Skeptic, comedian and voice of the Skeptics Guide To The Universe, Iszi Lawrence is out to delight and inform with her new show The Z List Dead List. The Z List Dead List is a live comedy show about obscure people from History. As a skeptic, Iszi has found a few people from the past that will pique your interest.

Expect woo, violence, sex and death. And a competition.

The show is also a podcast with guest interviews from Jon Ronson, Griff Rhys Jones, Natalie Haynes, Neil Denny, Richard Herring etc. You can find it on iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-z-list-dead-list/id915778702?mt=2) or from www.zlistdeadlist.com

7.30PM start at St. Aldates Tavern, and entry is free, although we do suggest a donation of around £3 to cover speaker expenses. Come along and say hello! All welcome. http://oxford.skepticsinthepub.org/Event.aspx/4661/The-Z-List-Dead-List

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/481007695400886/

An APGRD Public Lecture: Peter Wiseman (University of Exeter) talks on: ‘Rhinthon and the Roman Audience’.

Free, all welcome, no booking required.
Talk followed by audience Q & A, and refreshments.

The Lecture Theatre
Ioannou Centre
66 St Giles’
Oxford OX1 3LU

Exhibition opens at 3pm – Talks 5pm – Drinks 6.45pm

The first English full-stage, masked production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex caused a sensation when it opened at Sadler’s Wells in January 1960. Directed by Michel Saint-Denis and conducted by Colin Davis, the designs by the Algerian theatre designer, Abd’Elkader Farrah captured the high modernist, ritualised aesthetic of Stravinsky’s oratorio.

Join us for an Exhibition and Study Afternoon devoted to this ground breaking production. Speakers: Jonathan Cross (Oxford) on Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex; Stephen Harrison (Oxford) on Jean Daniélou’s Latin version of Cocteau’s Libretto; and,
Jane Pritchard (Curator of Dance, Theatre and Performance Collections, V&A) on Farrah’s designs.

Mass Circulation: Writing about Art in a Daily Newspaper

With Richard Dorment, art critic, and Dr Alexander Sturgis, Director, Ashmolean Museum

A special Ashmolean evening In Conversation event

Wednesday 18 November
6‒7pm
Lecture Theatre

As The Daily Telegraph’s chief art critic from 1986‒2015, Richard Dorment CBE covered exhibition subjects ranging from the Ice Age to the Turner Prize. He talks to Ashmolean Director, Dr Alexander Sturgis, about art history, art criticism, and the popular press.

Tickets £12/£10 concessions. Booking is essential.
https://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford/#event=20239

Society for Dance Research/DANSOX presents a one-day conference on ‘The Role of the Choreographer in the Stage and Screen Musical’.
With distinguished keynote speeches from Dame Gillian Lynne, acclaimed British dancer, choreographer, and theatre/television director; and Professor Millie Taylor (University of Winchester). Dame Gillian Lynne will speak at 2pm. There will be a drinks reception after the conference.

BROKE is a moving play made up of first-hand accounts of British people experiencing poverty. Performed as a rehearsed reading by Actors for Human Rights, the script challenges some of the “poverty scepticism” that is on the rise in this country, and asks us to look beyond the circumstances to the human being behind the issue.

The Big Shock, a new play by Russell Highsmith
17th February 2016, 8 pm at Cornerstone Theatre, Didcot.

Performed by actors from Abingdon & Witney College (Performing Arts students)

The first play written & created, and put on at a theatre, by a person with a learning disability.

After a night of celebration, Lucy and William’s relationship starts to unravel. Especially because Abbey is lurking with her own plans. All of which leaves Luke kind of on the sidelines. Or maybe not. Torrid and turbulent times in Abingdon!

Join us for a rehearsed reading by Blazon Theatre company, of Paula B. Stanic’s new play about the Amazons, Icons. Free, all welcome, no booking required.

David Scourfield (Maynooth) delivers the second annual joint Classics and English Lecture.

Free public lecture, all welcome, no booking required.
Lecture followed by Q&A and refreshments.

After being diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease (MND), Ted goes on the trip of a lifetime…and so does his pet fish. As the disease starts to cause his mobility to degenerate, Ted rushes to experience a world that is outside of his comfort zone; from the streets of Lille to the romance of Venice.

Humorous, heart-warming and hopeful, CELL features charming puppetry, physical theatre and an original score to tell the story of one man’s final adventure to create enough memories to last a lifetime.

The performance will be followed by a discussion with a member of the cast and Kevin Talbot a Motor Neurone Disease expert.

Nominated for a Peter Brook Award, CELL is the outcome of a new collaboration between two of the most exciting young companies in the UK.

★★★★ “A celebration of technique and emotion” – The Stage
★★★★ “Combining a mix of puppetry forms and an evocative original score with breathtaking technical brilliance, CELL is a visual theatre gem.” – The List
★★★★★ “As perfect a piece of theatre as one is likely to see.” – The New Current

Suitable for ages 11+

Smoking Apples and Dogfish production www.cell-show.co.uk
CELL is presented at the Old Fire Station in partnership with Science Oxford.

A one-day conference, with Professor Dame Marina Warner and featuring a rehearsed reading of Roberto Cavosi’s Bellissima Maria (after Phaedra/Hipploytus). Registration is £25, or £20 for students, and includes: lunch, refreshments, a drinks reception and confirms a place at the evening’s rehearsed reading (in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s). See the website for the full line-up of speakers and papers.

A rehearsed reading of Roberto Cavosi’s Phaedra/Hippolytus inspired play, Bellissima Maria; performed by Marco Gambino and Sasha Waddell. Please join us in the Jacqueline Du Pré Music Building from 6pm for a Drinks Reception, and a pre-performance talk chaired by Marina Warner, with the playwright Roberto Cavosi, the translator Jane House, and actors Marco Gambino and Sasha Waddell.

*This event concludes the Italy and the Classics conference held during the day at the Ioannou Centre (66 St Giles’). Registration for the conference is £25 (students £20) but you do not need to attend the conference to book for the evening’s rehearsed reading.

William Zappa performs from his ABC-radio-commissioned, one-man version of the Iliad.
Free, all welcome. No booking required.

This performance concludes day-one of the APGRD’s 16th annual joint Postgraduate Symposium (but you do not have to attend the symposium in order to attend the evening performance).

Shakespeare lived in one of the most unhealthy times and places in history. Disease was rife and hygiene poor, physicians could only be trained abroad, and there was no such thing as a public medical lecture. Most of Shakespeare’s own insights into science were learnt through friends who would tell (or show!) him their discoveries.

This event will bring together professional actors from Creation Theatre with medical historian Leah Astbury and modern day researcher Martijn van de Bunt to explore some of the medical references in Shakespeare’s plays and how they relate to contemporary science. From epilepsy to astrology, malaria to anaesthesia, compare the science of 400 years ago to the cutting edge research we have today and discover what has changed and what has stayed the same.

Join us for a sensational evening of cabaret – an alchemy of acts delivered by Science Oxford’s network of creative science performers. If you love science, stage and stand up, you’ll be in your element with our periodic table-themed cabaret including science presenter and geek songstress Helen Arney and compered by award-winning science communicator Jamie Gallagher. See the everyday elements that make up the world around us in a new light, watch in disbelief as gold is created before your eyes, and learn about their origins and how they behave inside our bodies. Get your tickets now – once they are gone they argon!

Photographer Akio Kushida will share her photographs and experiences of capturing the backstage view of kabuki and other forms of Japanese theatre. Her photographs are currently on display in the Museum’s Long Gallery exhibition ‘Kabuki – Behind the Scenes’.

Ruth Webb (Charles-de-Gaulle Lille III): “Bodies and texts: Attitudes towards tragedy from the Second Sophistic to Late Antiquity”. Free, all welcome, no booking required.

Sean O’Brien, Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative European Literature, on ‘For dreams are licensed as they never were’. What becomes of the history poem?

Other lectures in this series:

Tuesday 14 February – Displacement: Irish poetry and poets of Irish descent in Britain.

Tuesday 21 February – ‘I only am escaped alone to tell thee’ or ‘The Faster We Go the Rounder We Get’

Tuesday 28 February – In Conversation with Patrick McGuinness

The lectures take place at 5.30pm in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre at St Anne’s College. The first lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. All welcome, no need to book.

Sean O’Brien is a poet, novelist, playwright, critic, broadcaster, anthologist and editor. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University in the UK and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His first six poetry collections gained awards, most recently The Drowned Book (2007), which won both the Forward and T S Eliot Prizes and was republished in 2015 as a Picador Classic.

His version of Dante’s Inferno was published in 2006, and the bilingual poetry anthology, The Third Shore, published simultaneously in the UK and China in 2013, includes translations he produced during ground breaking poet-to-poet workshops in China that year. In 2015, his versions of the poems of Cape Verde Portuguese poet Corsino Fortes were published in the USA.

O’Brien’s own Collected Poems was published in 2012. His eighth and most recent poetry collection, The Beautiful Librarians (2015), shared the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

In 2016 his publications have included his second novel, Once Again Assembled Here, a chapbook of poetry and photographs, Hammersmith, and a graphic novel collaboration, The Railwayman. A second collection of short stories, Quartier Perdu, will be published in 2017.

He is currently working on a new collection of poetry and a book-length poem.

Director and adaptor, Wayne Jordan will be in conversation with Fiona Macintosh, discussing his acclaimed version of Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus’ at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 2015. At 2.15pm on Monday 27 Feb. 2017.

Followed by Q&A and refreshments.
Free, all welcome, no booking required.

An APGRD Public Lecture, in the Ioannou Centre at 66 St Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LU.

A quirky theatrical evening of drama, discussion and disease.
Killer germs, superbugs, pestilent plagues and global pandemics have fascinated writers, musicians and thinkers for centuries. As diseases spread through a population, likewise myths and ideas travel virally through film, literature, theatre and social media.
Join a cast of actors, scientists and literary researchers for an inventive illustration of
infectious extracts from plays and music, past and present.

Sally Shuttleworth is Professor of English Literature looking at the inter-relations between
literature and science, including the project Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century
Perspectives.
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies, interested in the relationship between modernism, science and theatrical performance.
John Terry is Artistic Director of Chipping Norton Theatre known for ambitious and adventurous theatre work, usually script based but with a strong visual and physical tilt.

Isabelle Torrance (Associate Professor at Aarhus University) delivers an APGRD Public Lecture on Tom Paulin’s adaptation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus. Free, all welcome. No booking required.

This lecture is at the conclusion of day one of the annual APGRD/RHUL postgraduate symposium on the theory and performance of ancient drama. Attendance at the symposium is not necessary – but you are quite welcome to join us: http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/events/2017/02/postgraduate-symposium-2017

We are delighted to be welcoming Sir Tom Stoppard to St Catz to deliver his inaugural lecture as the 26th holder of the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Theatre.

A lecture-performance by APGRD Artists in Residence, Paul O’Mahony and Out of Chaos theatre company, on the development of their new version of the ‘Aeneid’, entitled ‘Crossing the Sea’. Free, all welcome, no booking required.

A juggling demonstration with hilarious explanations of the mathematical details of the practice.

Juggling has fascinated people for centuries. Seemingly oblivious to gravity, the skilled practitioner will keep several objects in the air at one time, and weave complex patterns that seem to defy analysis.

In this talk the speaker demonstrates a selection of the patterns and skills of juggling while at the same time developing a simple method of describing and annotating a class of juggling patterns. By using elementary mathematics these patterns can be classified, leading to a simple way to describe those patterns that are known already, and a technique for discovering new ones.

Those with some mathematical background will find plenty to keep them occupied, and those less experienced can enjoy the juggling as well as the exploration and exposition of this ancient skill.

Free for OUSS members; £2 for non-members.
Membership can be bought on the door: £10 for a year or £20 for life. Includes membership of Cambridge University Scientific Society.
Refreshments will be served afterwards.
Contact oxforduniscisoc [at] gmail [dot] com with queries.
See you there!

A lost play, remixed…

A sharing of ‘Fragments’, a new play-in-development inspired by fragments of Euripides ‘lost’ play Cresphontes, followed by a post-show panel discussion to discuss tragic fragments, ideas of fragmentation in perception and memory, and the making of the show. With co-writers Laura Swift and Russell Bender, and members of the creative team.

This play is currently in development and we warmly welcome audience feedback.

*This event complements an earlier event at 5pm that evening hosted by Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama with poet and translator Josephine Balmer. For details of that event please visit: http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/events/2017/08/josephine-balmer-a-reading

The contemporary market for the consumption of real lives has led to an increasing demand for performers to play or impersonate real people. In this presentation, Professor Mary Luckhurst will explore the ethical issues inherent in the staging of real lives. Mary Luckhurst is Professor of Artistic Research and Creative Practice at the University of Melbourne. She is a theatre director, writer, theatre historian and a pioneer of practice as research. She is a world expert on dramaturgy and on analysing and articulating the applied processes writing, acting and directing in theatre-making. She is a specialist in modern drama and her many books include Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre; On Acting; On Directing; Theatre and Celebrity, and Playing for Real, as well as two Blackwells Companions on British and Irish Theatre.

A Panel Discussion with Professor Ruth Harris, Shrimati Kajal Sheth and Professor Sir Richard Sorabji

This event marks the UK-India Year of Culture, which will be celebrated in the Oxford Town Hall on 24 January with the award-winning Indian play, Yugpurush: Mahatma’s Mahatma, on the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and his mentor, Shrimad Rajchandra.

Sponsored by The Asian Studies Centre, St Antony’s College, The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, and The Oxford India Society.

2pm Wilde’s last years: Dr Sos Eltis, Brasenose College
2.45 The Ballad of Reading Gaol – read by five LMH students
3.15 Break
3.30 Jonathan Aitken in conversation with Alan Rusbridger – Why did the rehabilitation of Oscar Wilde fail in the 1890s? Why does the rehabilitation
of offenders fail today?
4.30 Break
5-6.30 Simon Callow reading De Profundis
Drinks

Playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker explores the meaning of rhetorical voice in drama, in her work and in the work of other playwrights. Is the rhetorical voice different when it is female rather than male? Timberlake is the Chair of Playwriting at the University of East Anglia, and artistic adviser to RADA.

As part of our Vote festival, Sos Eltis and Savannah Whaley discuss feminism and theatre across the last century – looking at the continuities, the revolutions and the inspirations.

Sos Eltis is a fellow and vice-principal of Brasenose College and her work includes Acts of Desire: women and sex on stage, 1800-1930. She is currently researching the literature and theatre of the women’s suffrage campaign. Savannah Whaley is a PhD candidate at King’s College London, currently researching the relationship between gender, performance and activism. She has previously worked with theatre companies Cardboard Citizens and Clean Break.

The talk is free but ticketed.