Staging History: a One-day Symposium
University of Bristol
Booking essential: http://bit.ly/StagingHistory
This one-day symposium addresses collaborations between academic history, heritage, and theatre.
Such collaborations have been of obvious interest to heritage organizations, as a way of communicating the past to diverse publics. Theatre performances have also become a well-established route to ‘impact’ for academic researchers, while some forms of playwrighting, such as the ‘theatre of the real’, and ‘documentary’ or ‘verbatim theatre’ have moved ever closer to the methods and sources of historical research. Collaborations can become research processes in their own rights, as creative practitioners and researchers learn from one another.
This one-day symposium brings together playwrights, historians, and theatre professionals. Themes for discussion include:
- Theatre as practice-based historical research
- The ethics of staging histories
- Historical performance as entertainment
- Definitions of ‘truthfulness’ and accuracy in theatrical performances
- The functions and purposes of performing histories
- Interactive histories