Creative Writing Workshops with the RSC

Location
The Other Place - Stratford-upon-Avon
Dates
Wednesday 15 February (10:30) - Friday 17 February 2017 (16:00)

As part of the exciting collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Birmingham, the RSC is offering second year Creative Writing students the opportunity to participate in a prestigious and cutting edge research project, which will directly contribute to RSC Research and Development.

An event taking place in Stratford

About the project

Students will be working with RSC artists Gemma Brockis and Wendy Hubbard who are currently developing an immersive piece of theatre, titled Interregnum, for The Other Place.

The project deals with iconoclasm in the English Civil War - the destruction of the institution of monarchy, the collapse of familiar political systems, the trial and execution of Charles I, the stripping of the churches of imagery, the closure of theatres, the possibilities and hopes for a new social and political system, and the failure (in all of this violence and determination) to make a permanent radical change.

About the workshop:

The workshops will be held 15 February - 17 February in The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. Workshops will run from 10.30 - 16:00 each day.

We will start by working from texts from visionaries, prophets, poets and radical political writers of the 1640s (Abiezer Coppe, Anna Trapnell, Elizabeth Poole, Gerard Winstanley). They publish, and they speak in public; they recycle biblical and political texts and improvise ‘the word of god’ in trances. They are men and women, aristocrats and people living in poverty.

On day one, we will work closely with these texts and the students will be writing individual creative responses. (We do not expect that the work produced will necessarily remain rooted in the period - for the purposes of the workshop this material will be stimulus and provocation.)

On day two, we will work with presentation of text in space and the ways in which that presentation can feed back onto and transform the text.

On day three, we will work with juxtaposition, to collage work created in days one and two, exploring collaborative writing processes.

At some points in the workshop students will be invited to read/perform work in order to spatialise and theatricalise the material.

Further information

For further information or to express interest in attending the symposium, please contact Sally Delbeke, The Other Place Programme Manage, s.delbeke@bham.ac.uk. Spaces are limited and the deadline for enrollment is 30th January 2017.