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Faculty of Arts
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| The CAPITAL Centre |
Profile
The Faculty includes Classics and Ancient History, Comparative American Studies, the CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching & Learning), English and Comparative Literary Studies, Film and Television Studies, French Studies, German Studies, History, History of Art, Italian and Theatre Studies.
Academics in the Faculty of Arts are increasingly engaged in international collaborations which allow them to work with other experts in their field to produce cutting edge research.
Warwick is currently leading a number of such projects including Dr Vicky Avery (History of Art) who is working with colleagues across Europe and the US to study Venetian Renaissance Bronzes from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Dr Rebecca Earle is working with colleagues in the UK and North and South America to examine nationalism through text and image in 19th century Spanish America and several members of the Global History and Culture Centre are working with colleagues across Europe, the US, India and China to explore material culture and trade from the early modern period to the 19th century.
The CAPITAL Centre
At the University, the CAPITAL Centre is creating new space for experimentation, expression and play. In the studio and in the rehearsal and writers' rooms at Millburn House, participants are embarking on projects which will bring together students and actors, academics and theatre practitioners.
We work with our collaborators, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in association with a number of other play-makers such as Cheek by Jowl, Northern Broadsides, Warwick Arts Centre and the Warwick Writing Programme to share artistic practices, to work on texts and performances, to produce, develop and perform new theatre writing and to devise practitioner-led theatre research projects.
These performances will be recorded and captured for audio and visual archives with the aim of developing the material arts allied to theatre (photography; sound) and to embody the creative process.
Quite simply, we are promoting the arts by giving our students, from Philosophy to Law, English to Medicine, the opportunity to collaborate in the arts: to experience theatre, to work with theatre-makers and to become makers of theatre. For existing practitioners, we are providing a laboratory for artistic works-in-progress.
Our aim inside the University is to create a sea-change in literary studies. Starting with the core final-year Shakespeare module, we want to erase the boundary between academic 'work' and physical 'play', arguing that all writing is performance and that until it is put on its feet and given a voice, the writing isn't really 'read'.
Collaborating with the RSC (and others), we are offering practitioners a free space for intellectual play where they can improvise, test out ideas, workshop their creativity and become students learning through investigation.
CAPITAL's activities can be tracked on our website.
Professor Carol Chillington Rutter
Director, CAPITAL Centre
The Oedipus Project
The Oedipus Project, a continually evolving performance piece at the CAPITAL Centre, came to an end in March after two terms of weekly events. The project was a collaborative work between Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company, run by CAPITAL Associate fellow Donnacadh O'Briain, also Assistant Director at the RSC.
The project itself developed a piece of theatre based on the Oedipus myth, which placed Oedipus in a purgatorial, Samuel Beckett-inspired landscape where he was forced to re-play the sins (mistakes?) of his life. The project took the form of weekly workshops in the performance space of the CAPITAL Centre, and allowed the creative development of the Oedipus story from the bare bones of a myth with diverse theatrical approaches. The ideas developed in the workshops saw the Oedipus story evolve on many levels, with new structures, characters and images.
The final workshop of the project at the end of the spring term showed a work-in-progress performance from a project which had been contributed to by many different individuals from various departments and backgrounds across the University.
Peter Marsh, of the IT department, profiled the project on camera and has produced a stunning set of black and white images detailing the various stages. The photographs taken by Peter were displayed in the foyer of the CAPITAL Centre and can now be seen in the Centre's open space. Previews of the photographs are on Peter's Warwick blog.
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