Staging History: 26th April 2019

The programme and tickets are now available for the symposium 'Staging History' at the University of Bristol on 26th April 2019. Booking is essential: tickets available here. Staging History Programme

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Clown School

Image credit: Clown Tod Teufel Engel by Max Rüedi Ever since our first session on playwriting, I’ve been thinking about making mistakes. Poppy gave us the challenge of writing a scene of dialogue (using the ‘actioning’ technique - see Poppy’s blog To Pin Things Down). Our prompt was the following ‘Known Case of Witchcraft’: Saint-Didier …

To pin things down

I’m a playwright, who is about a month into working on the year-long project called ‘Creative Histories of Witchcraft, France 1790 – 1940’. So far, it’s been illuminating and challenging to bring together the fields of history and theatre.  “Which ideas from these readings on witchcraft resonate with ideas about poetry or drama?” Will (the …

Theatricality

One of the guiding questions in the creative histories of witchcraft project is what it would mean to treat historical research as practice. One form of practice the project is particularly interested in is theatricality. Of course, the idea of social life as drama has a long academic tradition, from Erving Goffmann, through Victor Turner …

Magpieing: sparking the creative process

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy… Last year I worked in a primary school, and noticed children using a literacy technique called Magpie-ing. As European folklore tells us, the magpie is a thief of shiny things. The pupils were being taught to ’steal’ words, phrases or ideas …

History is What We Take Away

This week Anna selected some poems that engage in different ways with history, using found materials, imagined ventriloquisms, and techniques of selection and presentation. One of these techniques is erasure: removing words from a found text. Tracy K Smith’s poem ‘Declaration’, for instance, is based on the United States Declaration of Independence. You can read …

I Doubt Some Foul Play

When I tell people that I research witchcraft, I am often asked whether people really believed in witchcraft. I like to pause when someone asks this, because there is a good answer to this question, and a true answer. The good answer, the one that people want to hear, is the simple one: Yes, people believed in witches! …