Event overview
The Performance Research Forum hosts a range of events, talks and presentations by established and early-career researchers and practitioners in theatre and performance.
‘Heterotopian dreams and flawed allegories: the contemporary Greek world in 1970s British television dramas by Michael J. Bird’
From 1972-1983, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) commissioned a quartet of television dramas set and filmed in Greece and Cyprus, from screenwriter Michael J. Bird, namely, The Lotus Eaters (1972-3), Who Pays the Ferryman? (1976), The Aphrodite Inheritance (1979) and The Dark Side of the Sun (1983). The BBC’s interest in an expanded Greece as European exotica was singular for the time and in contrast to the majority of fiction-writing tastes and choices on British television in the decade. Bird’s choice was more in line with the cultural and educational aims of the public broadcaster, in being a veiled attempt at updating the Classical world and legitimising an interest in contemporary Greek cultural consumption, including music, food, fashion and tourism. The settings of the dramas sustained both a contemporary vision of a Greek fictional world and production values that were underpinned by vestigial colonial attitudes. What did this fascination reveal about the heterotopian terrain of dramatised Anglo-Hellenic ‘contact’ and cultural relations post-war? How did this writing exemplify a poetic and cultural engagement with a Greek world that was unstable in its construction, leading to a re-examination of how allegory functions in popular dramatic works on screen?
Pamela Karantonis is Head of Department in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths where she also lectures in Musical Theatre. From 2010-2014, she jointly convened the Music Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. In 2016, she co-founded the Creative Corporealities Research Group at Bath Spa University and has supervised a practice-as-research PhD relating to voice. Publications include editorships of, and contributions to, Opera Indigene – Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures (2011) and Cathy Berberian – Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality (2014). Her most recent publication features in The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century Material, Symbolic and Aesthetic Dimensions (Routledge, 2021) and her next forthcoming work is on decolonising the curriculum for the Oxford Handbook of the Global Musical. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4171-1066
Image: Ian Hendry and Wanda Ventham in The Lotus Eaters (1972)
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Oct 2023 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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