Communications, Drama and Film

What's on

Performances, workshops, events and seminars are shown on this page, where they're of interest to Communications, Drama and Film students.

Please remember that coursework-related events may not appear until a week before the event, so please check back regularly.

Wed 26 Feb

Start time: 16:30
 

Tickets (in-person): 31
Tickets (online only): 994
Admission Free
End Time: 18:00

Research Seminar: Keep singing, Orpheus: Decadent voiceworlds and utopian possibilities in Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown (2019)

Location: TS1  Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA  Show on Map

In this presentation, I will introduce themes and ideas from my new book Singing Utopia: Voice in Musical Theatre (OUP, 2024). As the first long-form study of musical theatre voices from a cultural perspective, I will consider some of the key terms and frameworks introduced in the book through a close listening to the ‘voiceworlds’ in one primary case study—Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown (2019). Using utopian theory, musicological analysis, and four new approaches developed in Singing Utopia, we will examine the spaces, sonorities and social constructs of this folk-infused reimagining of the Orphic myth, listening to what voices do in their efforts to imagine, critique, and shape better worlds in the face of inevitable failure. The implicit tension between hope and loss is the very substance of Orpheus’s song and, I argue, the very thing that imbues musical theatre vocality with utopian possibility.

Reserve a place for in-person attendance or viewing the livestream online via the Reserve button.

Wed 05 Mar

Start time: 16:30
 

Tickets for students/staff: 38
Tickets for public: 10
Admission Free
End Time: 18:00

Gender, Power and Autonomy

Presented by: Research Centre for the Study of Gender Media and Sexuality (GEMS)
Location: TS1  Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA  Show on Map

This is a joint CDF Research Seminar

In recent years, the world has witnessed growing feminist challenges and anti-feminist right-wing backlash. We have also observed the blurred boundaries between feminist politics and reactionary politics, as in the case where women’s self-empowerment is both a feminist goal and a neoliberal propaganda. As the power in the late capitalism develop new strategies and apparatuses to regulate, control, manage, and defuse feminist practices and politics, the key question at stake thus is one of autonomy. Departing from the Western, liberal notion of autonomy – defined as the realization of the desires of individual’s true will, our discussion draws on de-colonial, queer feminist insight of agency - that moves beyond the binary model of enacting and subverting norms  - to address the contemporary predicament. Against this backdrop, we invite the CDF community to explore how the changing communication environment re-shapes the ways in which autonomy is experienced and enacts, and how autonomy can be reimagined by different media practices and performances.
 
Topics might include (but are not limited to):
 
  • Women creators’ autonomy in television and film industries
  • Autonomy and the body
  • The power of affects – intimacy, eros, and anger,
  • Popular feminism and popular misogyny 
  • The role of White supremacy and racism in re-shaping the idea of autonomy
  • Decolonising and de-Westernising the idea of autonomy
  • LGBTQ, feminist, anti-racist, disability activisms

Wed 12 Mar

Start time: 16:30
 

Tickets (in-person): 40
Tickets (online only): 999
Admission Free
End Time: 18:00

Research Roundtable: The way the world could be – utopias and conditions

Location: TS2  Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA  Show on Map

‘See, Orpheus was a poor boy 
But he had a gift to give: 
He could make you see how the world could be, 
In spite of the way that it is 
Can you see it? 
Can you hear it? 
Can you feel it?’ (Hermes in Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown) 

 

Where calls to ‘save the planet’ tend to be fuzzy on what the saved planet actually looks like, sounds like or feels like in terms of the climate, justice and civic society, artists such as Anaïs Mitchell are attempting to imagine possibilities. Ending the award-winning musical Hadestown, Hermes the storyteller restarts the familiar tragedy of Orpheus and Euridice knowing that it ends badly, but still ‘hoping it might work out this time’. 

 

Theorists such as Jill Dolan and José Esteban Muñoz have separately explored the notion of performativity in relation to utopias, but what is conditional in these possible worlds (utopian or otherwise)? How are artists and communicators generating the conditional? Intervening in conveying a sense of what might be possible? Responding to the conditions in which they work?  

 

Short presentations and provocations from across the department include (but are not restricted to): 

 

  • The way the world could be: conditions and the conditional
  • Considerations of climate, social justice, civic society  
  • Utopias, affects, and representations 
  • Can you see it? Visual possibilities 
  • Can you hear it? Sound and music 
  • Can you feel it? Tangible propositions  


Reserve an online only ticket to receive the link for the live stream.