Stephe Harrop is a visiting lecturer who teaches Greek Theatre at Goldsmiths.
As a freelance lecturer, Stephe teaches the performance and reception of ancient drama, European theatre history, actor training and performance storytelling at a range of institutions including Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, Millikin University (Illinois), Anglia Ruskin University and The Central School of Speech and Drama.
Stephe also works as a professional performance storyteller. Her first full-length show, The Border Ballads, premiered at A Bit Crack (Newcastle) in 2009. A companion-piece, The Dark-Eyed Sailor, had its first performance at The Watch House Museum (Sunderland) in 2010. She has appeared in six seasons of Vayu Naidu Company’s ‘Licence to Tell’ tour, and in 2011 was one of six emerging storytellers chosen to showcase their work at the Annual Gathering of the Society for Storytelling. In addition, she uses storytelling as a means of promoting public engagement skills within higher education. You can read more about her work at www.stepheharrop.co.uk.
Research interests
Stephe’s practice-based PhD (Royal Holloway, 2008) explored the relationship between poetic text and the dancing body in a range of modern English-language versions of Greek tragedy, culminating in a solo show (The Body in Translation, 2007) as well as a written thesis. Her subsequent research has continued to focus on the performance and reception of ancient tragedy and epic, and she’s a post-doctoral associate of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (University of Oxford).
Her current research is also increasingly concerned with contemporary performance storytelling in Britain; the craft’s origins, ideologies, techniques and practitioners, and in particular the challenges of creating new storytelling performances from historical materials and narratives.
Selected papers and performances
‘Epic Failure: The Storyteller, the Canon, and Composition-in-Performance’ at TaPRA Conference (Kingston University, September 2011)
‘Spotlight: Storytelling’
at ‘Sensory Stories Training Day: Making Sense of Public Engagement’ (Humanities Research Centre, University of York, January 2011)
‘The Strange Case of Augustus Rookwood: The Storyteller and History’
at ‘Storytelling: Imagination and the Past’ (University of York, November 2010)
‘Praise-Song for a Goat-Man’
at 10th Postgraduate Symposium on Ancient Drama (Royal Holloway, University of London, June 2010)
‘Performance Storytelling and the Greeks’
Performance Research Seminar (Goldsmiths, University of London, December 2009)
‘Dancing Between the Lines: Incomplete Histories and Performance Practice’
at ‘Approaches to Theatre Historiography in a Transdiscplinary Research Environment or Where have all the Theatre Historians Gone?’ (TaPRA Postgraduate Interim Symposium, University of London, March 2009)
Selected publications
Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice
Co-editor (with Professor Edith Hall) and author of a chapter on ‘Physical Performance and the Languages of Translation’. Duckworth, 2010.
Review - Reasoning Madness: The Reception and Performance of Euripides’ Herakles, by Kathleen Riley
Platform E-Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts, Spring 2009: pp.113-116.
‘Poetic Translation and Corporeality’ (co-authored with Professor David Wiles)
New Theatre Quarterly, Volume 24, Issue 1 (February 2008): pp.51-64.
‘Ezra Pound’s Women of Trachis: Modernist Translation as Performance Text’
Platform E-Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts, Spring 2008. pp.90-104.