Given The Circumstances: Performing in a Pandemic

Andy Smith is a part-time lecturer in theatre practice within the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. In this blog, he looks back on the past semester, thinks about some of the challenges it has brought to the teaching of his course in contemporary theatre making, and considers some of the steps that he and his students have taken to complete it.

I’ve been on the staff at Manchester since September 2018, but my theatre practice and teaching over the last ten years (possibly even more) has always focused on acts of theatre and performance as events or gestures that are social and collective. Our subject is social. Whether historical or practical, me and my colleagues teach and explore and specialise in a subject that encourages or even requires people to gather and consider things together. All theatre and performance invites experimentation; a challenging of and to the fabric of the given circumstances. In the theatre we can be other people in other places. Occupy other spaces. Explore other situations. Imagine different possibilities.

I think we can all agree that this has been a year like no other. Just like every other subject area in the University, in these given circumstances we’ve all had to work hard and adapt. Employ new methods. Learn new software. Re-write lectures. Deliver content differently. Make new plans. Change plans. Make new ones. Change those. Hope we don’t have to change them again. Change them again. We’ve all had heavy hearts while having to (and being asked to) stay light on our feet. We’ve all had to remain positive, but with a sense of pragmatism. Make sure we can exchange information without (hopefully) overwhelming our students or ourselves. It’s been pretty exhausting, eh? We haven’t been able or even wanted to pretend that anything different is happening, but we’ve had to work really hard to make sure that something different does happen.

And it has. I am biased of course, but I am in awe of the students that I got to teach on the Contemporary Theatre Making course in the semester we have just had. The hand that these ten were dealt was pretty harsh. Along with all the final-year professional practice modules in our department, this course was moved from semester one, when it is usually taught, to semester two, with the hope that we might be able to meet. Everything was opening up. We were all told we could see each other and work in rooms together; do the activities which are central to the thing we are interested in doing; meet and gather.

Then suddenly everything was all closing down again and we couldn’t. New plans were made. Questions already addressed in semester one came back to visit: how do you make theatre or performance in the given circumstances? It could have been difficult. Might have been seen as impossible, even. But seemingly impossible tasks are often what people in theatre and drama and performance enjoy – relish, even. As I said; we can experiment in the theatre. Try things out. Time and space can move differently. The theatre depends on the use of the imagination of everyone involved, including and especially (for me, at least) the audience. Using our imaginations is what theatre asks us to do.

During my course, these students are tasked with imagining and creating their own works of theatre and performance. So here we were. In the last semester of their degree, and in the last stages of what they thought would be three years of study in big rooms and spaces together – thinking together, being together, talking together about and researching and doing this most social of art forms. And at one moment during the first day of the first week of teaching the course, as we sat together in our separate rooms at our separate computer screens, I asked the assembled students the same questions I always ask at the start of this course. What is theatre? Why do we make it? How do we make it now? What can we do with what we have? Or, maybe, what can we do here and now, in the circumstances we have been given?

This is me using a pedagogical approach that is similar to the methods I employ in my life as a freelance theatre-maker: a desire to try to find a way to open up ideas and possibilities, then work out ways to hold them open and to try to keep things that way. I’m not interested in closing things down. Creating and making theatre and art is not about discovering finite answers but instead ways, I think, to keep exploring and making and moving and learning. In my experience, the open state that I describe here is also the state that a curious audience bring when they come to meet performance works. This openness is also what is likely to keep everyone who is involved engaged.

I have asked these questions, and questions related to them – seemingly simple but of course full of complexities – in the first teaching session since the first time I taught the course as a freelancer in 2017, and every year since. Though of course this year they took on a very different tone and texture. In the given circumstances, we had no central theatre space to meet and be together in. We had to find different ways to make and present work. Other forms were borrowed from. Different skills needed to be learnt. Existing tactics and methodologies had to be developed or adapted. Alternative approaches made. By them and me. Rather than a stage, we gathered around and met through screens. Acts of listening and storytelling took place remotely and were as intimate through headphones as they might have been in a shared space. The streets of the city became a place of discovery. The inside of our houses and rooms a place to foster the imagination.

These students showed me that ideas of the live, the temporal and the connected could still happen despite the given circumstances. That other things could still serve the function of bringing people together. When I ask these questions at the start of the course, and because I have constructed the course in this way, that’s always what I hope might happen, how I hope it should be. And I think that even though we haven’t appeared in a theatre, we’ve still been performing. In the given circumstances the outcomes this year have had to be necessarily different, but they haven’t lost any of the imagination and ambition. It’s all just appeared in a different shape.

I am lucky to have received a great deal of support from staff across the University for this project, as well as a satisfying response to the work from an audience of peers, friends and family. One colleague gifted me the title for this blog when they wrote to me to suggest that the projects were not merely impressive “given the circumstances”, but just impressive, and that they had made and continue to make impressions. This was it for me, really. It’s been a year like no other. We’ve all had to work hard. It hasn’t been easy. But finding our way together, and thinking and making together with these students has offered me opportunities to continue to consider ideas such as creativity, imagination, public and private space, agency, power, resilience and generosity in (for me) new and different ways. I’m grateful for it. I’m not pretending for a minute it has been a smooth ride – in many ways it really hasn’t; in many ways it’s been exhausting. But we’ve done it and I don’t and won’t take that fact for granted.

Like I said, I am biased. But I do think that the works that have come out of our explorations together do all the things that theatre should. Each in their own ways explore ideas and concepts around audience, spectatorship, temporality, duration, engagement and participation.

These works developed in ways that they or we would never have entertained doing in the quiet and safety of The John Thaw Theatre, which is where the outcomes of this course usually end up. Instead, we had an 8-hour durational performance online; poetic video artworks that meditated on origins and grief; a film shown over eight hours in Alan Glibert Square; marks made on walls and paper; a mindfulness podcast to listen to over a week; a celebration of faith; a collage of black joy; a set of invitations to make your own work; and a series of secrets scattered across the city that even made it into the local press.

All these works deserve (I think) a wider audience. As wide an audience as possible, in fact. And now they can have one. In collaboration with these students, all these works (or traces of them) have been collected on a website created especially for that purpose. At the end of their degree, these ten artists made ten individual works that will be presented online for one year under the collective title NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT. And now I have written this blog in the hope that it might direct you the reader to engage with that work a little too.

I hope that you can. This is what they made. Have a look. Take your time. Thanks for your time.

https://www.notimelikethepresent.co.uk

You can contact Andy Smith by email at andy.j.smith@manchester.ac.uk

Drama at Sixty

As you may know (it’s been mentioned on here before), next academic year we are celebrating 60 years of Drama at The University of Manchester. To mark this, all through what feels like a particularly significant year – a year like no other in our story – we have been gathering short texts that reflect on 60 years of the department.

The invitation to alumni of the last 60 years has been – and until the middle of June will still be – to send us 60 words that in some way say something about their time studying drama at Manchester. Just 60 words. No more. No less. 

The responses so far have been fantastic. And in the last month, in collaboration with graphic artist and designer Micah Purnell, we’ve started to create slides of these short and beautiful pieces of writing. Our plan is that before the start of the 60th academic year (probably sometime this summer), these contributions will be able to be viewed on a website that Micah has designed especially for the purpose.

This website will then remain live throughout our 60^th year. 

Five of the first slides can be seen at the bottom of this blogpost, which is the last callout and so final chance for you – if you are an alumnus of our department – to get involved if you haven’t done so already.

We are still accepting submissions of 60 words (no more, no less) until the 15^th of June and we’d love to hear from you. Please write and send us 60 words if you can. All contributions will be displayed anonymously (as they are here) with a list of all contributors elsewhere on the final website.  

Please email your 60 words to Andy Smith, co-ordinator of the project, at the following address:

andy.j.smith@manchester.ac.uk 

You can see more work by Micah at micahpurnell.com

59 (AND A HALF) YEARS IN…

We’re at the end of one semester and approaching the start of another. The middle point of an academic year (or just year) that – let’s be honest – none of us really expected. It’s a world changing, life-changing time. We’re all engaged in trying to find creative solutions to it all. Ways to keep teaching, to keep learning, to keep making, to keep researching. 

To just keep going. 

I don’t know about anyone else, but for me what we might call the uncertainty of the moment – and all the busy-ness and anxieties that it can create – means that most of the time I can feel like I am a bit too focused on the here and now. Sometimes it even feels like I am fighting with it. Constantly wondering what this present is going to present next, in fact.

At the start of last semester – which feels like a very long time ago – we launched a project called 60 words for 60 years as a way to celebrate and mark the approaching anniversary of Drama as a subject at Manchester. Next year, Drama as a subject will have been here in Manchester for 60 whole years. Think about that.

In the invitation to participate in the project I wrote this:

To mark this, we are asking alumni of the department to compose/write 60 words on their time in the department. Just 60 words. One for each year that the department has been active. 60 words. No more. No less. 

As caretaker of this project, these sixty-words have been emailed to me. This has meant that while dealing with the all the present and immediate and sometimes difficult (as well as often creative and joyful) challenges of my work as a lecturer in the last semester, I would occasionally receive an email with a contribution on it. They are like postcards from a past. A succinct reflection on a different time. A time spent in and at Manchester engaging with this subject. A reminder that we are 59 years in. 

These short texts would offer me information on something that had happened, perhaps how it happened and what it had meant. Often they manage to do all three of these things, like in this one, for example:

Originally came to study English, stumbled upon a newly opened Drama Department, immediately transferred to a Joint Degree – and never looked back! Abiding memories of two ‘giants’ among the staff, Hugh Hunt and Stephen Joseph – poles apart in style and approach but generating a powerful stimulus to think afresh about what drama was, how it worked and why it mattered.

When they arrived, these would lift my working day a little. Give it and me a bit of impetus and momentum. In a time and situation that often felt challenging they would bring a different light to what I, what we, are all involved in doing. Looking at it, the example above reminds me of some things it’s often easy to forget: the importance of a difference in styles and approach. The need to recognise, grow and foster a diversity across our staff team, the student body, and the wider theatre and education landscape. Some things that perhaps also need to be given some space and time.

In these pandemic circumstances, these sixty words also simply made me reflect differently or even more on questions of what drama is, how drama works and why it matters. 

The original invitation also outlined that all contributions would be ‘partially anonymous’. This meant that though their name would appear somewhere when we finally get to present all these reflections, it would not be alongside what the alumni contributing had written. It was and is my hope that this would offer some opportunity for what I think is an important critical reflection. The possibility to acknowledge and even admit that sometimes the navigation and negotiation of all this doesn’t go the way we expected and can even be difficult. Even though I am all up for a celebration, I wanted to allow us to admit we are not always involved in something going right. And that we’re perhaps more involved in something bigger; working on and working out ways that we might move forward together, as this contribution revealed:

We were a mis-match. I wanted professionalism, passion, poetry.  Encouragement, sensitivity, humility. You were the opposite, or so I felt.

Unsurprising perhaps that I became a university lecturer, striving to be what I had wanted you to be. Yet I ask myself now, after all these years: am I what my students want? Or do they want the opposite too? 

Reflections like this offer me a different kind of motivation. This one in particular leads me to think a lot about what things like professionalism or passion really are and what we value. What our expectations and desires might be and how they might be met. As well as well as the ever-complex notion of if we are ever doing or able to do something in a totally satisfactory way. I wonder how and why we might work toward that, and what we might even mean by that. That feels like a lot to get out of just 60 words.

I also think these are important things to be considering at this time. A time where questions of what might be achieved by the studying, making of and searching and re-searching of all aspects and areas of this broad and (for me) brilliant discipline are hanging around.

Sometimes the contributions I have received are short scripts. Some are poems. Some are funny. Some attempt the capture of three whole years, some only one moment that summed it up. Many (perhaps inevitably) often involve the pub, like this one in which we meet Hugh Hunt again:

Professor Hugh Hunt took us to see some Yeats plays. After five minutes he got up:

If they haven’t got the beginning right it won’t get any better “

He took us to the pub and talked brilliantly about Irish Theatre. It was the sixties and was a joyous place to learn the mysteries of a great job.

Thank You! 

Perhaps it’s just the context in which I am receiving and reading them, but in all these contributions I think I see notions of possibility, failure, disagreement, opinion, joy, change, difficulty, challenge and discovery. Combined, these might be something like the mysteries that this contributor talks about. I don’t know that I would use that word myself, but I am grateful that they have. 

What these contributions have done, and what I suppose I am trying to share a little here, is offer me a longer view of what we are up to. All of us here are at a point where for 59 and a half years this subject has been studied, explore and researched at this university. We are, and have always been, engaged in the process of finding creative and engaging solutions to keep learning, to keep making, to keep researching. Maybe, hopefully, for another 59 and a half. Who knows.

It all might feel particularly acute and difficult at times at the moment, but rather than be defeated by the present situation I hope that we can all work through and with this historic moment together, however hard that might be and however had it might sometimes feel. It looks and feels a lot different, but it’s still the start of another semester, in the middle of a year none of us expected, a world changing, life-changing time. 

Let’s keep going.

I’ve now received exactly sixty contributions to this project, but there are many more people that have passed through our department, and I am still looking for more.

As well as reflect on it all so far, and offer some thoughts to those who are here with me in this fifty-ninth and a half year, this blog is also of course an opportunity for me to advertise the project further, and say that if you are reading this and you are or you know an alumni of the Drama Department at The University of Manchester then this is your (or their) invitation to also get involved.

I’m open for contributions (and little lifts to my working days) until quite a long way into this semester. To the end of it, in fact.

Please feel free to email me your 60 words (or any questions you might have about the project) at andy.j.smith@manchester.ac.uk

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Andy Smith

Lecturer in Theatre Practice 

DRAMA AND FILM RECOMMENDS #5

Hello Drama and Film Community. It’s me, Andy Smith, Lecturer in Theatre Practice. 

Here we are at the end of what has been quite a semester. I hope everyone is doing OK. 

This is the final instalment of our occasional series. Another selection of links for you to click on to things we find interesting and hope you might find interesting. 

The first link this week will lead to work by some of our current students. 

These excellent short films were made last year on the Introduction to Documentary Film Practice run by Sophie Everest, Lecturer in Film Practice. 

Sophie offers a bit of background here:

Students worked with the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre (a UoM special collection) to explore and draw inspiration from their unique archive collections. They then worked with members of Manchester’s Black, Asian and ethnic minority communities to create short documentary films. Some students worked with current community heritage projects and others were inspired by older archival material. The aim was to collaboratively produce films that held meaning and value for the community groups and individuals who were represented.

Watch the films here: https://www.racearchive.org.uk/videos/

Now for some theatre and performance.

If you like a bit of emotion in your festive season, I strongly suggest you have a look at Them’s The Rules by Hester Chillingworth. It’s part of the Homemakers season from HOME in Manchester. It has some fantastic performers in it in Peter and Nicki Hobday. 

Information, as well as the link to book tickets (on a pay what you can basis) is here:

Them’s the Rules

Earlier this year Hester created Caretaker at The Royal Court, a durational work which ran online from the 8^th of May to the 15^th of October, and that they describe as a ‘beacon of resilience’ in this interview:

In Conversation with Hester Chillingworth

Through these days, I would occasionally drop in on this work while it was running. I really enjoyed thinking about it whilst I wasn’t looking at it as much as when I was. It provided me with good cause for reflection on the difficulties of the moment we are in, it asked me to think about what I was missing, what was important, as well as the joys of making and the presence of people in space. Thinking about it, these are similar thoughts to those that I had while I watched Them’s The Rules.

As a special end of semester extra, I’m also going to suggest that you really make some time to check out the ongoing series You Had To Be There by Action Hero. This marks 15 years of this collaboration between Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse.

Each week James and Gemma are offering a director’s commentary on documentation of the pieces of work they have made together through these years. There have been three so far. 

It’s just so great to hear artists talk so fluidly and frankly about their work in this way. The commentaries are honest, funny and revealing. Each commentary so far has offered fantastic insight into motivations, approaches and process for that particular work, and I’m also really enjoying the emerging sense of development in their collaboration and the wider body of work that it has resulted in over the years. I’m looking forward to more.

In the rest of December and January you can watch the rest too. The link is here:

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. I hope everyone has a good break/restful festive season.

Andy Smith 

Drama and Film Recommends #4

Hello everyone, it’s me again, Andy Smith, Lecturer in Theatre Practice. I’m here with another edition of our occasional blog Drama and Film Recommends…

Our first recommendation this week comes from David Butler, and is for the organisation Delia Derbyshire Day, which he co-founded with the musician Caro C. This might seem like an unashamed plug/self-promotion, but David’s work here is important. Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) is a crucial figure in the development of electronic music in Britain and had a major impact on the British public’s growing awareness of the possibilities of electronic sound in the 1960s and 1970s, most famously through her extraordinary arrangement and realisation of the original theme tune for Doctor Who. 

David writes:

This year DD Day was online, and featured the UK premiere of a beautiful short film by the acclaimed Dutch artist Madelon Hooykaas with music and sound design by Caro C.

In The Footsteps Of Li Yuan-chia and Delia Derbyshire (2020) is a meditative reflection on Madelon’s friendship with Delia and the Chinese-born artist Li Yuan-chia. The piece incorporates images from the Hubble space telescope and text relating to Li’s concept of the ‘cosmic point’ which informed his philosophy and creative practice. The film might offer a welcome moment of calm in the midst of all the noise in our lives this semester – if you can, I would wear headphones when you watch it so that Caro’s evocative music and sound design will surround you more immersively.

Madelon has generously made the film available to DD Day on our YouTube channel for a week – running from 23-30 November – so there is still a chance to catch it. The link to the site and film is here:

DD DAY 2020

If you have missed it but would still like to experience it please do let David know. Please do explore the DD Day site as well if you can – David particularly recommends playing the Deliaphonica game. It’s pretty addictive. The link to that is here:

Deliaphonica Game

Our theatre recommendations this week come from Rachel Clements. Similar to David’s picks, these films are only available for a certain period of time, so catch them while you can.

Rachel writes:

You have until 13th December to watch the film version of DV8’s The Cost of Living (2004) here. They’ve made this extraordinary dance piece available until then in memory of the performer David Toole, who died a little earlier this year. If you watched the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics then you might remember David dancing and flying during that. The Cost of Living is one of my very favourite pieces of dance theatre. I guess it’s sort of about two street performers, disillusionment, a seaside town, and set of interactions. Toole’s performance is particularly memorable; he was an important figure – both as dancer and activist – in the field of disability arts specifically and in the industry as a whole.

I agree in every way. This is an extraordinary piece of work.

Rachel also offers us another recommendation specifically for this evening (the 27^th of November). She writes:

The National Theatre is streaming Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ Death of England: Delroy from 7pm next Friday, 27 November, for 24hrs, on the NT’s youtube channel. Filmed on the night the show opened and – because of the second lockdown – closed, that they’ve managed to record this at all is no mean feat (and there’s a short film about that, if you’re curious, here). Of course, this means that I’ve not seen the piece either (described by the NT as exploring ‘a Black working class man searching for truth and confronting his relationship with Great Britain’) but it looks as though it should be of interest to a lot of you, and I’ll certainly be trying to watch it myself. 

That’s all from us for now. Hope everyone is doing OK, and that you all have a good weekend – perhaps with some of this work in your life. 

All best,

Andy

Drama and Film Recommends #3

Hello everyone,

It’s me, Andy Smith, Lecturer in Theatre Practice here at The University of Manchester.

I hope you are all doing OK. 

As reading week approaches, it’s time for the third edition of Drama and Film Recommends. 

Our film this week comes from Dr MaoHui Deng, Lecturer in Film and Theatre Studies. It’s Kuroneko (1968, Kaneto Shindo, Japan).

This is, Mao suggests, a great watch for the ‘horrifying days that we are currently working in’. It can be found on the BFI player, which all students in the drama department now have access to.

Mao writes:

The film will be of interest to first year students doing Art of Film, as we have just discussed the vampire genre (something from the non-western world to complicate your understanding of the genre) and it will also nuance your understanding of the Japanese samurai film (which we will discuss a little more when we talk about Kurosawa and auteurship). 

More generally, it will be of interest to anyone who is interested in a feminist vampiric cat spirit returning to exact revenge on men who treat women poorly. It’s a great watch!

It sounds absolutely fantastic.

The next recommendation this week is from me, and is something to listen to. It’s a project that I was involved in making earlier this year for Coventry City of Culture. 

It’s an interpretation/re-writing of a piece very dear to my heart called The Future Show, by the theatre maker Deborah Pearson. 

The Future Show plays with and challenges the form of solo autobiographical performance, imaging the future from the end of the performance rather than recounting some of what might have happened before it.

It is a text and score for performance that I have used a lot in my teaching. If you are a recent graduate of our department reading this who has studied contemporary theatre making with me, you will remember imagining your own future. I wonder now how much of it has come true!

During lockdown number one, Deborah and I, along with artist Ira Brand, worked with Deborah’s score and 12 young people from Coventry to imagine what their future might be. The recording of the work, along with an introduction recorded by Deborah, can be found here:

https://coventry2021.co.uk/explore/the-future-show/

That’s all from Drama and Film Recommends this time. Let us know what you think if you can. There’ll be some more before the end of the semester. 

For now, take care. 

All best,

Andy Smith

DRAMA at 60

The academic year 2020-21 will see the 60^th anniversary of Drama at The University of Manchester.

To mark this, we are asking alumni of the department to compose/write 60 words on their time in the department. Just 60 words. One for each year that the department has been active. 60 words. No more. No less. If you are an alumni from any year of the department of Drama at The University of Manchester then this is your invitation to take part.

Your response might be a reflective paragraph, it might be poetic, political, cryptic, creative, celebratory or critical. In this limited word count, you might say something about what Drama Manchester did well, or perhaps what you feel it could do or have done better. You might relate or tell a particular and personal story, or say more generally some of what you think you and others have taken into your life from the time you studied at Manchester. That’s up to you.

Through as many 60 words as we can gather, we’d like to build up a picture of what has happened and who has been in our department over the last 60 years. We’d like to think about how it has changed and developed in this time. Think about how it was established. How it has moved forward. How it might move forward some more.

We’d like to gather as many responses as possible. 

These responses will form a selective and personal archive of Drama at Manchester in the last 60 years. We’ll collate them all and present them through the University website, and in a limited print-run publication of a selection of contributions. We want to offer a parity and openness to both authors and readers. In order to achieve this each piece of writing will be partially anonymous, presented alongside a list of contributors rather than the authors name appearing alongside each 60 words. 

We want to reflect on the rich history that the department has and hopefully continues to offer. In the current historical moment – at a time where we are limited in how we occupy and use our building,  this feels like an opportunity to use our imaginations and take stock. To consider the last 60 years, and think about how we can and will continue to change and develop into the future.

We would love it if you could and would like to contribute to this celebration and reflection of Drama at 60. Please send your 60 words, along with your name and the degree and year you graduated to me, Andy Smith at andy.j.smith@manchester.ac.uk

If you know or are in touch with any other alumni then please feel free to forward or pass this information along.

With thanks and best wishes,

Andy Smith

Drama and Film Recommends #2

Hello Drama and Film Community,

Welcome the second edition of Drama and Film Recommends. This week we thinking about some songs and some sport.

Our first suggestion comes from Catherine Love. Catherine writes:

I’d like to recommend something to listen to, rather than something to watch. The theatre company RashDash have a Bandcamp page where you can listen to music from several of their shows. They make brilliant, angry, thrilling theatre that always has music and movement at its core. Whether or not you’ve seen their shows, the songs are well worth listening to on their own. They even have a new track that’s responding to the crisis we’re in right now and asking what kind of world we might want on the other side of this mess.

You can find the RashDash Bandcamp page by clicking here.

Like Catherine says, this is well worth having a listen to. In Don’t Go Back To Sleep, RashDash are offering really considered, engaged and entertaining response to the circumstances we have all been living through of late. 

Our second recommendation this week comes from Sophie Everest, and is the Netflix Documentary series Losers. Sophie writes:

Losers celebrates sporting failure. Each episode is around 30 mins long and follows the story of someone from the footnotes of sporting history. It’s fun, fast and satisfyingly brash – very smartly edited with a mix of archive, animation and more conventional (though beautifully composed) talking heads. It is a series that could absolutely be made whilst social distancing. Each story rips along but, overall, you get a real sense of the psychology of failure. And I don’t even like sport. 

I am not a huge sports fan either, but I also really enjoyed this series. It really makes you consider the act of defiance in the face of adversity, and what the idea of being the best or the winner might mean. All of this, along with Sophie’s comment, also makes me think about the work we can and perhaps should be thinking about making in these times.

The trailer is here:  

ALSO ON OUR RADAR…

Also on our radar this week is a new online piece called The Write Environment by recent graduates Anna Robson and Mike Moulton. This reflective and experimental film/audio piece is well worth 24 or so minutes of your time, and features some thinking and discussion around university and theatre making too. You can find it here:

That’s all for this week. If you do have a look and listen to some or all of these recommendations, then please do let us know your thoughts and reflections in the comments below.

And if there is anything you think could or should be featured here in future weeks, perhaps work that you involved in, then please let me know. 

All best for now,

Andy Smith

Drama and Film Recommends #1

Hello and welcome to Drama and Film Recommends. 

Collected and collated by me, Andy Smith, it’s an occasional blog aimed primarily at students of the drama and film community at Manchester, as well as former students, staff, and any other interested party that might be reading this.

Normally, at the start of a new semester, all of us in Drama and Film would be looking out for and noticing the work that we really want to go and see in theatres and cinemas in the coming months. We would be thinking about things we recommend that you – our students – go and see, and also finding examples of work that we might all go and see together.

As I think we all understand and know by now, this is not in any way what we might call a normal start to a new semester.

Undeterred by the current context, and indeed in some way inspired by it, we have decided to use the Manchester Drama blog as a way to share some examples of drama and film that we love and appreciate with you.

Every couple of weeks this semester I’ll put up a new post. Each post will feature one recommendation from a member of staff from Film, and one from Drama. It might also include anything else that might be on our radar and we think you might be interested in that week.

The examples we recommend will be work that we have enjoyed or that in some way might have inspired us. They might include things we have been involved in or have taught or studied or written about ourselves. They might be things just discovered or things that we return to when we are feeling in need of a good laugh, or cry, or both.

We want to share these pieces of work with you in the hope you might watch or listen to them and enjoy and be inspired by them too. I want to suggest that if you would like to you could set up an opportunity to do this together in your student houses. However you decide to engage with them, once you have you might want to put a comment below the blog letting us know what you thought, why you liked or disliked the work, or what it meant to you. It would be great to get a few thoughts or even get a discussion going.

If these pieces of work present ideas that inspire and find their way into your studies and thinking over the semester that would of course be fantastic, but mostly this is an opportunity for us to engage with and think and talk about work for the love of it. We’ll also be including examples of work in the world that is responding to the restrictions and challenges we all face in these fields in the current context, so if these suggestions help you think about how we study and make Drama and Film then that’s great.

The first recommendation for this week comes from Vicky Lowe. Vicky writes:

My recommendation this week is Rocks (2019; Gavron). I saw it last week and loved it so much I am going again this week with my daughter! You can still just about catch it at HOME and other independent cinemas in Greater Manchester.

It’s about a 15-year old British Nigerian girl who has to look after her brother after her mother leaves home. The relationship between them is beautifully portrayed and intensely moving. It’s an all women team of film makers too from director Sarah Gavron, cinematographer Helene Louvart (whose previous credits include the equally brilliant Alice Rohwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro) and writers Therese Ikoko and Claire Wilson. If you’ve taken my British Cinema course, you will know that I do like my depressing British films (!) but this is exactly the opposite, uplifting and a testament to the resilience of the main character, who is wonderfully portrayed by Bukky Bakray. 

You can see the trailer for Rocks here:

Our second recommendation comes from Kate Dorney. Kate writes:

I am nominating the king of solitude, Samuel Beckett, and in particular, Kathryn Hunter doing Rockaby, a woman alone, being forced to recount over and over again, staying indoors ‘hoping to see another living soul’.  I saw this at the Young Vic about 15 years ago and still hear her repeating ‘in the end, close of a long day’ when I’m at the end of a long day myself.

You can watch Kathryn Hunter performing Rockaby, along with some other shorts by Beckett, here:

That’s all for this post, but do remember that other stuff that you can go and see is still happening in Manchester, albeit in a socially distanced and safe way. 

And do let me know if you see or hear of anything you think I should include, perhaps even work that you have been involved in making yourself.

Thanks for now,

Andy