returning

The past comes back to haunt in all sorts of ways. This is a key feature of the archaeological imagination. It may be something like “this happened here”, or “this was the way it was, and still is”. And, as archaeologists, as all of us do – we return, revisit, rehearse, reiterate, repeat. This familiar…

war music

Poetry turned performance — National Theatre Wales are currently presenting a performed version of Christopher’s Logue’s extraordinary account of Homer’s Iliad, designed and directed by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes. [Link] Pasts and presents mingled in place event, past poetic shards rearticulated as real-time event – theatre/archaeology. It’s another theatrical triumph – after Aeschylus Persians…

forty years on – restaging – return – nostos

I have just received the wonderful photo book of Mike Pearson’s new work – The Lesson of Anatomy 1974/2014. On 5 and 6 July 1974, the newly founded Cardiff Laboratory for Theatrical Research (later Cardiff Laboratory Theatre) presented The Lesson of Anatomy: The Life, Obsessions and Fantasies of Antonin Artaud in the Sherman Arena Theater,…

art/theatre/archaeology

The review of my work with Mike Pearson – theatre/archaeology, and more, is out this week in the collection Art and Archaeology: Collaborations, Conversations, Criticisms edited by Ian Russell and Andy Cochrane for Springer – [Link] It all began twenty and more years ago, when Mike came to my department at University Wales Lampeter and…