Aoife Monks

The Actor and the Audience in the Theatre
6.30-8pm | Tuesday 10 March 2009
Room H102, Connaught Jouse, Aldwych, LSE

Speaker
Aoife Monks, Lecturer in Theatre Studies, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London

These talks will consider the question: ‘what might an actor be?’ and will answer this question in three ways by: considering the actor historically, looking at the actor’s embodiment of identity, and by thinking about the actor on the 20th Century age. The discussion will consider some case-studies, such as the belief systems underlying approaches to actor training; anti theatricality; the relationship between the actor and the fashion system; the history of racial representation in the theatre; and the attempts by modernist and avant-garde artists to exclude the actor’s body from performance. A consideration of histories and theories of the actor helps us to think about theatre’s social function, and the audience’s role in the theatre.