“Performance as Possibility:  Finding Joy and Hope at the Theatre” takes as its starting place the notion that theatre offers an important place of live encounter.  At an historical moment in which screens and remote interactions dominate social discourse, how does theatre, with its insistence on co-presence, on sustained attention, and on the immediacy of the spectator’s intellectual and emotional response provide a place to rehearse other engagements of citizenship?  What can theatre model about the joy and hopefulness of being together with strangers, witnessing the narrative, aesthetic, and emotional possibilities of performance?  How can theatre help us practice social encounters based on joy and hope?

Jill Dolan served for nine years as the Dean of the College at Princeton University, where she is the Annan Professor in English and Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts.  She is the author of many books, including The Feminist Spectator as Critic; Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre; The Feminist Spectator in Action; and a critical study of the plays of Wendy Wasserstein. Dolan received the 2013 Distinguished Scholar Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Scholarship from the American Society for Theatre Research.  In 2011, she received the Outstanding Teacher Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism for her blog, The Feminist Spectator.  She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

To attend this event, please register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/performance-as-possibility  

Please note that a follow-up event inspired by Prof Dolan’s work entitled Criticism in Precarious Contexts: An Open Seminar on Theatre Reviewing Cultures in the North, will take place the following evening. You can register for that event here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/criticism-in-precarious-contexts  

These events are coordinated by Trish McTighe (QUB), Ciara McAllister (QUB), Caoileann Curry-Thompson, Claire Murphy (QUB) and Kristýna Ilek (QUB). For queries about the event please email t.mctighe@qub.ac.uk.

We are grateful to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences’ Global Reputation Fund and the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast for supporting this event.