QUB Drama Guest Speaker Series

‘Dr Caroline Radcliffe (University of Birmingham)

 “The Machinery”: Dehumanisation and Creativity in the Industrial Workspace 

30 October 2023

5-6.30pm, Longley Room, 21 University Square

The Machinery’ is a performance for solo dancer and a laptop-based digital artist, devised and performed collaboratively by Caroline Radcliffe and composer and digital artist, Sarah Angliss, between 2007-2021.  The Machinery’ expresses the dehumanisation of the female industrial worker, relentlessly subjected to an exhausting cycle of repetition in the cotton mills and call centres of the 19^th to the 21^st centuries and explores the subversive potential of creativity in the capitalist workspace. The ‘heel-and-toe’ clog steps, passed down to Radcliffe by third generation, East Lancashire clog dancer, Pat Tracey, are layered with looped sounds taken from Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, a working 19th century cotton mill, and a 21st century call centre, emphasising the global and economic connections between the two industries.

The performance was awarded a Quake contemporary dance festival award in 2008, and in 2018 and 2019 ‘The Machinery’ received Arts Council England and National Heritage Lottery funding to develop and tour the work with digital filmmaker, Jon Harrison, as an audio-visual, immersive art installation. ‘The Machinery’ allowed Radcliffe to discover connections with Kathak musicians and dancers in Leeds, the Algorave movement in Sheffield and the Homo Textor/Penelope project in Munich. With tours cut short by the pandemic, Radcliffe was left to reflect on the elements of Marxism implicit in the work while identifying the re-implementation of alienation in the lockdown workplace and the expansion of the artisan/artist divide fostered by neo-liberal policy makers.

In this presentation, we will show an 8-minute video of the work followed by a talk by Dr Caroline Radcliffe with time for discussion and reflection.

Dr Caroline Radcliffe is Reader in Drama and Performance in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. Caroline’s research focuses on theatre and performance in the nineteenth-century and her current monograph is on the dramas of Wilkie Collins. Caroline works professionally in music and theatre and teaches contemporary performance as well as nineteenth century studies and popular performance studies. Caroline is research lead for her department, was a director of the Nineteenth Century Centre at University of Birmingham and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. ‘The Machinery’ was an Impact Case Study for REF 2021.