Staging Loss

Michael Pinchbeck is MA Theatre Programme leader and Principal Lecturer (Professional Practice) in Drama at the University of Lincoln, UK. He completed a PhD at Loughborough University exploring the role of the dramaturg in contemporary performance. As a writer and theatre-maker, he was commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse to write The White Album (2006), The Ashes (2011) and Bolero (2014), which toured Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo supported by the British Council.Andrew Westerside is Senior Lecturer in Drama & Theatre at the University of Lincoln’s School of Fine and Performing Arts, UK, and Co-Artistic Director of Proto-type Theater. Andrew is a performer, writer, director and academic. He has performed and toured nationally and internationally and directed work including: The Good, the God and the Guillotine (2013), A Machine they’re Secretly Building (2016), Fallen (2016) and The Audit(2018).

• 1. Staging loss: an introduction.- 2. There is some corner of a Lincolnshire field…: locating commemoration in the performance of Leaving Home; Andrew Westerside.- 3. Watching with mother: ‘rejourning’ the wartime memories of a Wren, 1946/2016; Karen Savage and Justin Smith.- 4. Commemoration: sacred differentiation of time and space in three WWI projects; Helen Newall.- 5. Making Bolero: dramaturgies of remembrance; Michael Pinchbeck.- 6. Andrew Bovell in the History Wars: Australia's continuing cultural crisis of remembering and forgetting; Donald Pulford.- 7. After them, the flood: remembering, performance and the writing of history; Dan Ellin and Conan Lawrence.- 8. Cheers, Grandad! Third Angel’s Cape Wrath and The Lad Lit Project as acts of remembrance; Alexander Kelly.- 9. On Leaving the House: the loss of self and the search for “the freedom of being” in The Wooster Group’s Vieux Carré; Andrew Quick.- 10. The God, the owner & the master: staging rites of passage in the maritime crossing the line ceremony; Lisa Gaughan.- 11. Staging absence and the (un)making of memory in A Duet Without You; Chloé Déchery.- 12. Trace: shame and the art of mourning; Louie Jenkins.- 13. The performative ritual of loss: marking the intangible; Clare Parry-Jones.- 14. Searching shadows, lighting bones: commemorative performance as a radical, open-ended and ethical action; Emily Orley.- 15. Conclusion: Some words speak of events. Other words, events make us speak.