HRC Seminar Series 2016
 

Making Memories: Performing Research on Henry V in Australia (1916-2016)

How is performance research best articulated?
Does live presentation afford the researcher opportunities that are commonly untapped?
How is research a kind of performance?
 
When the first ANZAC Day (25 April 1916) collided with the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (23 April 1916), a special kind of challenge was issued to the Australian commemorative calendar. To this day productions of Henry V still bear traces of the ways in which the newly federated nation met this challenge. From a newsreel of a ‘Shakespeare in the Schools’ on the steps of the ANZAC memorial in 1955; to the 1995 Bell Shakespeare production featuring ‘diggers’; to the 2014 Bell production which couched its meditation of war politics in the context of the London blitz, Australian treatments of the play map a specifically Australian politics of war remembrance. In this unique event, using moved readings of key speeches from the play, theatre scholars Rob Conkie (La Trobe) and Kate Flaherty (ANU) will perform recent discoveries about the cultural work it has been used to achieve in Australia since 1916.

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