A Bit Lit

The Tower of London is hosting an immersive experience that combines live performance and digital technology to explore the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to kill the King and Parliament. Audiences get to decide whose side they are on as they encounter the world the plotters inhabited. In this film, historian Tracy Borman, joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, tells us about the Gunpowder Plot experience, its place at the Tower of London and the research and creative work behind the show. Tracy offers us a history of the Tower itself, from its early purpose to 'subdue the evil inhabitants of London' for William the Conquerer, to its emergence as a tourist attraction and its later Victorian revamps. Finally, we hear about Tracy's own extensive publishing career, her 15 books ranging across fiction and non-fiction, with a focus on the cultural impact of the British monarchy. For more information on The Gunpowder Plot, and to book, go to: https://gunpowderimmersive.com For more information on Tracy Borman, go to: http://www.tracyborman.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Engendering the Stage are re-investigating the evidence base for early modern theatre, and using these findings to make space for an inclusive performance history that involves female-identified and gender-non-conforming performers as well as performers of colour. We discuss failed performance, the porousness of theatre, the politics of domestic performance, rope-dancing, tumblers, sword-dancing, performing masculinity, dynamic femininity, androgynous clothing, the famous ‘Jumping Judy’, cocoanut shies, forbidden students, The Roaring Girl, the Fortune playhouse, female shareholders, archival research in an age of Covid, practice-as-research, and more... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sacha Coward tells us about life as a queer tour guide, graveyard explorer, folklore expert, escape room designer and mermaid enthusiast - what a CV! All of these things, he tells us, are rooted in storytelling, in a conversation that ranges across 'the strange tension between life and death', Zelda and the Muppets. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard O’Brien discusses his new collection, The Dolphin House, a poetic exploration of “a failed NASA research project to teach a dolphin the English language in a flooded apartment on a Caribbean Island.” He introduces us to this strange and compelling story and the people involved, and reads from the collection, while also discussing his other poetic hats, including his tenure as Poet Laureate of Birmingham (2018-20), which features the first public reading of his poem written for Warstone Lane Cemetery. We also hear about the benefits of poetic forms, the relationship between indie music and poetry, and visual and material elements of printed poetry pamphlets (by way of Broken Sleep Books and the Emma Press). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ronan Hatfull speaks with Rebecca MacMillan and Tom Wilkinson from Impromptu Shakespeare about improvisation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mira Assaf Kafantaris (Butler University) talks to her mentor, friend, and collaborator Jennifer Higginbotham (The Ohio State University) about the politics of racialization and the embodied threat of foreign ruling women in the early modern period. They discuss how early moderns grappled with the racialized presence of foreign queens and how they became loci of competing ideologies. Finally, Assaf Kafantaris and Higginbotham reflect on the conversation surrounding Meghan Markle’s marriage into the British royal family, which sparked transatlantic, even global, conversations about race, nation, belonging, and reproduction. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The very polymathic Phoenix Andrews talks us through some of the polys that they math. We hear about the development of fan and internet cultures via Ed Balls, which Phoenix uses to work up a really rich and convincing political history of the early twenty-first century across the UK and US. Visit ABitLit.co for more conversations, and to book our brand-new courses and events. How to Make an Elizabethan Theatre starts on 14 February 2022: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-make-an-elizabethan-theatre-tickets-198132237857 Warning: some strong language. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mira Assaf Kafantaris (Butler University) talks to her mentor, friend, and collaborator Jennifer Higginbotham (The Ohio State University) about the politics of racialization and the embodied threat of foreign ruling women in the early modern period. They discuss how early moderns grappled with the racialized presence of foreign queens and how they became loci of competing ideologies. Finally, Assaf Kafantaris and Higginbotham reflect on the conversation surrounding Meghan Markle’s marriage into the British royal family, which sparked transatlantic, even global, conversations about race, nation, belonging, and reproduction. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this film Eric Weiskott tells us about his new book, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 which explores English poetry across its forms and across time periods often divided up and isolated in conventional academic discussion. The book is, Eric tells us, an attempt to 'get around the retrospective reading of form'. The book traces three metrical traditions across 300 years: alliterative (that is, lines features words starting with the same letter), tetrameter (lines of usually 8 syllables) and pentameter (lines of usually 10 syllables). This historical and cross-metrical approach allows the book to identify iambic pentameter, in its earliest years, as a specifically London-based compositional practice. Asked to define 'literature', Eric says that it recognises and responds to life, and invites us all to turn to the poem Piers Plowman as a poem about close reading practices. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this film Luke Kennard tells us about his new collection of prose poems, Notes on the Sonnets, which responds to Shakespeare's sonnets from the point of view of someone at a really bad party. We at A Bit Lit love a really bad party, so we were excited from this discussion! Luke tells us that Shakespeare's poetry is obsessed with avoiding wrinkles, as though written by the 'military-industrial beauty complex', and he wants his poems to be somewhere between insolent and impudent in their relation to Shakespeare's work. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this film Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta tell us about their new book, Shakespeare and Latinidad, which they hope will be 'of value to anyone wanting to make culturally-relevant Shakespeare' productions. The book contains 25 essays by both theatre scholars and practitioners and celebrates the more than 130 Latinx productions of Shakespeare taking place since 1969. Trevor and Carla emphasise the importance of co-creation between art and knowledge, practitioners and scholars, and exploring new ways for theatres to create self-documentation and archiving practices. Both literature and theatre are made by 'living and breathing real people', they tell us, and they stress the need to ground ourselves in the orality, sound, noise and silences of creative work. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The actor and writer Richard Katz tells us about devising work, the creative space between play and playtext and the joys of being a clown. In devised work, Richard tells us, everyone directs, and there is no power structure in which the director is in charge of a group of actors. Clowning involves being in the moment, escaping the Freudian need to ask why a character does something. This film is a fascinating insight on theatre from a performer who has worked across The Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe, Complicité, Told By an Idiot and Improbable. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this film we hear from Felix, Jamie, Johan, Ewan and Will about performing in Edwards' Boys' forthcoming production of John Marston's The Fawn. The boys tell us about the play and their experience of working in this boys company, based at King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Perry Mills tells us about his forthcoming production of John Marston's The Fawn, on sale now and onstage in early October. See http://edwardsboys.org for more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The project draws on the transgressive histories of British popular theatre, including the Victorian music hall, variety theatre, the Shakespearean stage, and fairgrounds and circuses. In a far cry from the polite theatre that dominates today, Music Halls were bold and scandalous spaces where feats of strength and exhibitions of wrestling were interwoven with comedy, popular songs, and other variety acts such as human statuary and animal performances. In this interview, Richard Summers-Calvert and Sam West tell us about making these films, celebrating a time 'before wrestling was pinned down' and fixed, and instead mingled with other art and festival forms in what Claire Warden has called a 'queer music hall sport'. This work allows us to 'see wrestling differently', and connect wrestlers to the long history of their craft. Richard and Sam tell us about recreating and reimagining rare archival footage, and creating an 'experimental learning space' as a 'structure in which only wrestlers could thrive' - celebrating the unique skillset of a wrestler. The film also celebrates the importance of failure in any form of performance experiment, which is music to Andy Kesson's ears! You can see the documentary itself in our previous film, and be sure to check out our other wrestling films with Claire Warden and Sam West at Wrestling Resurgence, and the wrestlers Nick Radford, Chuck Mambo, RJ City, The OJMO and Josef Kafka. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We hear about moving from short stories to the novel as a creative writer, and the balance between historical and contemporary issues in the study of literature. We also hear what it has been like to study at a time of Covid, both the good and the bad sides of lockdown learning. Oli and Lauren also tell us about Fincham Press, Roehampton's own publishing house, which nurtures new writing from students and staff. We hear about student trips to Paris and across the streets of London, bringing literature back into the real world that produced it and where it is set. They both speak powerfully about love, literature and stories, and working as a student community to take each other seriously and help one another to develop. Literature, they tell us, is something that records who we are and who we might be, and documents our lives even as it changes them. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He talks us through The Devil upon Two Sticks, which sees the devil looking into people's houses, which feels both spooky and also like an early version of reality TV. John Milton's Paradise Lost, Daniel Defoe's A Political History of the Devil and Eliza Heywood's A Spy upon the Conjuror all also feature, as does the anonymous The Adventures of Lucifer in London, in which the devil is a kind of human connoisseur and body-hops his way around England's capital city. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eleanor Janega tells us about her new book, ‘The Middle Ages: A Graphic History’, illustrated by Neil Max Emmanuel. She tells us about the Eurocentric and Italian ways that history has been told, seeing the very concept of time periods as an Italian, impe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Klara and the Sun, the eighth novel by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, was published in March 2021. Ishiguro is well-known for the combination of a subtle, understated style of narration, often delivered by unreliable and compromised narrators, with d Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Erik Wade tells us about the global origins of the ideas of sex and race in early English literature and language. We hear about Alfred the Great and his search for 'books most needful to know', and the need to work across text and images to understand th Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.