
JOHN TASIOULAS is a Professor in
the Dickson Poon School of Law. His
research focuses on the philosophy of
law. His forthcoming monograph is called
Human Rights: From Morality to Law.
DAVID PAPINEAU is a Professor of
Philosophy of Science. He was President
of the British Society for the Philosophy
of Science for 1993-5, of the Mind
Association for 2009-10, and of the
Aristotelian Society for 2013-4. He works
on issues in metaphysics, philosophy of
science, and the philosophy of mind and
psychology.
SARAH FINE is a Lecturer in
Philosophy. Before joining King’s,
she was a Research Fellow at
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Her forthcoming book is called
Immigration and the Right to Exclude.
DAVID OWENS is a Professor of
Philosophy. His most recent book
Shaping the Normative Landscape
focuses on blame, wronging and
obligation and their involvement in
forgiveness, friendship, promising
and consent.
Image: King’s Rugby Club, with thanks to Greg Funnell
Panel discussion
18.30-20.00 Friday 14 October 2016
Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Philosophy
38 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
Play time: the day off,
from Maupassant to Renoir
When the Parisian shopkeeper,
Monsieur Dufour, takes his
family for a day out in the
countryside, a chance encounter
with two young, strapping
boaters brings them rather more
than they had bargained for...
Like droves of petty bourgeois
families, the Dufours ventured
into the Parisian suburbs in
pursuit of tranquility, fresh air,
the bucolic – an antidote to the
claustrophobia of home and
workplace. For Dufour’s playful
wife and sensitive daughter,
however, the wholesome
pleasures of the excursion take
on a more permissive character,
as the moment of liberation
culminates in a double scene of
seduction.
Jean Renoir’s 1936 film Partie de
Campagne (A Day in the Country)
is based on Guy de Maupassant’s
short story of 1881. A screening
of this film will be followed by
a talk, which will explore the
relationship between fiction and
film, and will look at some of the
famous Impressionist paintings of
leisure time that are referenced
by both writer and filmmaker –
including those of Jean Renoir’s
father, Pierre-Auguste. Both
Maupassant and Renoir parody
the lower middle classes at play,
together with their dreams of a
more authentic way of living. But
though we are invited to laugh at
the Dufour family’s naivety, the
ideals accompanying their escape
from work acquire a sentimental
poignancy, prompting us to
reflect on what it is we want and
expect from our own day out.
CLAIRE WHITE is Lecturer in French at
King’s. She specialises in nineteenthcentury French literature and art. Her
book, Work and Leisure in Late NineteenthCentury French Literature and Visual
Culture: Time, Politics and Class, was
published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.
The film is in French with English subtitles.
Image: still from Partie de Campagne, © Anne-Marie et Jean-Pierre Marchand © Photo CNAC/MNAM Dist. RMN-Grand Palais – © Droits réservés
Film screening & talk
19.00-21.00 Friday 14 October 2016
Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of French
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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39
Tragic play:
music in the face of death
Franz Schubert, was, according
to Franz Liszt, the most
poetic musician who ever
lived. Schubert’s melodies and
harmonies capture feeling as it
truly is, free from sentimental
exaggeration, with a simplicity
that lifts us up at the very
moment we face the darkest loss.
The Endellion Quartet will begin
their performance with a short
fragment that Schubert wrote in
1820, as he embarked on what
we now call his mature phase of
composition. Quartettsatz D 703
is a string quartet he started at
23 and never finished. Brahms
edited and published it after
Schubert died of syphilis in 1828
– aged just 31.
The Endellion will also play
Quartet 13 and 14. Astonishingly,
Schubert wrote these two
masterpieces of the chamber
music repertoire in two months,
in 1824. Both are imbued with
his knowledge of impending
death and the likelihood of
insanity from the final stage of
syphilis. Yet this knowledge
also magnified his sensitivity to
life. Knowing his genius would
not have the chance to flower
over decades, he crammed his
astonishing body of mature work
into a few years.
Both pieces are sublime, but they
could not be more different. The
exquisite, delicately haunting
Quartet 13 in A Minor has all
the lyric resonance of Schubert’s
Lieder, and reprises music from
his music for a play, Rosamunde,
while Quartet 14 in D Minor,
known as Death and the Maiden,
has the energy of a tornado
and has inspired nearly two
centuries of painting and drama.
These quartets are a passionate
testament to the human capacity
for celebrating, in the face of
death, the blaze, tenderness and
also the sweetness of life.
Between the musical
performances, Ruth Padel will
read her new sequence of poems
on Schubert.
THE ENDELLION STRING QUARTET, with
Andrew Watkinson and Ralph de Souza
on violin, Garfield Jackson on viola and
David Waterman on cello, is ‘arguably
the finest quartet in Britain, playing with
poise, true intonation, excellent balance
and beautiful tone’ (New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians). The quartet
was formed in 1979 and named after St
Endellion in Cornwall. They have been
‘Quartet in Residence’ at Cambridge
University since 1992, and continue to
perform globally.
RUTH PADEL is an award winning poet,
and Reader in Poetry at King’s. She has
published nine poetry collections and
several much-loved books on reading
contemporary poetry. Her new collection
Tidings – A Christmas Journey, will come
out in November from Chatto & Windus.
Image: pixabay
Musical & poetic performance
19.30-21.00 Friday 14 October 2016
Chapel, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of English and ‘Poetry And…’
40 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Monday
17 October 2016
14.30-17.00 &
Workshop Playing with medieval visions,
sounds & sensations see p12
18.00-19.00
Performative talk In the ruins of the
university: institution in personal &
public history see p32
18.00-19.30Workshop Playing with medieval visions,
sounds & sensations see p12
18.30-20.00
Talk & guided walk An illuminating night
talk & walk around Aldwych
18.30-20.00
Dance workshop Redoute:
a 1790s Viennese ball
18.30-20.30 Lecture Gamification of Russian media
& politics
19.00-20.00Lecture Aristophanic comedy between
play (paidiá) and education (paideía)
19.00-20.30
Inaugural lecture The art of noise:
interwar modernism & the politics
of sound
19.30-22.00Performance Cervantes at play:
a series of performances
An illuminating night talk & walk
around Aldwych
Public street lights play a
fundamental role in our
experience of the city at
night, yet we rarely notice
street lights themselves: the
lighting masts, ‘furniture’,
or the quality of the light.
Presented by King’s College
London’s Joanne Entwistle,
her colleagues from the
Configuring Light Team at the
LSE, and lighting designers at
Speirs+Major (S+M), this talk
will highlight the social relevance
of public realm lighting for our
experience of the city at night.
It will focus on the importance
of lighting for our way-finding
and sense of safety and security,
as well as the use of lighting to
demarcate major landmarks that
would otherwise be lost at night
and to therefore help ‘brand’ the
modern city.
The talk will be followed by a
night walk around Aldwych and
Westminster with two lighting
designers, Satu Streatfield and
Benz Roos from leading London
lighting design firm S+M, to
show the important ways in
which different forms of street
lighting affect our sense of
space and place. The streets of
London tell the story of modern
lighting, from gas lights (still in
evidence in Pimlico) to sodium
lighting and modern LEDs. This
rich mosaic of different lighting
technologies will be highlighted
during the walk, and the relative
qualities of light measured and
described.
JOANNE ENTWISTLE is a co-founder of
‘Configuring Light/Staging the Social’
and Senior Lecturer in the Department
of Culture, Media & Creative Industries
at King’s. She has published extensively
on the sociology of fashion, dress and
the body, and aesthetic markets and
economies. Her forthcoming publications
include: Fashioning Models: Image,
Text, Industry, co-edited with Elizabeth
Wissinger.
DON SLATER is a co-founder of
‘Configuring Light/Staging the Social’
and Associate Professor (Reader)
in Sociology at the LSE. His current
research builds on an extensive research
and publishing record in the sociology
of material culture and economic life,
new media and digital culture and visual
culture. His publications include: New
Media, Development and Globalization:
Making Connections in the Global South
(2013).
BENZ ROOS is Design Associate at S+M.
Benz studied Architectural Design at the
Royal Art Academy, The Hague, and went
on to study for a Masters in Architectural
Lighting Design at the University of
Wismar, Germany. He joined S+M in
2008, and became a Design Associate in
2016. Benz has worked on a number of
projects, including heading up the design
for ‘In Lumine Tuo…’, an animated light
installation in Utrecht, which won the
IALD’s Radiance Award in 2014.
Image: Nick Wood
SATU STREATFIELD is Design Associate
at S+M. She leads the team specialising
in urban design and lighting strategies
and has worked on a variety of strategies
for cities/areas including Bath, Derby
and London’s West End, as well as public
realm projects including Wharf Green
in Swindon, Granary Square in King’s
Cross, Channel 4’s Big 4, Lights over
Kruunuvuorenranta in Helsinki and the
‘lighting overlay’ for LOCOG during the
London 2012 Olympic Games.
Talk & guided walk
18.30-19.00 (talk), 19.00-20.00 (walk) Monday 17 October 2016
Small Committee Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Configuring Light Project at LSE, in partnership with Speirs+Major
42 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Redoute: a 1790s Viennese ball
In late-eighteenth-century
Vienna, they knew how to play.
From the 1760s on, Habsburg
rulers had taken steps to open
up the city’s dance halls to the
public. (Previously, only the
nobility enjoyed access to these
spaces.) The public balls that
now took place in these dance
halls proved a very popular form
of entertainment, attended by
numerous citizens from across
the social spectrum. During the
‘Carnival’ period before Lent,
two balls a week were held in
the imperial residence, open to
anyone who could afford a ticket.
The two main dances performed
by all at these events were the
minuet and the German dance
(which would later become the
waltz). The fact that so many
people danced the minuet at
these balls is important for music
history: it means that the same
people, attending concerts,
would listen to the minuet
movements of symphonies and
quartets with the knowledge of
the dance steps. The knowledge
of the dance would inform their
engagement with this music.
In this event, participants will
learn to party like it’s 1792. Mary
Collins will play the role of
dancing master. In a workshop
session, she will teach all willing
participants the steps for a basic
minuet and German dance.
(Spectators are also welcome,
but everyone is encouraged
to participate to the best of
their ability.) A small ensemble
directed by Joseph Fort will
provide the music, using minuets
and German dances composed
by Haydn for a public ball in
Vienna in 1792. Following the
workshop, all participants will
perform the dances, together, as
if at the ball itself.
Dance workshop
18.30-20.00 Monday 17 October 2016
Great Hall, King’s Building, Strand Campus
MARY COLLINS is an early dance
specialist whose research and teaching
approach has inspired musicians to
look afresh at the dance music which
is at the heart of the Renaissance and
Baroque repertoire. A practitioner and
researcher, she performs regularly
with the London Handel Players and
Florilegium, giving master classes,
lecture-recitals and workshops to
dancers and musicians throughout the
world.
JOSEPH FORT is College Organist
& Director of the Chapel Choir, and
Lecturer in Music at King’s College
London. He completed a PhD at Harvard
University, and is currently preparing
this research for publication. He has
presented at conferences including the
American Musicological Society annual
meeting, the Mozart Society of America
biennial meeting, and the Oxford Dance
Symposium.
Image: Joseph Schütz, Maskenball im redoutensaal der wiener hofburg um 1815 radierung koloriert.
With thanks to Vienna Museum
Presented by the Department of Music
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Gamification of Russian
media & politics
The relationship between
Russian media and politics is
often considered, by the west, to
be a collusion of opposites. In one
regard, the Russian media system
is thought of as a hierarchal
structure, and its audiences,
the passive and obedient
recipients of the government
message. In another regard, it
is a political process, framed
by a debate between pro- and
anti-government forces that are,
at different times, conceptualised
as official and unofficial politics,
conservative and oppositional
parties, and so on. This approach
serves a specific ideological
purpose in the west, and is rooted
in the Cold War paradigm which
remains largely unchanged since
the dissolution of the USSR.
In this lecture, Vlad Strukov
offers a more complex and
nuanced interpretation of the
iterations between media,
governance and politics
in contemporary Russia.
Gamification is a general term
which defines the application
of ludic concepts and principles
to non-game contexts. This
lecture will offer analysis on
recent developments in Russian
media and politics (since the
annexation of Crimea) through
the lens of gamification. Dr
Strukov will draw on a range
of case studies, including a
number of cross-media and
multi-platform events, such as
Meduza and Yekaterinburg TV
media outlets, celebrations of
the Victory Day, and Allods
Online Massively multiplayer
online role-playing game.
VLAD STRUKOV is Associate Professor in
Film and Digital Culture at the University
of Leeds, and Editor of Studies in
Russian, Eurasian and Central European
New Media. His latest publication is
Contemporary Russian Cinema: Symbols
of a New Era.
Image: yandex.ru
Lecture
18.30-20.30 Monday 17 October 2016
Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Modern Language Centre
44 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Aristophanic comedy between
play (paidiá) & education (paideía)
How serious was the Old
Comedy of democratic Athens,
of which our sole surviving
author is Aristophanes?
Aristophanes claimed that his
comic theatre was as educational
as it was pleasurable. Looking at
the texts of his plays alongside
images of ancient Athenian
pottery, this illustrated talk will
cast new light on the relationship
between play and education
in Aristophanic comedy.
It is in his play Clouds that
Aristophanes most explicitly
asserts his belief that comic
poets are, as much as tragedians,
‘teachers’ of the citizen body.
This revision of the civic role
of comedy can be seen in his
innovative use of the words
‘play’ (paidiá, emphasis on the
final syllable) and ‘education’
(paideía, emphasis on the
penultimate syllable).
Edith Hall will examine two
aspects of the Aristophanic
negotiation between play and
education. The first is concerned
with the Greek word for a ‘play’
put on in a theatre, which is
commonly referred to as ‘drama’
– an action – and is characterised
as neither playful nor serious. But
whilst two of the three genres
of theatrical verse – tragedy
and satyr play – are always
referred to as dramas, comedy
is occasionally denoted by the
term ‘play’, paidiá, which also
suggests playfulness of other
kinds, for example jokes or short
and light-hearted prose treatises.
The second focus of the talk will
look at personifications of Play
(Paidiá) as a female divinity.
Looking at Attic pottery of the
late 5th and early 4th centuries
BCE, most notably, two vases
featuring the erotic Aphrodite
and the wine-god Dionysus in
the British Museum’s collection,
we will see how Paidiá comes to
be associated with the two deities
most intimately associated with
Old Comedy.
EDITH HALL is Professor in the
Department of Classics and Centre
for Hellenic Studies at King’s. She has
published more than twenty books
on ancient Greek and Roman culture
and their reception. Her most recent
books are Adventures with Iphigenia in
Tauris (2013) and Introducing the Ancient
Greeks (2015). In 2015 she was awarded
the Erasmus Medal of the European
Academy, and a Goodwin Award by
the American Classical Society for her
research. She regularly broadcasts
on BBC Radio and, in 2017, is to be the
recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from
the University of Athens.
Image: Red-figured squat oil- or perfume-jar (lekythos), in the style of the Meidias Painter, © The Trustees of the British Museum
Lecture
19.00-20.00 Monday 17 October 2016
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Classics and Centre for Hellenic Studies
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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The art of noise: interwar modernism
& the politics of sound
Inaugural lecture by Anna Snaith
Noise is often defined as
‘unwanted’ or ‘unmusical’ sound.
It can signify disruption, terror
or meaninglessness, but is also an
indicator of play and sociability.
This inaugural lecture will turn
up the volume on a period in
which concerns about noise
became particularly clamorous.
Aldous Huxley described
interwar Britain as the ‘Age of
Noise’. With the cacophony of
war, the popularization of the
gramophone, the advent of radio
broadcasting and the rising hum
of industry and traffic noise, the
shifting soundscape altered not
just the sounds people heard,
but how, where and when they
listened to them. The vociferous
campaigns of the Anti-Noise
League (1933) for ‘acoustic
civilisation’ encapsulated a
time when noise came to be
seen as a physical danger and a
public health issue. Modernist
writers did not just represent
their noisy environment on the
silent, printed page, they tuned
in to noise and its aesthetic and
political possibilities. From
Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises
(1916) to TS Eliot’s ‘auditory
imagination’, they employed a
sonic vocabulary to rethink their
craft.
With particular attention to the
writing of Virginia Woolf and
Jean Rhys, Anna Snaith will
explore the ‘sonic-mindedness’
of interwar modernism and its
relationship to questions of excess
and interruption. ‘Noise’ also
provides a way of thinking about
the place of literary culture more
broadly, both in the modernist
period and the present.
ANNA SNAITH is Professor of TwentiethCentury Literature. Her research centres
on the cultures of literary modernism
particularly in relation to anti-colonialism
and gender. She has published a number
of books including Virginia Woolf: Public
and Private Negotiations (2000), Locating
Woolf: the Politics of Space and Place
(co-edited with Michael Whitworth,
2007), and Modernist Voyages (2014). She
has edited The Years for the Cambridge
University Press Edition of Virginia
Woolf (2012) and A Room of One’s Own
and Three Guineas for Oxford World’s
Classics (2015). This lecture is part of a
wider research project on modernism
and noise in interwar Britain. She is also
editing a new volume, Literature and
Sound, for Cambridge University Press.
The vote of thanks/response will be given
by LAURA MARCUS, Goldsmith Professor
of Literature, University of Oxford.
Image: ‘No Needless Noise’, Image 10317890, Science and Society Picture Library
Inaugural lecture
19.00-20.30 Monday 17 October 2016
Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of English
46 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Cervantes at play:
a series of performances
This year marks the 400th
anniversary of the death of
Miguel de Cervantes: author
of Don Quijote, re-inventor of
Spanish Golden Age theatre,
contemporary of Shakespeare.
In the spirit of the Festival’s
theme, we celebrate Cervantes in
‘playful’ mode, through creative
and critical engagement with his
ironic – and at times iconoclastic
– outlook on life and art. Our
celebration has two stages:
performance and reflections.
In the first part of this event,
The Out of the Wings
Theatre Research, Translation
& Performance group at
King’s and Head for Heights
Theatre Company will be
performing readings of three
works by Cervantes, as well
as contemporary English and
Spanish writers.
The Out of the Wings Theatre
Research, Translation and
Performance group at King’s has
been holding regular workshops,
bringing together graduate
students and theatre professionals
in the development of theatre
scripts for performance. This
event will showcase their work
by presenting three plays. Actors
will perform excerpts from
Spanish playwright, Yolanda
Serrano’s Ser o no Cervantes /
To Be or Not Cervantes, Kim
Gilchrist’s Forgiving Shakespeare
(a play about an encounter
between Cervantes and
Shakespeare), and a Cervantes
entremés (a one-act play)..
CATHERINE BOYLE is Professor of
Latin American Cultural Studies at
King’s, where she directs the theatre
translation and performance project, Out
of the Wings (www.outofthewings.org).
She is a director of Head for Heights
Theatre Company, and a translator of
Latin American theatre and poetry.
She is also Principal Investigator on the
research project ‘Language Acts and
Worldmaking’, funded by the AHRC
Open World Research Initiative.
JULIAN WEISS is Professor of Medieval
& Early Modern Spanish at King’s, and
an affiliate member of the Department
of Comparative Literature. He is a
Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded
‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’, leading
projects related to the global impact of
Sephardic culture.
This event is one of two events concerning ‘Cervantes at Play’. It is followed by an afternoon workshop, held on Tuesday 18 October, that
will combine critical reflection on Cervantes with the practical process of understanding his work for performance (see p47). Attendees to
these performances are warmly encouraged to join us for the workshop on the following day, but are under no obligation to do so.
Image: Statue of Don Quixote, pixabay
Performance
19.30-22.00 Monday 17 October 2016
Anatomy Museum, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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47
Tuesday
18 October 2016
13.00-14.30 Reading, performance & exhibition
Playing & reading / reading & playing
14.00-19.30Workshop Cervantes at play: reflections
14.30-16.00
Reading, performance & exhibition
Playing & reading / reading & playing
17.30-19.30
Guided walking tour Mr Punch in Fleet
Street see p7
18.00-20.00Lecture Games in painting:
playing with society
18.30-19.30
Discussion & performance The Mother –
playing with a play
18.30-20.00
Discussion & readings ‘Poetry And…’
As the crow flies: Ted Hughes as
inspiration and muse
18.30-20.00
Panel discussion Playing & reality:
Winnicott, creativity & play
19.00-21.00
Practical art workshop Drawing life:
playing poetically see p11
19.00-21.00
Film screening and Q&A The Timbertown
Follies: a tale of interned men, cabaret, &
bittersweet memories of war
19.30-21.00
Performance & talk Play it again, Romeo
Playing & reading /
reading & playing
Calling all 5-10 year olds to come
and join us for an international
afternoon of ‘Playing and
Reading’. Fantastic authors from
France, Italy, Mexico, Portugal
and Russia will be reading their
books and there will be an
opportunity for you to meet them
and ask them questions. There
will be readings in English as
well as Arabic, French, German,
Italian, Portuguese, Russian
and Spanish. A group of Syrian
children will also share their
favourite stories with us.
The readings will be interspersed
with performances and
projections. The Belarusian
theatre group will perform a
bilingual Russian/English puppet
show; the speaking portrait or o
Retrato Falado will be brought
alive by João Fazenda and Bruno
Humberto; and Italian writer,
Roberto Piumini will read and
perform. Other confirmed writers
are Anna Nikolskaya (from
Russia), Ana Saldanha (from
Portugal) and Laura Pacheco
(from Mexico). The Great Hall
will also host an exhibition of
Joao Fazenda’s illustrations. This
afternoon will be a celebration of
the amazing richness of children’s
world literature and of the simple
pleasures of reading and playing.
This event is organized by
the Modern Language Centre
with generous support from
numerous partners: the Camões
Centre, the French Institute, the
Russian Translation Institute, the
Portuguese Embassy, UNAM
and the Department of Spanish,
Portuguese & Latin American
Studies, and the Faculty of Arts
& Humanities.
Participants include celebrated
international children’s authors ANNA
NIKOLSKAYA, ROBERTO PIUMINI, LAURA
EMILIA PACHECO, and ANA SALDANHA;
the illustrator, JOÃO FAZENDA; and
actors OLEG SIDORCHIK and VICTORIA
MILHAM.
Please see the event web page for more
information on these artists:
www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/
eventrecords/2016-2017/Festival/Playingand-Reading.aspx
Image: from Au Bonheur des Lapins by Marie Nimier, Béatrice Rodriguez and Albin Michel Jeunesse. With grateful thanks.
Reading, performance & exhibition
Session 1: 13.00-14.30 | Session 2: 14.30-16.00
Tuesday 18 October 2016
Great Hall, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Modern Language Centre
Pour oublierWWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
son chagrin, Lapin
apprend à lire.
Il découvre les consonnes, les voyelles, les accords
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
49
Cervantes at play:
reflections
This workshop follows on from
the first ‘Cervantes at play’
event, which will be a series of
Cervantes inspired performances
and readings given the night
before. Led by Catherine Boyle
and Julian Weiss, this workshop
provides an opportunity for
critical reflection on plays about
and by Cervantes, and his
playfulness and improvisation
generally. It is structured around
two talks and a roundtable
discussion of the work performed
the previous evening.
The keynote lecture will be
given by Edward H. Friedman,
and will be on the subject of
Cervantes in performance.
The roundtable discussion will
comprise of members of The Out
of the Wings Theatre Research,
Translation & Performance
Group, a group of theatre
professionals and postgraduate
students who collaborate in
playwriting and production. An
evening reception will follow the
afternoon workshop.
EDWARD H FRIEDMAN is the Gertrude
Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish
at Vanderbilt University. He has been
editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes
since 1999 and is a past president of
the Cervantes Society of America.
He has worked extensively on Early
Modern literature, with special emphasis
on Cervantes, the comedia and the
picaresque narrative.
CATHERINE BOYLE is Professor of
Latin American Cultural Studies at
King’s, where she directs the theatre
translation and performance project, Out
of the Wings (www.outofthewings.org).
She is a director of Head for Heights
Theatre Company, and a translator of
Latin American theatre and poetry. She
currently leads the research project
‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’,
funded by the AHRC Open World
Research Initiative.
JULIAN WEISS is Professor of Medieval
& Early Modern Spanish at King’s, and
an affiliate member of the Department
of Comparative Literature. He is also
a Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded
‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’, leading
projects related to the global impact of
Sephardic culture.
Attendees of this event are advised also
to attend ‘Cervantes at play: a series of
performances’, which will be held as a
prelude to this workshop the previous
evening, 19.30-22.00 Monday 17 October.
Please see the event page on the website
for more information about the workshop
programme, www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/
ahri/eventrecords/2016-2017/Festival/
Cervantes-Workshop.aspx
Image: statue of Cervantes, pixabay
Workshop
14.00-19.30 Tuesday 18 October 2016
River Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies
50 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Games in painting:
playing with society
Caravaggio’s card-sharps,
Hogarth’s gin-steeped
gamblers, and the chess, dice
and backgammon players in
paintings of the Dutch Golden
Age each encapsulate something
of the social changes for their
time. As immoral excess, bawdy
intemperance, and general
impropriety follow those who
engage in games of chance and
skill, so their fortunes unravel
across the surface of a canvas.
But as well as impressing the
morals of their time through their
artworks, artists have often used
the image of the game and gameplayer to probe more intricate
social imbalances: between the
powerful and the impoverished,
wise elder and arrogant youth,
religious tradition and radical
reinvention.
In this lecture, Alice White will
explore the role of games and
game-players across the history of
fine art. She will reveal how they
feature in different cultures and
time periods, and will interpret
what they represent.
There will be an (optional)
immersive aspect to this lecture,
as game enthusiasts will be
invited to participate in a round
of Art Bingo. This game has
been designed specifically for
the lecture, as a limited edition
piece by the lecturer (and artist)
Alice White. There will be a
prize for the winner, and all who
join in will become creators of a
collaborative artwork, proving
that there is more to a game than
winning.
ALICE WHITE is a professional oil painter,
and an Associate Lecturer in painting and
drawing at Central St Martins College
of Art & Design. Her solo show, entitled
‘A New Wave’ documented her year’s
residency as Artist for Animals at ZSL
London Zoo. Her forthcoming exhibitions
include the RSMA Annual Exhibition
2016 at the Mall Galleries. She has also
exhibited at the Music Room in Mayfair,
Kingly Court in Carnaby Street, and the
Affordable Art Fair in New York and
London.
Image: Theodoor Rombouts, Kaartspelers / Playing Cards (CC BY-SA 3.0 Ophelia2)
Lecture
18.00-20.00 Tuesday 18 October 2016
Council Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Arts & Humanities Research Institute
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
51
The Mother – playing with a play
Artistic company in residence
Mahogany Opera Group
presents excerpts from and
discussion around its project in
development, The Mother. The
Mother is a wild, impassioned
chamber opera adapted from
the absurdist play Matka by
influential Polish artist Stanisław
Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939),
known as Witkacy.
Witkacy was a Polish writer,
playwright, poet, painter,
photographer, philosopher
and art theoretician. He was a
visionary ahead of his times, a
prankster, whose cutting-edge
judgement and catastrophic
prophesies continue to resonate
with younger generations. Often
dismissed by his contemporaries,
he developed his own theories
on theatre and performance,
writing:
“On leaving the theatre, one should
feel that he has woken up from
some strange dream in which even
the commonest of things possessed
some strange unfathomed charm
characteristic of dreams and
incomparable to anything else.”
The Mother places Witkacy’s
radical views on theatre within
an opera context for the first time.
Drawing on his anarchic and
surrealist subversion of theatrical
norms, Mahogany artists
Laurence Osborn (composer),
Theo Merz (writer) and Frederic
Wake-Walker (director) explode
the operatic form, allowing it to
have its own existential crisis.
Join composer Laurence Osborn,
Professor Paul Allain and singer
Lindsay Bramley as they discuss
the development of this opera,
the task of adapting a play for the
operatic stage and the influence
of Witkacy and Polish theatre on
contemporary practice, alongside
sung excerpts from the piece.
The discussion will be chaired by
Kelina Gotman.
LAURENCE OSBORN is Composer-inAssociation with Nonclassical. His music
has been programmed at venues such
as the Royal Opera House, LSO St Luke’s
and Milton Court, and broadcast on BBC
Radio 4.
PAUL ALLAIN is Professor of Theatre
and Performance at the University of
Kent. He has written extensively on
contemporary Polish theatre, actor
training and physical theatre and has led
several funded projects, including the
British Grotowski Project.
LINDSAY BRAMLEY read Music at The
Queen’s College, Oxford. Originally
trained as a pianist, she started
singing at university and since has sung
various parts including the title role in
The Judgement of Theodora for ENO’s
Contemporary Music Studio and Mere
d’Iseut in Le Vin Herbé. Recently she has
also begun to work as a conductor and
librettist.
MAHOGANY OPERA GROUP is a leading
UK opera and music theatre company
specialising in new and contemporary
work. Mahogany stretches the
boundaries of what opera can be
and who it is for. The company tours
throughout the UK and internationally,
bringing together a wide variety of
artists.
Image: Mahogany Opera Group
Discussion & performance
18.30-19.30 Tuesday 18 October 2016
St David’s Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by Mahogany Opera Group
52 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
‘Poetry And ...’ as the crow flies:
Ted Hughes as inspiration & muse
‘Poetry And…’ is King’s College
London’s popular series of
public readings which pair poets
with other experts to highlight
poetry’s connections to all areas
of life.
In this ‘Poetry And...’ event,
chaired by Ruth Padel, publisher
Max Porter reads from his
multi-award-winning first book,
the novella Grief is a Thing with
Feathers, in which a father and
his sons, mourning their wife
and mother, are visited by Ted
Hughes’ protagonist Crow.
Porter will discuss poetry and
Ted Hughes with Hughes’s
fellow Yorkshireman Simon
Armitage, who has written about
the shamanic qualities in Ted
Hughes’s poetry, and Hughes’s
interest in nature and the
supernatural. Simon Armitage
will read his own Yorkshire
poems, reminisce about hearing
Hughes read in Hebden Bridge
cinema when he was at school,
and discuss the liberating, wild
and darkly playful inspiration of
Ted Hughes.
‘Perhaps there has been a sense that Hughes was not a man to be messed
with… an image at odds with the supportive, generous, enigmatic person
many found him to be’.
Simon Armitage
‘None of the establishment stuff takes away from how dark and brilliant
and deep and clever Ted Hughes is’.
Max Porter
SIMON ARMITAGE is Oxford Professor
of Poetry. He has won unprecedented
critical and popular acclaim; his many
awards are not only for his much-loved
poetry collections but for work in other
genres including radio, television, film,
the stage and novels. In 2010 he was
awarded the CBE for services to poetry.
MAX PORTER was born in 1981, studied
History of Art at the Courtauld Institute,
worked as a bookseller and is now
Editorial Director at Granta Books. His
first book Grief is a Thing with Feathers
won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was
shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and
Guardian First Book Award.
RUTH PADEL is an award winning poet,
Reader in Poetry at King’s and Chair of
Judges for the TS Eliot Prize. She has
published nine poetry collections and
several books on reading contemporary
poetry. Her new collection Tidings – A
Christmas Journey, featuring a homeless
man, a fox and the angel of silence, will
be published by Chatto & Windus in
November .
Images from left: Simon Armitage (courtesy Paul Wolfgang Webster), crow (morguefile), Max Porter
Discussion & readings
18.30-20.00 Tuesday 18 October 2016
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of English and ‘Poetry And ...’
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
53
Playing & reality:
Winnicott, creativity & play
Forty-five years ago the
paediatrician and psychoanalyst
Donald Winnicott published
Playing and Reality, in which
he suggested that play supplied
the foundation of all human
creativity. Rather more
controversially, he thought play
could not be reduced to fantasy,
conscious or unconscious. The
opposite of play is not reality but
compliance and conformity, from
which a ‘false self’ may result.
It’s a notion that continues to be
extremely enticing today not just
for psychoanalysts but for artists
and writers.
Here, the Centre for the
Humanities & Health and the
Centre for Modern Literature
& Culture join forces to bring
together a novelist, visual artist,
and psychoanalyst to discuss
Winnicott’s ideas.
Olivier Castel, Brett Kahr
and Deborah Levy will be in
conversation with Kate Shovron,
discussing why Winnicott is so
popular today? How important is
play in today’s culture? What is
the relationship between play and
creativity? Visitors arriving at the
event will have the opportunity
to experience Winnicottian play
for themselves, attempting his
squiggle game on iPads.
OLIVIER CASTEL is a visual artist based in
London. Recent solo exhibitions include
Mumbai Art Room (Mumbai) and Artium
(Spain). Recent group exhibitions include
L’Exposition d’un Film (Chatou, France),
and The fifth artist, Wysing Arts Centre
(Cambridge). His forthcoming solo
exhibition at Kunstraum (London) opens
in November 2016.
BRETT KAHR is Senior Fellow at Tavistock
Relationships at the Tavistock Institute of
Medical Psychology, and Senior Clinical
Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and
Mental Health at the Centre for Child
Mental Health in London. He is the author
or editor of eight books, including D.W.
Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait, which
won the Gradiva Prize for Biography.
Recently, he published Tea with Winnicott.
DEBORAH LEVY’s books include Hot Milk,
the Man Booker shortlisted Swimming
Home, Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing
Geography, The Unloved, Billy and
Girl. Her 2012 short story collection,
Black Vodka, was short listed for The
Frank O’Connor Award. She wrote two
acclaimed dramatisations of Freud’s case
studies, ‘Dora’ and ‘The Wolfman’, for
BBC Radio 4.
Panel discussion
18.30-20.00 Tuesday 18 October 2016
Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Image: Alamy
Presented by the Centre for the Humanities & Health and the Centre for Modern Literature & Culture
54 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
The Timbertown Follies:
a tale of interned men, cabaret,
& bittersweet memories of war
Following the siege of Antwerp
in 1914, almost 1,500 troops from
the 1st British Naval Brigade
found themselves seeking
safety in the neutral zone of
the Netherlands. Arriving
in Groningen, the men were
eventually interned in a custombuilt barracks camp that they
called Timbertown. To pass
the time, the troops undertook
a variety of activities, with one
set of men forming a cabaret
group in music hall style, a genre
increasingly popular in the UK.
Known as the Timbertown
Follies, these men performed
more than 300 shows during
the war years throughout the
Netherlands. The ease with
which they performed songs,
their perfect comic timing,
their affable nature, and always
accompanied by an actor in
the part of the ‘Lady’ endeared
them to audiences, despite
the language barrier. The
Timbertown Follies were a
roaring success.
This documentary reveals the
stories of some of the members
of the Timbertown Follies,
exploring their lives and their
emotions. We hear how they
made connections with Dutch
families, with these bonds lasting
a lifetime and even beyond,
spanning generations. The film
interrogates this fascinating
moment in history by looking at
the influence that these interned
soldiers had on Groningen
society, by examining how
members of the Follies reflected
on this period after the war.
There is no denying that theirs
was a bittersweet memory of war,
tinged with conflicting emotions
of homesickness, shame, and
glory.
The Timbertown Follies is only
a small part of the Great War’s
story but it is a part that tells
a tale of a group of ordinary
men and boys experiencing the
extraordinary.
LEO VAN MAAREN is a scriptwriter,
director, and film producer. As a
producer, he has worked on a number
of films, including The Lost Art of Willem
de Ridder and a documentary about the
graphic artist Frans de Jong. He directed
The Bankruptcy Jazz, a film based on
a 1919 script by the Flemish poet Paul
van Ostaijen. The Timbertown Follies is
the first of four films documenting the
cultural impact of WWI on the citizens in
neutral and occupied territories.
FRANK HERREBOUT is a film and
documentary maker. He studied at the
Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam; his
graduation film Nurse Lydia’s Flight for
Happiness was selected for the Berlin
International Film Festival 1985. He
produces and directs feature films and
documentaries. In his documentaries
he often seeks to explore the edgy side
of art.
The Timbertown Follies documentary is
part of the HERA-funded project Cultural
Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict:
Colonials, Neutrals and Belligerents during
the First World War (www.cegcproject.eu).
The screening of the film will by followed
by a Q&A with the film’s director, Leo van
Maaren, and filmmaker, Frank Herrebout.
Image: detail from original picture of the Timbertown Follies, private collection © Menno Wielinga
Film screening and Q&A
19.00-21.00 Tuesday 18 October 2016
Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the CEGC Project
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
55
Play it again, Romeo
Little known today, the aria
Ombra adorata aspetta (wait,
shadowy beloved) was incredibly
popular in Napoleonic Europe. It
first appeared in the Neapolitan
composer Niccolò Zingarelli’s
Romeo and Juliet in 1796.
The version which travelled
across Europe, however, was
an adaptation by the castrato
Crescentini. Crescentini was the
opera’s first Romeo, and Ombra
adorata is his swan song in the
piece. After drinking poison in
the Capulet tomb, he announces
the aria as his ‘last lament’, and in
singing it calls on his beloved to
expect him in Elysium.
Like modern hits, the aria
was covered by innumerable
artists and amateurs, remixed,
rewritten, and retold in settings
ranging from operas to domestic
music-making, vocal concerts,
and instrumental arrangements.
Textually, it appeared in printed
scores, private albums, singing
manuals, and libretti, and
was discussed in newspapers
and periodicals, memoirs,
autobiographies, reflective
essays, and at least one short
story. It launched careers; won
a knighthood for its composer;
made an Emperor (Napoleon)
weep; and even featured in a
parody devised by an Empress,
Maria Theresa, where it was
comically interrupted by a chorus
of coughs, snores, and sneezes.
Strikingly, from 1800 Romeo’s
aria was increasingly sung by
women, as the rage for castrati
waned and as prima donnas, not
without friction, took their place
at the centre of operatic culture.
Through musical performances,
literary reflections, and
contemporary images, this event
explores the transformations
of this single aria, revealing
the ways in which performers
and writers played with sound,
character, gender, and, not
least, with listeners’ hearts, in
Romantic-era Europe.
MIRANDA STANYON is a lecturer in
comparative literature at King’s, and
specialises in British and German
literature and musical culture in the long
eighteenth century.
Image: pixabay
Performance & talk
19.30-21.00 Tuesday 18 October 2016
Chapel, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of Comparative Literature
56 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
Wednesday
19 October 2016
16.45-18.00
Pre-concert talk … to set one line
against another: Afterlives of Counterpoint
18.00-19.30
Panel discussion Playing ordinary
18.30-20.00Talk Let’s Party? On the history,
philosophy, & politics of ‘having fun’
19.00-20.45Concert Played by the picture of
Nobody: a recital of solos, duos & trios
19.00-21.00
Practical art workshop Drawing life:
playing poetically see p11
19.00-21.00
Film screening Screening of student
films: Play
19.30-21.00Talk Charles Wheatstone and
the craze for the stereoscope
… to set one line against another:
Afterlives of Counterpoint
As a prelude to a recital of solos,
duos and trios, contemporary
music specialist John Fallas will
lead a discussion with King’s
composers Rob Keeley and
Silvina Milstein. The discussion
takes a cue from the concert’s
featuring of music for pairs of
identical instruments – two
violins, two trumpets, two
double basses, and two pianos –
and considers how this timbral
doubling allows us to forget the
material source of the sounds and
to focus on the interactions of
motives and lines.
Counterpoint – the setting of
one line against another – is
responsible for many musical
‘depth effects’. Moreover, the
contemporary employment
of contrapuntal techniques
from earlier times adds a
further dimension, establishing
connections not only between
different lines in a musical
texture but between the
resulting music and that of those
earlier times. Opening out to
consider the broader landscape
of contemporary composition,
the speakers will provide three
distinctive and personal views of
the status of counterpoint and its
implications for understanding
the role of pitch in music written
today.
JOHN FALLAS studied musicology at the
University of Cambridge, King’s College
London and the University of Leeds, and
works as a writer and speaker on the
music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
He is currently engaged in a large-scale
research project titled ‘Afterlives of
Genre’.
ROB KEELEY is a senior lecturer in
composition at King’s. He studied
composition with Oliver Knussen at the
Royal College of Music, with Bernard
Rose and Robert Saxton at Oxford and
later with Franco Donatoni.
SILVINA MILSTEIN is Professor of Music
at King’s. Her music has been played by
some of the world’s leading orchestras
and ensembles, including the BBC
Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Lontano,
the London Sinfonietta, and the Endellion
String Quartet. Her chamber music has
been recorded by Lontano and issued
by LORELT.
Image: Egon Schiele Autumn Sun and Trees, with thanks to awesome art
Pre-concert talk
16.45-18.00 Wednesday 19 October 2016
Room SWB21, the Department of Music, South West Block, Strand Campus
This talk will be followed by a concert (see p62).
Presented by the Department of Music
58 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
Playing ordinary
To what extent is play an
integral part of your everyday
life? Is there something
intrinsically, inescapably ludic
about the basic processes of
thinking, reading, and being?
In this interdisciplinary panel
a philosopher, a literary critic,
and an historian will discuss the
role of play in (respectively) the
imagination, the novel, and the
self.
Historian Hannah Dawson
will investigate the pre-modern
view that being a member of
a community involves playing
a part, or putting on a mask,
that selfhood is inherently
performative. Philosophy scholar
John Callanan will explore
Kant’s view that if we want to
be creative, if we want to make
beautiful things, we need to
let loose the ‘free play of the
imagination’. Literary critic
and author Jon Day will look at
how the novel, which began as
an exercise in linear causation,
is being transformed into a
sort of game, an exploration of
contingency and chance.
JOHN CALLANAN is a Senior Lecturer in
Philosophy, focussing mainly on Kant. His
most recent book is Kant’s Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader’s
Guide.
HANNAH DAWSON is a Lecturer in the
History of Political Thought. She is a
regular contributor to mainstream print
and broadcast media, most recently in
Marx: Genius of the Modern World for
BBC4. Her latest book is Life Lessons
from Hobbes.
JON DAY is a Lecturer in modernist
fiction in the Department of English. His
criticism has appeared in the London
Review of Books, the Times Literary
Supplement, n+1, Apollo, the Guardian,
the Telegraph and the Financial Times.
He is a 2016 Man Booker Prize for
Fiction judge. His most recent book is
Cyclogeography.
Image: pixabay
Panel discussion
18.00-19.30 Wednesday 19 October 2016
Council Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of History
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
59
Let’s Party! On the history,
philosophy, & politics of ‘having fun’
A conversation between Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Dr Madison Moore
What is a party? More to the
point, perhaps, what makes a
good party? What’s more fun:
a house party, or a night out?
Is a fiesta/ festa the same as a
‘party’? What about carnival
and festivals? Is a party better
outdoors or indoors? During
the weekend or midweek? Must
there be food? – alcohol? – fancy
clothes? – music and dancing?
And why is it important for us to
think critically about parties?
Different cultures party
differently, but in the 21st
century, we do seem to share
a basic notion of what a party
involves. Is there a grand
universal theory of partying
that we can extract from a
study of these divergences
and convergences, or are
we all moving towards a
McDonaldisation of fun? Can
a party be both rebellious and
conformist? If a party is about
having fun, what does it tell us
about work, drudgery, and the
modern condition?
Drawing on the research of the
ERC funded project Modern
Moves (www.modernmoves.org.
uk), Ananya Kabir and madison
moore will host a conversation
(replete with some party tricks
and surprises) on the history,
philosophy, and politics of having
fun. Let’s party!
Talk
18.30-20.00 Wednesday 19 October 2016
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR is a literary
and cultural historian in the Department
of English at King’s. She works at the
intersection of embodiment, affect,
memory, and post-trauma in the global
South. She is the author of Territory of
Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir
(2009) and Partition’s Post-Amnesias:
1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (2013).
She directs Modern Moves, a five-year
research project funded by an ERC
Advanced Grant, which examines the
resilience and global popularity of
Afro-diasporic music and dance.
MADISON MOORE is a London based
artist-scholar who blurs the lines
between theory, pop culture and
artistic practice. He is an ERC-funded
Research Associate in Modern Moves
in the Department of English at King’s,
and his first book, The Theory of the
Fabulous Class: Creativity at the Margins,
is under contract at Yale University
Press. madison has been published by
Aperture, Interview magazine, Art in
America, Thought Catalog, Splice Today,
the Journal of Popular Music Studies,
Theater magazine and Dancecult: A
Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture.
Image: from the 2015 A&H Festival, photography by David Tett
Presented by Modern Moves
60 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
Played by the picture of Nobody:
a recital of solos, duos & trios
Listening to the expressive
interplay of simultaneously
unfolding melodies tends to
make us oblivious to the material
source of the sounds. The solos,
duos, and trios in this concert
feature pairs of violins, trumpets,
double basses and pianos, or
single instruments playing
pairs of lines. Submerged in the
interactions between distinct,
yet inseparable, musical lines,
as for Shakespeare’s Trinculo in
The Tempest, the music magically
becomes disembodied and we
find ourselves enthralled by the
‘tune of our catch, played by the
picture of Nobody’.
The ensemble Lontano
conducted by Odaline de la
Martinez, and the Tali-Varbanow
Piano Duo will perform a
programme that includes
Harrison Birtwistle’s Five Little
Antiphonies for Amelia for two
trumpets and Harrison’s Clocks (1
& 4) for piano; Silvina Milstein’s
In a bowl of grey-blue leaves for
two pianos and a thousand golden
bells in the breeze for harp and
two double basses; Rob Keeley’s
Fiestas for two pianos; George
Benjamin’s Three Miniatures
for Solo Violin; as well as world
premieres of compositions by Rob
Keeley and Silvina Milstein.
GEORGE BENJAMIN is one of the
outstanding composers of his
generation. He currently holds the
Henry Purcell Chair of Composition
at King’s. His opera Written on Skin
has been greeted by universal praise,
recorded on CD and DVD and won
several major awards and prizes.
HARRISON BIRTWISTLE is widely
regarded as one of the leading European
figures in contemporary music. His
works combine modernist aesthetic with
mythic power and emotional impact. He
was the first Henry Purcell Professor of
Composition at King’s (1995-2001).
ROB KEELEY is a senior lecturer in
composition at King’s. He studied
composition with Oliver Knussen at the
Royal College of Music, with Bernard
Rose and Robert Saxton at Oxford and
later with Franco Donatoni.
SILVINA MILSTEIN is Professor of Music
at King’s. Her music has been played by
some of the world’s leading orchestras
and ensembles, including the BBC
Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Lontano,
the London Sinfonietta, and the Endellion
String Quartet. Her chamber music has
been recorded by Lontano and issued
by LORELT.
Image: detail from Egon Schiele The Setting Sun, with thanks to awesome art
Concert
19.00-20.45 Wednesday 19 October 2016
Great Hall, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Pre-concert talk at 16.45 (see page 59)
Presented by the Department of Music
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
61
Screening of student films: Play
‘My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living
persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order
and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.’
Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
Students in the Department of
Film Studies at King’s are not
only film scholars, but, in many
cases, filmmakers themselves.
This event, which was first
included in the 2015 Arts &
Humanities Festival ‘Fabrication’,
showcases some of the exciting
work being produced by
undergraduate and postgraduate
students at King’s.
The programme, compiled in
collaboration with the King’s
Film Society by Kristina Pringle
and Martin Brady, includes
documentary, fiction, and
experimental films. The final
selection will be made in the
run-up to the event and posted
on the Festival’s webpages.
It will include a short film by
postgraduate student Pedro
Aspahan, #from the life of bees#
(2015, 7 minutes 21, colour).
Speaking of the idea behind
this film, Aspahan explains that
‘Joseph Beuys was fascinated
by mock honey or “poorman’s honey” – Kunsthonig,
literally “art(ificial) honey” – an
industrially fabricated honey
substitute better known to us
as invert sugar syrup. There is
no chemical difference between
honey and mock honey, but
clearly they are not the same.
Art= Capital.’
The filmmakers will be invited to
introduce their films and answer
questions.
KRISTINA PRINGLE graduated in Film
Studies at King’s in 2016. She was
President of the KCL Film Society and
has worked as a film programmer
(for example at the Genesis Cinema in
Stepney Green).
MARTIN BRADY is a lecturer in German
and Film Studies at King’s. He researches
into documentary and Brechtian cinema
and has published on European cinema,
new music (Arnold Schönberg, Paul
Dessau), theatre, painting (Anselm
Kiefer, Joseph Beuys), disability, and
architecture. He is currently working
on classical music in the former GDR
and documentary films about the drug
thalidomide. He also staged multimedia events at the Being Human and
Fabrication A&H festivals.
Image: Pedro Aspahan
Film screening
19.00-21.00 Wednesday 19 October 2016
Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
In partnership with King’s College London Film Society and The Department of Film Studies
62 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
Charles Wheatstone & the craze for
the stereoscope
Photo historians Brian May
and Denis Pellerin will give a
3D talk on the birth and rise of
the stereoscopic craze between
1832 and 1862, and on the
prominent place held by King’s
College London lecturer, Charles
Wheatstone, in the history of
3D, then known as Stereoscopy.
Professor Wheatstone was
the first to demonstrate, using
drawings and an optical
instrument that he designed and
named the ‘stereoscope’, how
binocular vision works. He began
to demonstrate why most of us
can see the world around us in
three dimensions, and how, with
only two flat pictures, our brain
can recreate the illusion of depth.
King’s College London Archives
house an important collection
of Wheatstone’s personal papers
and material, including over 90
large stereoscopic pairs that were
made by various photographers
from 1851 onwards, to be viewed
in Wheatstone’s reflecting
instrument. In the talk, some
of these will be shown in 3D
for the very first time, thanks
to the use of two projectors and
interferometric passive glasses.
Given on the 141st anniversary
of Wheatstone’s death, this talk
is the result of a collaboration
between Brian May’s London
Stereoscopic Company and
King’s Archives. In part, it
acknowledges and celebrates
the role that King’s Archives has
played in preserving our unique
scientific heritage. The talk will
also put the name and work of
Charles Wheatstone back in the
limelight, recognising him as
the pioneer of today’s age of 3D
movies and Virtual Reality.
BRIAN MAY is a founding member of the
rock band Queen, a world-renowned
guitarist, songwriter, producer and
performer. Brian postponed a career
in astronomy when Queen’s popularity
exploded, but after thirty years as a
musician, returned to astrophysics in
2006, when he completed his PhD and
co-authored his first book, Bang, The
Complete History of the Universe, with
Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. His
second book, A Village Lost and Found,
written with Elena Vidal, introduced the
genius of Victorian stereo photographer
TR Williams to a global audience.
DENIS PELLERIN is a self-taught photohistorian with a passion for stereo
photography. He has been researching
and learning about the history of stereo
photography for over 30 years and has
written several articles and books on
the subject, in French and in English. In
his thirtieth year as a secondary school
teacher, he was hired by Brian May as
curator of his photographic collection.
Brian May and Denis have co-authored
three books together (Diableries:
Stereoscopic Adventures in Hell, 2013; The
Poor Man’s Picture Gallery, 2014; Crinoline:
Fashion’s Most Magnificent Disaster, 2016).
Images: left: Wheatstone, after a photography by Kilburn, middle: Brian May & Denis Pellerin (image – Denis Pellerin) right: Wheatstone & family by Claudet
Talk
19.30-21.00 Wednesday 19 October 2016
Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by The London Stereoscopic Company and King’s College London Archives
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
63
Thursday
20 October 2016
17.30-19.30
Poetry reading & discussion Playing with
tigers: poetry & translation
18.30-19.30
Musical performance Playing in church
with Haydn & Mozart
19.00-20.30
Digital installation & performance
Moving past present: digitally reanimating
the Gaiety Girls
19.00-20.30
Film screening & discussion
Still Shakespeare
19.30-21.00
Poetry readings Serious play: reading by
King’s poetry students
19.30-21.00
Performance & discussion Midday
lunches or Petit Dejeuner du Midi
Playing with tigers:
poetry & translation
Ana Luísa Amaral was born in
Lisbon in 1956. She is widely
recognized as one of Portugal’s
most important writers today.
She has published sixteen
original books of poetry, besides
two volumes of collected poems,
a play, Próspero morreu (2011),
a meta-fictional narrative, Ara
(2013) and five children’s books.
Amaral is also a distinguished
literary scholar and critic. She
is an established translator of
Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson,
John Updike, to name a few. She
has pioneered feminist theories
and the publication of the first
dictionary of feminist concepts
in 2005 marked an important
turning point in Portuguese
studies. Subsequently she
prepared an annotated edition of
New Portuguese Letters allowing
a new generation to engage with
one of the most important texts
in Portuguese 20th-century
literature.
A Arte de ser Tigre was first
published in Portugal in 2003 and
its English translation, The Art of
Being a Tiger, appeared in the UK
in 2016.
Ana Luísa Amaral will read a
selection of poems from this
recently translated volume,
and will discuss her work as a
poet, academic and translator.
Professor Claudia PazosAlonso, a scholar of Portuguese
and Brazilian literature, will
introduce Amaral and will lead
the discussion following on from
the readings.
ANA LUÍSA AMARAL is a Portuguese
writer, literary critic, and translator.
She has received many national and
international literary prizes, including the
Great Poetry Prize of the Portuguese
Writer’s Association in 2008.
CLÁUDIA PAZOS-ALONSO is Associate
Professor in Portuguese and Brazilian
Studies, University of Oxford and a
Fellow of Wadham College. She is the
author and co-editor of several books
on women writers, and is perhaps best
known for her work on Florbela Espanca,
Judite Teixeira, and Lídia Jorge. She
recently wrote an introduction for the
English translation of Sophia de Mello
Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales and
is preparing a monograph on a neglected
19th century feminist, journalist and
novelist Francisca Wood. She is currently
serving a term as Vice-President of the
International Association of Lusitanists.
Image: pixabay
Poetry reading & discussion
17.30-19.30 Thursday 20 October
Small Committee Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Modern Language Centre
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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65
Playing in church
with Haydn & Mozart
Haydn’s playfulness sometimes
landed him in trouble, especially
in church. As a teenager he found
himself expelled from the choir
of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in
Vienna for cutting off the pigtail
of the chorister standing in front
of him. This same mischievous
streak often finds its way
into his music. He endured a
somewhat difficult relationship
with the Church authorities,
who complained that (amongst
other things) his Mass settings
were too long. Haydn’s Missa
brevis Sancti Joannis de Deo, or
the ‘Little Organ Mass’ might be
thought of as a riposte to these
objections. Everything is out
of proportion. The fast ‘Gloria’
movement is ridiculous in its
shortness, at about one minute
in duration. Each of the four
voices sings a different line of
text simultaneously, allowing
Haydn to get through the text
in a quarter of the time, but
also rendering the words utterly
inaudible.
Mozart’s Vesperae solennes de
Confessore demonstrate a different
kind of playfulness, namely
Mozart’s skill in depiction.
Whether the choir is singing
about sitting at God’s right
hand or casting down enemies
at their feet, each line of text
is carefully and wonderfully
crafted musically to illustrate the
concept that it conveys. Mozart’s
operatic experience bubbles up
throughout this work – again,
much to the chagrin of the church
authorities, who believed that the
church and opera styles should
remain distinct and separate. And
Mozart’s treatment of the text is
playful in other ways: in several
movements, when we come to the
text ‘as it was in the beginning’,
the choir sings this to a musical
theme from the beginning of the
movement.
Both composers pushed the
boundaries of what was allowed,
as they edged towards a more
playful style than had previously
been heard in church. Join us to
experience this playful music.
THE CHOIR OF KING’S COLLEGE LONDON
is one of the leading university choirs in
England. Founded in its present form in
1945, it consists of around thirty choral
scholars reading a variety of subjects.
As well as performing at services in the
College Chapel, the choir gives many
concerts, both in England and abroad.
The choir performs a large and varied
repertoire ranging from the fourteenth
century to the present day. It regularly
broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and Radio
4, and has made many recordings, with
a particular focus on sixteenth-century
English and Spanish repertoire.
JOSEPH FORT is College Organist
& Director of the Chapel Choir, and
Lecturer in Music at King’s. Prior to
assuming this position in 2015, he studied
at the Royal Academy of Music, the
University of Cambridge, and Harvard
University, where he completed a
PhD with a dissertation on dancemusic relationships in the minuets of
Joseph Haydn. As a conductor and
musicologist, his work spans the worlds
of performance and scholarship.
Image: King’s College London Chapel Choir, with thanks to Kaupo Kikkas
Musical performance
18.30-19.30 Thursday 20 October 2016
King’s Chapel, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Office of the Dean
66 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Moving past present:
digitally reanimating the Gaiety Girls
The Gaiety Theatre’s musical
comedies were the toast of late
Victorian London. Performed
just across the road from what is
now the King’s Strand campus,
plays like The Shop Girl and A
Runaway Girl combined comic
songs, lavish costumes and
spectacular dances, trading
on the allure of the theatre’s
glamorous chorus of ‘Gaiety
Girls’. Even as the plays’ plots
betrayed anxiety over women’s
independence, those ‘girls’
used them as stepping stones
to artistic careers, aristocratic
marriages, Hollywood roles
and even parliamentary office.
With their meticulously crafted
public personae, their lucrative
merchandising deals and
their innovative transmedia
collaborations, Gaiety alumni
like Constance Collier and
Ellaline Terriss helped to draw
up the blueprint for modern
celebrity.
For this year’s festival, artist
Janina Lange will take us back
to the Gaiety with an immersive
experiment in digital biography.
Drawing on archival materials
and employing motion capture
technologies usually used for
videogaming, Moving past present
will map the movements of a live
performer onto a virtual Gaiety
Girl, before giving attendees the
opportunity to take to the stage
themselves.
Developed in collaboration
with King’s researchers from
Strandlines, an online portal
celebrating ‘lives on the Strand
past, present and creative’,
and Ego-Media, a research
project exploring digital selfrepresentation, the project
reimagines the Gaiety Girls as
avatars to explore questions of
identity, gendered embodiment
and playful performance.
JANINA LANGE (*1986 in Berlin) lives
and works in London and Berlin. After
studying Fine Art at Chelsea College
of Art in London and gaining a MRes
in Cultural Studies at the London
Consortium, she is currently working on
her practice-led PhD at the Sculptural
Department of the Royal College of Art
in London. Her works have recently been
on show at Bluecoat for the Liverpool
Biennial (2016), Kunsthalle Exnergasse
(2016), Studio RCA (2015) and in a solo
show at Heit (2014). Lange is recipient of
the TECHNE: AHRC scholarship, current
artist-in-residence at CW+ and has
been selected for the Bloomberg New
Contemporaries 2016. Upcoming shows
will be held at Richmix and the ICA.
Image: Gaiety glove – photograph by Janina Lange, illustration by Dudley Hardy
Digital installation & performance
19.00-20.30 Thursday 20 October 2016
Anatomy Museum, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by Ego-Media and the Centre for Life-Writing Research
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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67
Still Shakespeare –
animated shorts screening
Still Shakespeare is a slate of
five artists’ short animated
films including new works by
Shaun Clark, Sharon Liu, Kim
Noce and Farouq Suleiman and
Jonathan Bairstow. The films
are developed in partnership
with the London Shakespeare
Centre at King’s College London,
animation company Film Club at
Th1ng and animation company
Sherbet.
The aim of the project was to
create contemporary artworks
that take iconic Shakespearean
imagery as their starting point
and respond in a variety of
irreverent and original ways,
making Shakespeare current
and engaging to wide audiences
and adding a contemporary
element to the Shakespeare400
worldwide celebrations in 2016.
The artist filmmakers were
given access to the research
and expertise of the London
Shakespeare Centre.
The key research feeding into
the project was the PhD by Sally
Barnden, in the Department
of English Language &
Literature. Sally’s research on
the intersection of Shakespeare’s
plays, performance and
photography is concerned with
the way that certain well-known
iconic images have been absorbed
into a shared cultural memory.
The films will be screened,
followed by a discussion of the
work with some of the artists
and members of the London
Shakespeare Centre.
FILM LONDON is the capital’s screen
industries agency. They connect
ideas, talent and finance to develop a
pioneering creative culture in the city
that delivers success in film, television,
animation, games and beyond. They
work to sustain, promote and develop
London as a global content production
hub, support the development of the
city’s new and emerging filmmaking
talent and invest in a diverse and rich film
culture. Funded by the Mayor of London
and the National Lottery through the
BFI, they also receive support from Arts
Council England, Creative Skillset and the
Heritage Lottery Fund.
Image: TO COME FROM LD
Image: The Waking Dream with thanks to Farouq Suleiman and Ben Sayer
Film screening & discussion
19.00-20.30 Thursday 20 October 2016
Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the London Shakespeare Centre and Film London as part of Shakespeare400
68 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Serious play:
readings from King’s poetry students
‘Serious Play’ promises an
evening of enlivening and
inspiring poetry, written and
performed by King’s students,
chaired by Ruth Padel and
Declan Ryan. King’s College
London has always been deeply
connected to poetry. John
Keats, who died in 1821, studied
medicine at Guy’s Hospital, now
part of King’s. One of Britain’s
most distinguished 20th-century
poets, Maureen Duffy, is a King’s
alumna, and many academic
tutors here, from Julian Brown,
Professor of Palaeography 19601985, to Clare Brant, current
Professor of Eighteenth-Century
Literature and Culture, have
also been,or still are, practising
poets. The current Principal,
scientist Ed Byrne, has published
three volumes of poetry himself.
Under his leadership, King’s
is promoting and cherishing
poetry through many channels
including a new international
online magazine Wild Court and
a poetry reading series ‘Poetry
And…’ which spotlights poetry’s
power to connect across all
boundaries.
Undergraduates studying English
at King’s focus on poetry from
the start with a unique and
seriously playful First Year
module, ‘Reading Poetry’, in
which different members of
the English Department offer
their own insights into poetry.
Focusses of this module include:
‘Poetry is Song’, ‘Poetry is Free’,
‘Poetry is Global’, ‘Poetry is
Everywhere’, ‘Poetry is Voice’,
‘Poetry is Shaped’, ‘Poetry is
Making Strange’.
In that spirit, this event presents
poetry as ‘Serious Play’. ‘Poetry’
is one of three creative writing
courses run by the English
Department. Taught by Ruth
Padel and Declan Ryan, this
challenging course is hugely
popular. Come along to this event
and lend your support to students
who will be reading poems
they’ve written as a part of this
course.
CHAIRS
RUTH PADEL is Reader in Poetry at
King’s, and Chair of the 2016 TS Eliot
Prize Judges. In November 2016 Chatto
& Windus will publish her tenth poetry
collection, Tidings A Christmas Journey.
DECLAN RYAN is Visiting Lecturer at
King’s and Poetry Editor at Ambit Poetry
Magazine. Faber published his debut
pamphlet of poems last year and he
is founder-editor of Wild Court,
www.wildcourt.co.uk, an international
journal of poetry and poetry discussion.
Image: Shutterstock
Poetry readings
19.30-21.00 Thursday 20 October 2016
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Department of English
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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69
Midday Lunches or Petit Dejeuner du Midi
Midday Lunches or Petit Dejeuner
du Midi premiered in Santiago,
Chile in 1998 just as former
Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet was placed under
house arrest in London. The
play is a memorial to the kind
of political violence Chile has
suffered periodically since it
became an independent nation
in the nineteenth century and,
particularly, to the brutality of
the military coup of 1973 and the
legacy of the Pinochet regime.
Chilean playwright and director,
Ramon Griffero, memorializes
his country’s history in his
theatricalization of memory.
In Midday Lunches Esteban, a
prisoner depicted on the eve of
his execution, writes a novel to
leave behind as his legacy. In
a series of scenes the novel is
alternately about Socrates, the
Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate
Gabriela Mistral, a psychopathic
killer, and a woman in a garden.
Well-known and respected in
South America and Europe,
Griffero is little-known to
the English-speaking world.
While at school in the early
1970s, he ran guns for the
guerrilla group Movimiento
Izquierda Revolucionario. In
the mid-1980s, as an openly
gay former revolutionary, he
founded the theatre company
Teatro del Fin de Siglo and
‘El Trolley’, a cultural space
for resistance to the Pinochet
dictatorship. By programming
primarily performance art and
‘art actions’ that the regime did
not comprehend, ‘El Trolley’
was able to avoid censorship
and provided a vitally needed
gathering space for those in
opposition to the military
dictatorship.
With the publication of
Ramón Griffero: Your Desires
in Fragments and Other Plays
translated by Adam Versényi,
Griffero’s plays are now available
in English making his important
contribution to theatrical
innovation and the intersection
of art and politics accessible to
a much wider audience than
before. Be a part of that wider
audience by joining us for a
performance of Midday Lunches
in English, followed by postshow discussion with the play’s
translator, Adam Versényi.
ADAM VERSÉNYI is Chair and Professor
of Dramaturgy in the Department of
Dramatic Art at the University of North
Carolina and Senior Dramaturg for
PlayMakers Repertory Company. Recent
publications include Theatre in Latin
America: Religion, Politics, and Culture
From Cortés to the 1980s; The Theatre
of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy
and Other Plays; and Ramón Griffero:
Your Desires in Fragments and Other
Plays. He is the founder and editor of
The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation
Review.
HEAD FOR HEIGHTS THEATRE COMPANY
explore and produce work by significant
playwrights, mainly from Latin America,
whose work arises from diverse
theatrical traditions, and to which UK
audiences have had little exposure. Their
focus is on discovering and developing
the work of writers who examine the
increasing number of peoples and
communities worldwide whose lives
are lived on the margins: economically,
socially, and in terms of access to power
and influence.
With thanks to
Image: pixabay
Performance & discussion
19.30-21.00 Thursday 20 October 2016
Council Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the University of North Carolina and Head for Heights Theatre Company
70 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
Friday
21 October 2016
12.00-21.00Exhibition Playing with medieval visions,
sounds & sensations see p12
15.00-17.00 Practical art workshop Drawing life:
playing poetically see p11
17.30-18.30Symposium Playing with medieval
visions, sounds & sensations see p12
17.30-19.30
Movement workshop Freedom from
form: playing with movement see p9
18.00-19.30
Poetry readings Sprung from
Shakespeare – schools poetry
competition winners’ event
18.00-20.00
Practical art workshop Drawing life:
playing poetically see p11
19.00-20.30
Performance & panel discussion Marge
& Jules
19.30-21.00
Screening & panel discussion
Playing for peace: Soccer My Saviour
19.30-21.00Performance Playing with Orpheus
Sprung from Shakespeare –
schools poetry competition
winners’ event
Entrants were asked to pick
a sonnet by Shakespeare
that inspired them, and write
their own poem in response.
Submissions could take the
form of a sonnet or any other
type of poem, whatever format
and style they wanted. Judged
by internationally-respected
poets, Gillian Clarke and
Kevin Crossley-Holland, the
competition was open to all state
school and academy students in
London, in years 10-13 (GCSE
and A-level students).
Join us for this celebration of
Shakespeare and the poetic form,
as we announce the winners of
this unique competition, listen
to entrants read their poems, and
celebrate their success.
LONDON SHAKESPEARE CENTRE is
devoted to research, learning and
teaching in Shakespeare and early
modern English literary studies. Hannah
Crawforth and Lizzie Scott-Baumann
developed the idea for the poetry
competition following on from the
publication of their own edited collection
of contemporary poetic responses, On
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2016).
WIDENING PARTICIPATION at King’s is
committed to finding the brightest minds
regardless of their background, and
have supported this project through
the WP grant scheme. Activities are
targeted at state school students,
students from less advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, students from
low-participation neighbourhoods, black
and minority ethnic students, disabled
students and care givers. At King’s we
believe a diverse study body enriches
the education that we offer.
Original Image © Venusangel | Dreamstime.com | Black ink dissolving in water
William Shakespeare is often
regarded as the greatest writer
in the English language, and
his plays and poems have been
celebrated across the world for
hundreds of years, and translated
into over one hundred languages.
2016 marks the 400th
anniversary of Shakespeare’s
death and to celebrate his
life and work, the London
Shakespeare Centre, as part of
our Shakespeare400 Widening
Participation project, launched
a poetry competition for young
writers who are inspired by
Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Poetry readings
18.00-19.30 Friday 21 October
Council Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the London Shakespeare Centre and
Widening Participation at King’s and as part of Shakespeare400
72 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Marge & Jules
The first autobiography in the
English language was written
by mother of fourteen, Margery,
who couldn’t read. Dame
Julian, the renowned anchoress
of Norwich, penned writings
on mysticism and mercy that
have dazzled spiritualists for
centuries. Both women went
their own way. Both of them
loved Jesus, from the depths of
their soul, to the tingling of their
bodies. Both of them cried, one
hell of a lot.
Marge and Jules resurrects the
historic moment where – as
writings record – Margery
met Julian. As spiritual
enlightenment meets the darker
stories of life in the Middle Ages,
these women confess all; talking
faith, life, after-life, semantics,
erotics and the mysteries of the
Man they
love.
The performance of Marge
and Jules will be followed by a
panel discussion with the play’s
writers, Sarah Anson and Máirín
O’Hagan, together with Sarah
Salih, who has published widely
on female mysticism in the late
Middle Ages, and Sarah Law,
a scholar and a poet who has
written on both Margery and
Julian. These panellists will
respond to the play in the light
of today’s knowledge of the
medieval mystics.
For more about the playwrights
see www.queyntelaydies.com
MÁIRÍN O’HAGAN has written various
comic plays including The Orphanarium
of Erthing Worthing, The Snow Queen
and Leopardess, the latter with Sarah.
Bereavement: The Musical was nominated
for ‘Best New Musical’ and ‘Best Lyrics’
in the Musical Theatre Matters awards.
Her adaptation of Aristophanes’ The
Assembly Women is currently touring the
UK. Her film company, ‘barefaced greek’,
makes short films using Greek drama in
the original language.
SARAH ANSON has written Leopardess
Comedy, The Keepers, and Marge & Jules.
Her acting credits include the Dromios
in The Comedy of Errors (Pendley
Shakespeare Festival), Louise in White
Meat (Courtyard Theatre), Polly Brown
in The Boy Friend (Assembly George
Square) and MJ in Chokepoint. Alongside
Máirín, she is a founding member of
theatre company ‘Queynte Laydies’.
SARAH SALIH is Senior Lecturer in
English at King’s College London. She
co-edited a volume of essays on Julian of
Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and
Post-Medieval Reception, with Denise N
Baker (2009).
SARAH LAW is Senior Lecturer in
creative writing and English literature
at London Metropolitan University. Her
book, Ink’s Wish (2014), is a collection of
poems inspired by Margery Kempe.
Image: detail from poster for Marge & Jules
Performance & panel discussion
19.00-20.30 Friday 21 October 2016
Chapel, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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73
Playing for peace: Soccer My Saviour
‘Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the
power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language
they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is
more powerful than government in breaking down racial barriers.’
Nelson Mandela
In March 1994 Rwandan football
player Eric Murangwa Eugene
led his team, Rayon Sports, to
victory against players from
Sudan, on their home turf in
Kigali. For a few hours people
who had been driven apart by
politics were brought together
celebrating their victory. Three
weeks later President Juvénal
Habyarimana’s plane was shot
down, starting a meticulously
planned genocide. Up to a million
Rwandan Tutsis would loose
their lives in just 100 days. Eric
survived the genocide, hidden by
his team-mates at Rayon Sports.
He believes that football saved
his life.
This event opens with a
screening of Soccer My Saviour,
Kyri Evangelou’s evocative short
documentary telling Eric’s story
of survival and the organisation
he founded after the genocide:
Football for Hope, Peace and
Unity (FHPU). This will be
followed by a panel discussion
exploring the role of football in
building tolerance and social
cohesion both in the UK and
overseas with guest speakers from
the worlds of academia, media
and football.
To what extent does football
heal rifts between communities
and help young people to form
positive bonds, be that in an
inner city London borough or
on a hilltop in Rwanda? In the
UK the history of football in
public spaces has at times been
regrettably violent. Are there
any dangers and challenges
involved in promoting sport as
a proponent for peace? What
is it about the nature of the
game, the play – for both players
and spectators – that has the
potential to move us so deeply?
Screening & panel discussion
19.30-21.00 Friday 21 October 2016
Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
ERIC MURANGWA EUGENE is a Rwandan
football player and coach. He is the
Founder and Director of two post-conflict
charities: Football for Hope, Peace and
Unity and Survivors Tribune.
KYRI EVANGELOU is the Director of
Soccer My Saviour. His documentary
projects have taken him to Palestine,
Kenya, Egypt and most recently Rwanda,
where he also works with the Aegis Trust.
JOHN SUGDEN is a leading international
expert on sport and peace-building in
divided societies. An award-winning
author and Professor of the Sociology of
Sport at the University of Brighton, he is
Director and co-founder of the university’s
Football for Peace programme.
KELVYN QUAGRAINE has participated in
training sessions run by Football Beyond
Borders for young people in some of
London’s most deprived estates and
schools.
ZOE NORRIDGE is Senior Lecturer in
English and Comparative Literature at
King’s. In 2014 she presented the awardwinning BBC documentary Living with
Memory in Rwanda.
Image: Andrew Esiebo, from his Love of It soccer worlds project www.andrewesiebo.com.
Reproduced with kind permission of the photographer. Presented by the Departments of English and Comparative Literature
74 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Playing with Orpheus
In 1956 the play Orfeu da
Conceição (Orpheus of the
Conception) premiered in Rio de
Janeiro. Written by Vinicius de
Moraes, with music by Antônio
Carlos Jobim, and stage setting
by Oscar Niemeyer, the play has
proved an inspiration to many
other artists worldwide, and is
the basis for films like Orfeu Negro
(Black Orpheus, 1959) and Orfeu
(1999), as well as the musicals
Orfeu (Brazil, 2010) and Black
Orpheus (Broadway, 2014).
The play sets the Greek myth
of Orpheus and Eurydice in a
contemporary favela in Rio de
Janeiro during the Brazilian
Carnival. Taking its cue from
de Moraes’s re-imagining of this
Greek myth, this evening will
add to the tradition of ‘playing
with Orpheus’. Performers will
re-enact Orfeu da Conceição,
dialoguing it with Monteverdi’s
Orpheus and Brazilian capoeira
and other rhythms. This dynamic
evening will involve singers,
actors, dancers, the King’s Brazil
Ensemble and invited musicians,
and, of course, members of
the audience, who will also be
invited to play with Orpheus.
ORGANIZERS
VINICIUS MARIANO DE CARVALHO is a
Lecturer at the Brazil Institute.
ANANYA KABIR is a literary and cultural
historian in the Department of English,
and director of Modern Moves, a fiveyear research project funded by an ERC
Advanced Grant.
DAVID TREECE is a Professor of
Portuguese in the Department of
Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American
Studies.
FELIPE BOTELHO is Lecturer in Brazilian,
Portuguese and Lusophone African
Studies.
FREDERICK MOEHN is Senior Lecturer
in Music.
JOSEPH FORT is the College Organist
and Director of the Chapel Choir, and
Lecturer in Music.
Image: centre: Muerte de Orfeo by Antonio García Vega (CC BY-SA 3.0); left & right: Rio Carnival.
Performance
19.30-21.30 Friday 21 October 2016
Great Hall, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Presented by the Brazil Institute
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
75
Contributing to the Arts & Humanities Festival
Justyna Scheuring
Justyna Scheuring is a Polish
visual and performance artist
based in London. Her practice
is interdisciplinary and revolves
around the emotional presence of
the human being and groups of
people in social situations. Most
of her art projects speak about:
presence, formation of group
identities, social behaviours,
mutual relations as well as an
encounter and Difference. She
also is attentive to how the
personal trauma of the individual
impacts their sense of social
belonging as well as their general
and immediate identity.
Her performative events are
designed to challenge the preconceptions of participation
in socio-cultural gatherings to
include the language of human
instinctive reactions into
the language of art, uncover
surviving mechanisms or to
employ a critical resistance
within a given situation.
‘Through my artworks I address the state of transformation: when
something doesn’t cease to be what it was and, at the same time starts to be
what it has never been before’.
Justyna Scheuring
JUSTYNA SCHEURING received her
MA from the Academy of Fine Arts in
Poznan and MA in Performance Making
from Goldsmiths University in London.
She has created several large-scale
multimedia projects like: WE PLAY
TONIGHT NO MORE SORROW, Colchester
Arts Centre in Colchester, 2012; Bristol
Biennale 2014. Selected solo exhibitions
include: I don’t participate, but I love
you, as a part of The Silence of Marcel
Duchamp is Overrated, the Centre
of Contemporary Art in Torun, 2014;
NO WORRIES THE WORLD IS FULL OF
PEOPLE, the Corner Window Gallery,
Auckland, NZ, 2013. Selected group
exhibitions and performance festivals
participation include: Steakhouse Live,
Toynbee Studios, Artsadmin, London,
2016; SUPERMARKET, Stockholm, 2016;
HECKLE Festival, Bosse&Baum Gallery,
London, 2015; PAO Festival, Oslo, 2014;
FIERCE Festival, Birmingham, 2014.
Image: Justyna Scheuring, ‘Victory over the Sun’, 2015, photograph Tytus Szabelski
76 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Notes
ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
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Notes
78 ARTS & HUMANITIES FESTIVAL 2016
WWW.KCL.AC.UK/AHFEST
www.kcl.ac.uk/ahfest
#ahfest
PLAY
Arts & Humanities Festival 2016
Contents: at a glance
Events throughout the Festival
5 | Game playing sessions Modern Language Centre
6 | Installation One Easy Step
7 | Guided walking tour Mr Punch on Fleet Street
8 | Performance Radical Opera: Dido & ...
9 | Movement workshop Freedom from form, playing
with movement
10 | Installation Three King’s
11 | Practical art workshop Drawing life
12 | Workshops, exhibition, symposium Playing with
medieval visions, sounds & sensations
14 | Film screening & exhibition A Civil Soldier
15 | Exhibition The Infinite Mix
Monday
17 | Talk “Just write it, I’ll make it work” – Alan Bennett
and Nicholas Hytner
Tuesday
19 | Talk What’s wrong with classical music?
20 | Talk Playing in Public
21 | Inaugural lecture Life as melodrama, history as play
22 | Recital Canons & variations (...after Bach)
23 | Poetry reading & panel discussion Not another bloody
poet: what is poetry doing coming out of its “ghetto”?
Wednesday
25 | Workshop Level unlocked
26 | Panel discussion Patriotism & the ‘great game’
27 | Talk & performance At play in the early modern
tavern
28 | Film screening and Q&A Mitote: a documentary
29 | Panel debate Shift happens
39 | Lecture Constructing the ‘creative’ self
Thursday
32 | Performative talk In the ruins of the university
33 | Panel discussion Life gamified
34 | Performance The pity of war
Friday
36 | Games & film screening Child’s play
37 | Games Jam XX+ Game Jam London
38 | Panel discussion Is it only a game?
39 | Film screening & talk Play time: the day off
40 | Musical & poetic performance Tragic play: music in
the face of death
Monday
42 | Talk & guided walk An illuminated night talk & walk
about Aldwych
43 | Dance workshop Redoute: a 1790s Viennese ball
44 | Lecture Gamification of Russian media & politics
45 | Lecture Aristophanic comedy between play (paidiá)
& education (paideía)
46 | Inaugural lecture The art of noise: interwar
modernism & the politics of sound
47 | Performance Cervantes at play: a series of
performances
Tuesday
49 | Reading, performance & exhibition Play & reading /
reading & playing
50 | Workshop Cervantes at play: reflections
51 | Lecture Games in painting: playing with society
52 | Discussion & performance The Mother – playing
with a play
53 | Discussion & readings ‘Poetry And...’ As the crow
flies: Ted Hughes as inspiration & muse
54 | Panel discussion Playing & reality: Winnicott,
creativity & play
55 | Film screening and Q&A The Timbertown Follies
56 | Performance & talk Play it again, Romeo
Wednesday
58 | Pre-concert talk ... to set one line against another:
Afterlives of Counterpoint
59 | Panel discussion Playing ordinary
60 | Talk Let’s Party!
61 | Concert Played by the picture of Nobody
62 | Film screening Screening of student films: Play
63 | Talk Charles Wheatstone & the craze for the
stereoscope
Thursday
65 | Poetry reading & discussion Playing with tigers
66 | Musical performance Playing in church with Haydn
& Mozart
67 | Digital performance/installation Moving past
present: digitally reanimating the Gaiety Girls
68 | Film screening & discussion Still Shakespeare
69 | Poetry readings Serious play: readings from King’s
poetry students
70 | Performance & discussion Midday lunches or Petit
Dejeuner du Midi
Friday
72 | Poetry reading Sprung from Shakespeare
73 | Performance & panel discussion Marge & Jules
74 | Screening & panel discussion Playing for peace
75 | Performance Playing with Orpheus
Festival Organisation
Festival curated by the Arts & Humanities Research Institute (AHRI)
Festival Director: PROFESSOR MAX SAUNDERS
Festival Programme Director: PELAGIA PAIS
Festival Organisers: ALEXANDRA CREIGHTON DANIEL DALY VICKY BOWMAN
Festival Designer: W M PANK
Festival Brochure Editor: KATE SYMONDSON
Tel +44 (0)20 7848 1226/1232 Email [email protected]
Faculty of Arts & Humanities King’s College London Strand London WC2R 2LS