Module description
By any measure London could be described as a ‘world city’ of theatre, but how might you gain access to its workings, its conventions, its apparently impermeable structures and its potential for pleasure? It is just around the corner from King’s after all, hiding away in a thing called Theatreland, but how could one participate in it, and what questions would one ask of it?
Theatre Capital offers you an opportunity to engage with performance of the city on its own ground, it invites you to work across the King’s Strand campus and in off-site cultural settings, at shows, gallery installations, street events and site-specific spectacles to come to your own understanding of what ‘theatre in the expanded field’ might be.
In the past decade this module has walked the walk as well as talked the talk. It has been present at Alain Platel’s Gardenia, Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof, Tim Crouch’s Truth’s a Dog, Lucy McCormick’s Post Popular, Back to Back’s The Shadow Whose Prey, Tim Noble’s Lullaby for Scavengers. Look them up if you missed them!
Each has changed minds and moved hearts as to what theatre might be, but how to express that effect? This module will provide you with the intellectual tools to critically address and engage with creative practice, to find your own way into the world of theatre work and its works.
Classes will alternate between close -reading of theoretical and theatrical works, one week on campus the next off: at performances taking in the Vaults, the Royal Court, Sadlers Wells and the Institute of Contemporary Arts and at Tate Modern, Battersea Arts Centre, and the Royal Courts of Justice. Each week a discrete theme will guide our reading: Subject, City, History, Economy, Theatre, Loss, Spectator, Ecology, Art, and to end, Exit.
This module has been developed, convened and taught by Alan Read, Professor of Theatre since his arrival at King’s in 2007. You can find his interests here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Read_(writer)
Practicalities
It is essential that all students attend all classes as part of this Module made up of asynchronous lectures and synchronous seminars. The evidence from previous Module essays is that those who do best are those who have committed to developing their theatre and analytic vocabulary and understanding over the WHOLE Module.
Exercises
Exercises are intended to practice critical approaches to course material that can be shared at the following week’s seminar. It is important that all exercises are undertaken as each relates to ways of preparing for the course-assessed essay.
In addition to the My Reading Lists module reading, you will also be assigned exercises to be completed outside of class time during selected weeks; these will involve various forms of observation and intervention within the city around you.
Assessment details
An unassessed formative exercise to scope an essay abstract during Reading Week (400 words) and One x 2,500 word essay (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module seeks to develop students’ creative and critical skills and understanding of performance within and beyond the limits of an English literary field of study. It is as interested in affects as it is in meaning, in vibes as much as vocabulary, in sensory perception as much as semiotics
Learning outcomes
Students will develop capacities for advanced critical thinking about contemporary creative practice, a spectrum of expressive responses to theatre and performance examples, and a depth knowledge of the contemporary cultural capital that is London at the time of study.
Teaching pattern
One 3-hour lecture/seminar per week
Suggested reading list
Amongst a wide range of critical, theoretical and creative reading and seeing, I will ask all students to access on My Reading Lists six of my own books that set the scene for this module. Excerpts will be read from each as we proceed week by week:
- Theatre & Everyday Life (1993) a book that details a decade I spent directing a theatre in a derelict warehouse in London’s Docklands.
- Architecturally Speaking (2000) a book written with twenty architects and artists to uncover the hidden performance of the urban landscape.
- Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement (2008) a book written about the ecological ends of performance and theatre as a ‘last human venue’.
- Theatre in the Expanded Field (2014) a collection of seven essays considering how performance relates to questions of archaeology, anthropology, theology, law, psychology, pedagogy and activism.
- Theatre & Law (2016) a small book on the historic and philosophical encounters between legal process and performance (think Amber Heard and Johnny Depp)
- The Dark Theatre (2020) a book that looks back over three decades of neo-liberal acceleration to return to that derelict warehouse that was once a thriving neighbourhood theatre, but is now four luxury riverside condos (and asks why?).