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PRODID:-//University of Birmingham//Events//EN
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DTSTAMP:20230125T102300Z
DTSTART:20230401T070000Z
DTEND:20230401T190000Z
SUMMARY:Medieval English Theatre Conference: Bodies, Embodiment and Early Theatre
UID:www.birmingham.ac.uk/201097
DESCRIPTION:

 ‘In the theatre, the body bears the brunt of performance; it is the material… [the] text works on, works through.’  (Carol C. Rutter)\n
 Bodies are central to the experience of live theatre, both those of audience members and those of the performers themselves.   Performing bodies, as Rutter suggests, ‘bear’ the performance, both in the sense of suffering it, and bodying it forth.  They submit to its effects and rigours. They display particular attire, they move in particular ways, they may represent particular aspects of a narrative or a state. They may inscribe and enforce boundaries between performance and spectators, or they may seek to efface those boundaries.  Likewise, they may establish and enforce binary structures and concepts (e.g. female/male, soul/body, life/death), or dissolve and complicate them. Without bodies as ‘material’ through and on which to work, theatre, in Rutter’s formulation, is simply ‘text’.  Performing bodies may, moreover, shape this text as they perform it, and they may also be shaped by it.\n
 This year, the Medieval English Theatre conference invites delegates to consider bodies and embodiment in relation to any aspect of early theatre.   This might include (but is not limited to):\n

The body gendered
The body visualised
The body adorned
The sexual body
The suffering body
Spectating bodies / spectators as a body
Bodies and boundaries
The soul v. the body
The dead and dying body
The allegorical body
The corpus
Our bodies of knowledge and their construction

  Registration for this conference is now closed.\n
 For over forty years the Medieval English Theatre society conferences have offered an opportunity for intellectual collaboration and the journal has presented some of the best scholarship that has resulted from the vibrant intellectual network that is METh.\n
 Image from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, f. 63v.  Copyright Bodleian Libraries\n
  \n
LOCATION:Alan Walters Building  G11
STATUS:CONFIRMED
TRANSP:OPAQUE
CLASS:PUBLIC
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