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Playwright Nicola Baldwin appointed 果冻影院 Creative Fellow
31 July 2019
Dramatist and director Nicola Baldwin has been appointed to 果冻影院 as a Creative Fellow for the 2019-20 academic year
果冻影院 Creative Fellowships is a new programme that aims to encourage dialogue, collaboration and experimentation between researchers, students and creative practitioners, and provide space for activities that stretch the relationships between research, learning and creative practice in new directions.
During their time at 果冻影院, Creative Fellows will work towards the development of an original piece of work which draws directly on their interactions with researchers and students.
Nicola Baldwin, a former 果冻影院 English alumna, will be based jointly in the 果冻影院 Urban Laboratory and 果冻影院 Institute of Advanced Studies, working with听听on the project听City Dionysia: Narrating Wasteland in Urban Life.
Invoking the ancient Greek practice of CITY DIONYSIA where plays fuelled public debate, Baldwin will explore how twenty-first century theatre can create new audiences for academic research, promoting creative inquiry into urban problems.
Using as a testbed Pushpa鈥檚 priority area of 鈥�Wasteland鈥� at 果冻影院 Urban Laboratory and the听collaborative annual theme of 鈥榃aste鈥�听at the IAS and Urban Lab, Nicola will consider how these concerns of contemporary urban life might be apprehended, and how its socio-material aspects performed.
During the Creative Fellowship, Nicola will develop a new play, tentatively titled Wasteland,听challenging her own creative technique through collaboration with students on the MSc Urban Studies programme and wider 果冻影院 community, and by drawing on Pushpa鈥檚 unique pedagogical insights, combining theory and practice to rethink her approach to theatre as a curatorial exercise. Exploring political practices of urban activism as forms of theatricality that can display, dramatise, and more than symbolically address a theme, Nicola will focus on creating an urban performativity that, through an interactive dramaturgical approach, offers new ideas about the role of theatre in society, and representation of WASTELAND as a liminal space.
果冻影院 Urban Laboratory will present a staged reading of听Baldwin鈥檚 new play听We The Young Strong听at the Bloomsbury Theatre on Thursday 24 October.
Image credit: Rabbit Hole Photography