Joint Workshop: « Shakespeare and the Contemporary », Sorbonne-King’s College, Londres, 5-6/04/2019

A Research and Innovation Joint Workshop financed by the French Embassy in the U.K. and King’s College London

Defining the Contemporary in Times of Unrest: Shakespeare, Theatre, Now

King’s College, London

This joint workshop, which we seek to run at King’s during April 2019, will bring together the expertise of scholars at our two institutions working in the fields of Shakespeare Studies and Contemporary Theatre to reflect on ideas of the ‘contemporary’ in dramatic creativity – what the contemporary meant to Shakespeare and other early modern writers, what it means to playwrights writing in English now – in what we are calling ‘times of unrest’, encompassing both the national/international struggles of the Elizabethan/Jacobean period and the national/international scene which is the context for the writing of contemporary British playwrights and the performances of contemporary theatre makers.

Schedule

The provisional programme is as follows:

Friday 5 April 2019

morning                travel for Paris group

1.00                         lunch

2.00                         Gordon McMullan and Line Cottegnies, Opening remarks

2.15                         Discussion of set texts: Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, from What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford UP, 2009), 39‐54; extracts from Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner, Controversies, Politics and Philosophy in Our Times (Polity, 2018); Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All (Chicago UP, 2008); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (U of Minnesota P, 1991).

3.00                         Line Cottegnies: The ‘relevance’ of Shakespeare’s histories, then and now

3.20                         Amy Lidster: Questioning the boundary between past and present in Shakespeare’s

histories

3.40                         coffee/tea

4.20                         Lucy Munro: Shakespeare, theatre history and the present moment

4.40                         Nicolas Thibault: Drama and counsel

5.00                         Alan Read: The irrelevance of Shakespeare

5.20                         discussion

7                                dinner

Saturday 6 April 2019

10                             Anne-Valérie Dulac: Seeing the contemporary via/through/in Shakespeare

10.20                      Elisabeth Angel-Perez: ’In-Yer-Face’ and ‘In-Yer-Ear’ on the contemporary stage

10.40                      Gordon McMullan: Shakespeare then and now

11                             discussion

11.20                      coffee/tea

11.40                      round table discussion of issues raised.

1.00                         lunch and close

2.00                         Post-event meeting between lead academics