News & Events
All the latest research news and events in the Faculty of Arts
News
The Arts and the Big Society: sticking plaster or resistance?'
The Centre for Research into the Arts as Well-Being will host this two-hour seminar on interventions in health contexts and the politics of arts on Wednesday 29 February 2012.
For more information on the seminar, visit the Public Events CalendarPublic Events Calendar or contact Elizabeth.Scott-Hall@winchester.ac.uk
Researching Popular Performances
Researching Popular Performances is a series of public talks and discussions led by researchers in the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Winchester. They are held at the Theatre Royal Winchester alongside the theatre’s spring programme. Most of the talks are scheduled as pre-performance events, though attendance at the performance is not necessary to enjoy the talk. Each talk is thematically related to the performance in the season that it prefaces, but it is not about that specific performance. The series also includes post-show Q&A sessions, for which attendance at the performance is necessary. The pre-show talks are free and are held in the Garden Room of the Theatre (behind the box-office). All are welcome. Click HERE for more details.
Graduate film selected for European Arts Festival in Tallinn, Estonia
A recent graduate from the MA Journalism programme at the University of Winchester was chosen from hundreds of others to showcase her work at a prestigious European Arts Festival in Tallinn, European Capital of Culture 2011.Click HERE for more details
Funding for research project 'Writing Jewish'
Dr Ruth Gilbert, Lecturer in English, has been awarded a research fellowship of nearly £40,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the project 'Writing Jewish: Contemporary British-Jewish literature (1990 – present)'. In fiction, memoirs and journalism, writers are addressing increasingly challenging questions about what it means to be both British and Jewish in the 21st century. Ironic self-presentation is a recurring theme in recent British-Jewish memoirs and novels, and themes of disconnection run through many of these texts. At the same time however, the awareness of not quite belonging also generates a productive spirit of self-reflexive enquiry.
In this project, Dr Gilbert aims to question this emphasis on ambiguity and tension by asking such questions as 'In what ways are British-Jewish writers interrogating, embracing or resisting the diverse and diffuse forms of identification present within British culture today?' and 'Does a focus on the representation of British-Jewishness in particular reveal any wider preoccupations or anxieties within contemporary British culture?'.
Funding for International Emergent Artists Festival
John Lee, Programme Leader in Street Arts, working with the company Fuse, has been awarded over £36,500 by the Arts Council and £28,000 from other sources, including local councils and the NHS, to support and develop the International Emergent Artists Festival, which will take place on 23 July in Taunton, Somerset.
Find out more about the Festival.
Funding for Beacons
Dr Yvon Bonenfant, Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and former Director of the Research and Knowledge Exchange Centre, has been funded by the Arts Council England to undertake a 10-venue national tour of the theatrical voice and video performance Beacons in autumn 2011; the grant consists of over £17,000. The piece, which brings together extended vocalisation via live and recorded voice, multi-channel sound environments and three-screen video projection, was a collaboration between Dr Bonenfant and video artist and Winchester alumnus David Shearing, now at the University of Leeds.
The piece was developed over a long period; initial research came as part of Bonenfant's British Academy-funded project 'Extending Vocal Bodies into Audiovisual Media'. The multi-screen, hour-long theatrical performance was developed during a residency at the new Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, with further support from Central School of Speech and Drama's Theatre Noise Project. The University of Winchester has also supported various aspects of the project, providing space, time and seed funding.
Funding for NE©XT
project
The University of Winchester has recently been awarded ca €200,000 from the European Union’s Culture Programme. This grant is for a project titled NE©XT – New European Creative Talent that brings together a consortium of European institutions and organisations to support arts graduates in developing international careers. Led by Professor Anthony Dean, representing the University of Winchester, the consortium partners include the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA), Bergen National Academy of the Arts (Norway), Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (Tallinn), Porto Politecnico School of Music and Performing Arts (Portugal) and the International Theatre School Festival Amsterdam (Netherlands).
NEU/NOW Festival
At the heart of this project is the successful NEU/NOW Festival – of which Professor Dean is Artistic Director – which is both an online ‘virtual’ festival open to graduating arts students across Europe and a ‘live’ festival where selected works from the online festival are shown to producers, curators and public audiences. The first live Festival took place in Vilnius in 2009 as part of their European Capital of Culture programme that year; the second edition of the live Festival took place in the cultural city of Nantes in France in 2010 and the third edition is due to take place this autumn in Tallinn (Estonia) as part of their European Capital of Culture 2011.
The funding received from the EU’s Culture Programme will enable the consortium to achieve several key objectives, the chief objective being to create an open and supportive online and live environment to support an emergent generation of talented arts graduates, enabling them to show their work to both international and regional audiences, establish international professional partnerships and provide a fertile ground for transnational artistic mobility, international communities of practice and creative businesses. A further objective is to develop the online and live festival events as a vital component to the image of Europe as an innovative and creative continent, where innovation and experimentation are fostered and where artistic freedom, intercultural dialogue and diversity of expression are passionately upheld. A third objective is to raise the visibility of the high quality of higher arts education across Europe and beyond, demonstrating the active engagement between art schools on the one hand and creative business creation and commitment to society on the other.
It is often difficult for emerging artists to bring their work to the attention of the wider professional communities within the creative industries, let alone to international audiences or markets. Historically, both art schools and universities have close and long-established links with theatre companies, galleries, cultural enterprises and commercial creative industries. Innovative collaboration between higher arts education institutions and creative businesses and other economic, social and cultural domains has become essential in higher arts education. The European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA) views the University of Winchester as a good example of such collaboration, which was why the University was selected as the lead partner in making the application to the EU.
In addition to the range of activities outlined above, the funding will also support the development of a sustainable future for the NEW/NOW Festival beyond 2011. Part of the project will be to seek to conjoin the NEU/NOW Festival with the International Theatre Schools Festival, which has been running successfully in Amsterdam for over 21 years, for 2012 and beyond.
Funding for Big Ideas Conference
In the autumn of 2010, Professor Anthony Dean, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, was awarded circa £50,000 by Arts Council England to support a national conference event to share best practice on mounting large-scale outdoor events. The BIG IDEAS conference, which took place in October 2010, was designed to bring together three related yet distinctive communities of professional arts practice: street arts, puppetry and carnival arts. Professor Dean worked in partnership with The Puppet Centre Trust, the UK Centre for Carnival Arts, Emergency Exit Arts and the Independent Street Arts Network. The conference attracted over 170 delegates drawn from across the UK and included an impressive array of keynote speakers and workshop leaders, such as Ruth Mackenzie OBE, the Director of the Cultural Olympiad.
As part of the BIG IDEAS initiative, it is planned to produce a publication associated with the event. The publication, Animating the Outdoors: A User's Guide, will feature many of the contributions made on the day in addition to reports on discussion sessions and workshops. This new publication will form part of Professor Dean’s User’s Guide series, which includes five previous publications going back over the last 10 years and including topics such as Dramaturgy, Creative Producing, Street Arts, Puppetry and Performance Technologies.