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Image: The Medical Museum, Queen’s College Cork at the beginning of the 20th century (O’Rahilly, 1949).

Using UCC as our study site, the Living Well with the Dead project includes archival and ethnographic research on the display and

enlisting of the dead since the foundation of the university to produce bodies of knowledge and the ‘order of things’.

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Workshop 4

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Theatres of the Dead: Performance, Anatomy and Archaeology

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Location: CACSSS Seminar Room ORB G27 and Screen Media Centre in Kane Building B10 (Basement)

Date and time: 19th March, 11am-5.30pm (4-5:15pm in Screen Media Centre, Kane B10)

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Speakers:

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Margaret Werry, Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota

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Anna Furse, Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths University of London

 

Joanna Sofaer, Department of Archarology, University of Southampton

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Oonagh Kearney, Independent film-maker

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This transdisciplinary workshop, which will include a screening of Oonagh Kearney’s award winning film Five Letters to the Stranger who will Dissect my Brain,  is the fourth in the series of workshops in the project Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland. This project aims to find new ways of thinking about, researching and responding to contemporary public disquiet in Ireland about uncared-for dead bodies.

 

Through creative and critical approaches from theatre and performance studies, digital media and film, museology and archaeology, this workshop offers provocations and insights into the ways bodies become theatres, performances or sites, and where questions of who and what are displayed and for what audience, what is onstage and what is ‘obscene’ (off-stage), will continue to develop the on-going debates of the Living Well with the Dead project.  

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Margaret Werry

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Margaret Werry is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance.  Her first book, The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) examined the role of tourism in ethnic politics and liberal state-making. She is currently working on a short book entitled Theatre & Tourism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), examining the historical and contemporary entanglement of these two industries. Another major project (The Performing Dead: Public Culture at the Borders of the Human) concerns the way we treat, trade, and display human remains in museums and popular culture, and what this can tell us about contested and politicized understandings of human life, death, and rights.  Her other scholarly interests include critical and experimental pedagogy, multimedia and immersive performance, indigenous and intercultural theatre, and indigenous performance activism against climate change in the island Pacific.  Werry has published on these topics in a range of international journals, including Public Culture, Cultural Studies, Theatre Journal, Performance Research, TPQ, Review of Cultural Studies, Education and Pedagogy, TDR, and Essays in Theatre.  Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Wenner Gren Anthropological Foundation, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, American Association of University Women, and the Interweaving Performance Cultures project at the International Research Centre at Freie Universitat Berlin.

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Anna Furse

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Anna Furse is a professional theatre artist, academic researcher, creative and critical writer. She Directs the MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths - an international laboratory programme in performer-driven theatre/dance/live art making. She designed and convenes the BA in DTA Comedy and Satire and supervises undergraduate Dissertations and Practice Research PhD students. She curates the Performance Research Forum (PRF) - currently entering its 28th programme - for which she received a Peake Teaching Award in 2005. She is currently the Department’s Co-Director of Research. She is co-director, with medical historian Dr Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, of the interdisciplinary Centre of the Body. As Head of Department of Theatre and Performance 2011 - 2015, one of her key projects was the refurbishment of the George Wood Theatre and Studios that opened in 2018.

As one of the handful of first-generation of women directors in the UK, she uniquely blended feminist issues with Laboratory Theatre research in the early 1980s, earning her innovative international-touring feminist project Bloodgroup 1979 – 1986 critical acclaim and a London home at the ICA. Together with Suzy Gilmour, Kate Owen, Sylvia Hallet, Rick Fisher and other collaborators, she co-created 6 devised works that toured Europe, and directed Deborah Levy’s CLAM in 1985.

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An award-winning theatre director-writer, staging modern and new plays, classics and a range of devised works as well as her own commissioned creations, she has collaborated closely with some distinguished theatre artists including Peter Brook’s pioneering scenographer Sally Jacobs, lighting designer Rick Fisher, composers Stephen Warbeck and Graeme Miller, and musicians David Coulter and Henry Dagg. She has produced her work in a range of contexts, from repertory to applied theatres, ‘sci-art’ to experimental laboratory environments. In the 1980s she worked as movement director at the RSC and directed for numerous UK companies including Graeae, Scarlet Harlets and Womens Theatre Group (Sphynx). She has received many ACE Awards, Bursaries and Grants over the years as well as funding from the AHRC, the British Academy, Impact and People Awards and Small Grants from the Wellcome Trust.

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Selected publications include: editing a new experimental anthology for Theatre in Pieces: Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (Methuen, 2011); guest editing an issue on Gender and Performance for GenderForum, University of Köln; ‘Being Touched’ for A Life of Ethics and Performance (ed. John Matthews), Cambridge Scholars Press; ‘In Every Litre of Sea Water There Are Two Tablespoons of Salt… On Making SEA/WOMAN’ in Women: A Cultural Review. 22.4 (ed. Helen Carr) 2011.

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Joanna Sofaer

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Professor Joanna Sofaer (FSA) is a Professor of Archaeology within Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

 

I am Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fellow (2017-2020), Director of Archaeology for the Creative Industries, and Co-Director of the research at the important Bronze Age tell settlement at Százhalombatta, Hungary. I am PI for the Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) project Women at the Edge of Empire and am a partner in the Culture Europe project Journey to the Beginnings. I previously led the HERA-Funded Project Creativity and Craft Production in Middle and Late Bronze Age Europe (CinBA) (09-HERA-JRP-CI-FP-020) and was a partner in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks Forging Identities: Mobility of Culture in Bronze Age Europe (ITN 212402) and Emergence of European Communities  (RTN2-2001-00366). I was a partner in the AHRC-funded interdisciplinary PARNASSUS project.

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I am internationally known for my innovative research focusing on the European Bronze Age; creativity, craft and innovation in material culture; the past as inspiration for contemporary creative practice; archaeologies of social identity including archaeologies of the body, age, gender and bioarchaeology; archaeology for social benefit. I have published widely on these topics and have engaged in collaborative work with diverse partners in the UK and across Europe including universities, museums, cultural heritage organisations, businesses, arts organisations, the Crafts Council, schools, and major infrastructure projects. National and international research and industry collaborations range from architecture and engineering to contemporary craft, performance art, and dance. I have developed highly successful, novel archaeology-based Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for the creative and cultural sectors.

I have given invited lectures and keynote presentations in many countries including Argentina, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Sweden and the USA, as well as in the UK. I sit on the International Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute of Archaeology, Zagreb, Croatia, steering committees for a range of international projects and research groups, and regularly review for a number of European research councils. I am on the editorial board of the Springer series Bridging Bioarchaeology and Social Theory and a member of Advisory Boards for Bioarchaeology International, Norwegian Archaeological Review and Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. I engage in advocacy for the Arts and Humanities at the highest levels and am a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

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