Gabriel Gbadamosi
Staff details
Gabriel Gbadamosi is a poet, playwright and dramaturg. He holds an AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship at Goldsmiths for three years from September 2006. He will be based in the Department of Theatre and Performance and will be working on research projects in European, African and British playwriting and performance under the aegis of the Pinter Centre.
Gabriel is currently dramaturg for Voices, a drama series for Nigerian television by the BBC World Service Trust, and is also dramaturg for Hydroponic, a development program for culturally diverse writers run by Writernet and funded by the Arts Council South East and Reading Borough Council. In addition to conducting playwrights’ workshops and seminars in the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Slovenia, Gabriel has collaborated widely in productions of his plays across Europe and is a founder member of The Fence network of European playwrights and facilitators focused through the JANUS translation project on issues of cultural diversity and the mobility of the artist.
Previously, Gabriel was writer-in-residence as a Judith E. Wilson Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge and a Wingate Scholar researching theatre and performance in Africa. He was a director of the Society of Authors and is a presenter of BBC Radio 3’s culture and ideas programme, Night Waves.
Research Interests
Practice-led research into European and African performance which contributes to the development of well-founded, cross-cultural approaches to new work and the growth of culturally diverse performance practice in Britain. Gabriel’s focus as a Creative and Performing Arts Fellow is on researching and developing models for playwriting and for the dramaturgical processes involved in speaking to our diversity.
Publications and Productions
Plays include Abolition (Bristol Old Vic and Paines Plough, 1989); Eshu’s Faust (Cambridge Arts Theatre and Faculty of English, 1992); Hotel Orpheu (Schaubühne, Berlin, 1994; Culturporto, Lisbon and Teatro Rivoli, Porto,1997; Teatre de Griot, Barcelona, 2004) and Shango (De Nieuw Amsterdam, 1997). His play, Oga’s Ark, is published in Bulgarian by Homo Ludens (Sofia 2004) with a rehearsed reading in Russian translation at the Lubimovka Festival, Moscow (2004).
Recent critical writing: Transmission: Speaking and Listening (Site Gallery, 2005); Under Construction: Cultural Diversity, Cultural Identity and Audience Development (Arts Council England, 2005); A Wholly Healthy Industry (Theatre 2005 – Raising The Bar/Writernet Bulletin 2005); Africa Unbound, writing and publishing in Africa (BBC Radio 3, 2005); Strangers to Ourselves (Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, 2003); Olde England-New England (International Society for the Performing Arts, 2003); and Früchte Der Zeit (WUV, Vienna, 2001).
His most recent collaboration is Sun-Shine, Moonshine (Artwords, 2005) with visual artists Sanderson/Conroy.
AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship Projects
Europe and Africa in Britain: Re-thinking Approaches to Cultural Diversityin Writing for Performance
