Event overview
The Performance Research Forum hosts a range of events, talks and presentations by established and early-career researchers and practitioners in theatre and performance.
Alexandra Parsons: 'Remembering Derek Jarman’s life-writing'
This paper will discuss Derek Jarman’s queer life-writing project. Alongside his activism, filmmaking, and painting, he wrote and published prolifically, especially from the time of his HIV-positive diagnosis in 1986 until his death in February 1994. Jarman's personal response to the virus and his activism come together in a deeply moving body of autobiographical work. Despite the urgent and hostile climate he was working in, he takes a uniquely imaginative approach to his writing that understands life as art. Parsons will also reflect on what happens when autobiographical writing is created with others and will explore what it means to return to Derek Jarman’s writing now, thirty years after his death.
Alexandra Parsons spends most of her time working for Wellcome on programmes that seek to shift research priorities to be more community-centred and to transform the cultural scripts around illness. Her background is in researching queer histories and cultural responses to HIV/AIDS, and she teaches gender, sexuality, and contemporary culture at UCL. Her book about Derek Jarman, Luminous Presence: Derek Jarman’s Life-writing (Manchester U.P., 2021), was funded by the Paul Mellon Centre.
Marcus Bell: 'Dance Against the Void'
This paper will reflect on a recent article (Classical Receptions Journal, 2023), in which Bell considered three moments from the beginning, middle and end of Derek Jarman’s artistic career: Lindsay Kemp’s opening dance in Sebastiane (1976), Jarman’s words on a performance by Michael Clark in the 1980s, and Jarman’s last film Blue (1993), while holding onto the affective registers of his final diary entry (1994). Considering the ways in which Jarman indexed the ephemeral myth-making processes of queer life and art, Bell attempted to develop a new kinetic-temporal methodology for exploring relation in performance and queer cinema based on the fleeting queer modalities of dance.
Marcus Bell completed their PhD at University of Oxford with a project titled ‘Choreographic Tragedy into the Twenty-First Century’. They are a dancer and queer practitioner. Marcus currently holds part-time teaching posts at Goldsmiths University and University of Oxford.
Cass Fleming: 'Jarman Garden'
In this short talk, Fleming will reflect on Jarman Garden (2004), a theatrical fantasia on the life and work of Derek Jarman, integrating original film work with visual and physical performance. It was Co-Directed by Cass Fleming and Ben Santa-Maria.
Dr Cass Fleming is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, a theatre director, and a trainer of actors, directors, and theatre-makers. Fleming is the Founder and Co-Director of The Chekhov Collective Practice Research Centre. For more, see https://www.gold.ac.uk/theatre-performance/staff/c-fleming/.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Feb 2024 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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