Lost in a Sea of Glass and Tin by Gary and Claire, York Theatre Royal, 28 March 2019

This York Literature Festival event is in the Studio at York Theatre Royal

Book tickets here

What does it mean to leave everything behind? Take off and live a life of solitude. Where can we go and what can we become? A textual and visual performance by Gary Winters and Claire Hind.

Lost in A Sea of Glass and Tin responds to David Lynch’s concept of ‘the eye of the duck’, particularly with regards to what the eye can teach us about repetition, texture, shape and the colour of performance. We play with cross-fertilisations of art forms between Lynch’s noireesque cinema and a distortion of gestures for the singing body once explored by medieval hermits and in solitude. We draw upon our own fascination and observations of a seaside entertainer who week in and week out sings the classics and to his heart’s content along with the energy and commitment of his super fans.

Lost in A Sea of Glass and Tin premiered at The Defibrillator Gallery Chicago and is a mixed media live work of light, sound, projection and voice.

As well as a performance maker, Claire Hind is associate professor in our School of Performance and Media Production.

student opportunity: join a live reading of the play volpone

Adam Smith is looking for performers to help him stage an informal dramatic reading of Ben Jonson’s 1606 play, Volpone, which is to be studied by first year students this semester.

volpone

“This bawdy, provocative and frankly vicious play follows the Machiavellian Volpone and his parasitic side-kick Mosca as they con and connive their way through renaissance Venice. Filled with razor sharp wit and cutting insults, Jonson’s play is and exciting, darkly comic and haunting tale, which I hope you might consider helping me bring to life in Week 5.

Continue reading “student opportunity: join a live reading of the play volpone”

Iranian Production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus comes to York St John

GVG_2749After our very successful involvement with the first York International Shakespeare Festival two years ago, YSJU’s English Literature team will again be putting on two events as part of the second YISF programme this May in conjunction with the University of Tehran and YSJU’s Drama and Theatre team. Both events are free but ticketed. Please check the external link regularly as they will be available shortly as the York Theatre Royal adds events to its system. If you would like to get involved as a volunteer, please email Saffron at s.walkling@yorksj.ac.uk

 

Shakespeare’s play is a significant demonstration of the deployment of the state apparatus, which never discloses the strategies through which power is imposed. When Coriolanus reveals these strategies, the state, together with those who think order is the only guarantee of survival, literally delete him from society. Hence, Coriolanus reflects the current democratic crisis in our region.

-Adaptors Hamed Asgharzadeh and Javad Ebrahiminezhad

Coriolanus performed by Titus Theatre Group, Iran

Coriolanus 3Temple Hall, York St John University 2pm – 3:15pm, Monday 15 May 2017

After the performance of Coriolanus there will be a short Q&A session.

Performing Shakespeare Workshop

QS/015, York St John University 11.00am – 1.00pm, Tuesday 16 May 2017

Titus Theatre Group, in collaboration with Drama and Theatre at York St John University, offer a workshop based around their production of Coriolanus. The workshop will be led by Hamed Asgharzadeh from Tehran, and David Richmond from the University of York St John.

GVG_2980

The York St John student production, Coriolanus “and they hunt for the truth that is ‘behind it all’” (Brecht 1957, text by William Shakespeare, Kurt Cobain, Charles Olson and the company) will be presented on 11 and 12 May 2017 at the Stained Glass Centre at St Martin-cum-Gregory, Micklegate, York.

Black History Month: Noma Dumezweni talks A Human Being Died That Night.

by George Alexander Moss

Currently enchanting audiences as Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Palace Theatre, Noma Dumezweni has enjoyed a varied career on stage and screen including roles in everything from TV favourites Shameless and Doctor Who to Royal Shakespeare Company productions. To mark the opening of Black History Month, Dumezweni came to York St John to discuss her lead role in A Human Being Died That Night at the Hampstead Theatre.

 

Dumezweni began the sell-out event by quite literally drawing in the audience, asking them to gather their chairs closer to where she and YSJ English Literature Lecturer Julie Raby, who mediated the discussion, sat. The move seemed natural for the discussion of a play that demanded enormous personal investment from audiences and actors alike. The play is based on a book-length report by psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela of her interviews in prison with the head of Apartheid South Africa’s state-sanctioned death squads, Eugene De Kock. Dumezweni played the lead role of Gobodo-Madikizela herself. The play reminds theatre goers that, beneath immoral action, killers are mere people – not always the ‘other’. Dumezweni describes the play as being about the meaning of forgiveness, explaining that De Kock, “was able to apologise to three women whose husbands he had killed. They forgave him, because they felt his remorse.” It may seem initially difficult if not impossible to attribute remorse to such a monster. But in the face of murderous atrocities and sharp racial divides, empathy enabled a more complete truth to emerge, placing a fundamental human attribute into a time of enormous strife.

[He] “was able to apologise to three women whose husbands he had killed. They forgave him, because they felt his remorse”

-Noma Dumezweni, on State-sanctioned murderer Eugene De Kock.

To convey this,  A Human Being Died That Night was original and immersive in its theatrics from the get go; even the Hampstead Theatre’s bar, and its patrons, were part of the performance. On arrival, audience members were lectured on forgiveness by Dumezweni in character as Gobodo-Madikizela. For Dumezweni, this intervention was part of the production’s wider sense of “freedom of things staging wise. You come in relaxed, and its listen to the story, oh no let’s move you, oh shit I have to move all my bags again, oh now everything has gone really quiet. And now you have to be really referential to the space you’re walking in. You are now a witness to something you didn’t know was coming.” Such unpredictability garners attention and marks memories. No doubt this understanding could have inspired Dumezweni’s chair moving tactics. She adds that in the theatre, “there’s a cage, there’s a cell. You’ve just walked into darkness, and Matthew [Marsh]’s sitting in a silver cell, and he’s dressed in bright orange. You the audience, have to go past him before you can get to your seat.” The audience are suddenly no longer bystanders in the proceedings – but part of the production.
Pumla
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Few actors are granted the opportunity to meet those they are playing, but Noma Dumezweni is one of them. However, it wasn’t smooth sailing to meet Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and Dumezweni’s rationalisation for potentially being denied this opportunity was that “someone is playing you, that you have never met, and using your words. I would be terrified, she must be so nervous, because I was nervous with meeting her. But she did turn up, and I was able to ask her: were you scared? And she went: yeah.”

 

The cast of A Human Being Died That Night had many such remarkable experiences during the course of the production. This included meeting De Kock himself in Victoria Prison.  Dumezweni recalls this as being “an extraordinary thing, when you see somebody you’re supposed to hate. But I think the play helped me go along with this as well to a certain extent. I met a human being, who has taken absolute responsibility for everything he has done in his life […] He realised he was part of a system […] I got to meet him, extraordinary, and I can say gosh, I was able to forgive him. When we talk to people, it becomes a different thing.”

“I met a human being, who has taken absolute responsibility for everything he has done in his life”

-Dumezweni, on meeting “Prime Evil” Eugene de Kock in prison.

Ultimately, A Human Being Died That Night counts on the humanity of the audience to engage on an intimate level with characters that are based on real people. Even in the aftermath of the apartheid, one of humanity’s darkest times, human beings will always have the capacity to understand, empathise and even to forgive.

 


edited by Ollie Driver