The Family of Love in English Society, 1550-1630

A detailed investigation of an outlawed mystical religious fellowship in early modern England.

If Music Be the Food of Love:An Acoustic ‘Fourth World’ in Ong Keng Sen’s Awaking”

Staged as an attempt to ‘bring together Shakespeare’s plays and Tang Xian Zu’s classical Kunqu opera, The Peony Pavilion,’ (Ong, Programme Notes) Awaking stands as Singapore Director Ong Keng Sen’s most recent and prominent attempt at engaging issues of the intercultural through music and sound. While Ong’s previous intercultural projects sought to explore the politics of intercultural performance through the exchange, layering, confrontation and inter-mixing of Asian performance modes as visual aesthetics, Awaking is a performance at the borders of theatrical and musical conventions, as it features the music and musicians as central performative devices of staging the intercultural. Northern Kunqu opera, Chinese classical music and Elizabethan folk tunes from Shakespeare’s plays were re-moved, re-contextualised, and juxtaposed to explore ‘differing yet connected philosophies on love, death, and the afterlife’ (Awaking, Publicity). These humanist and ‘universal’ themes found expression in the ‘universal’ language of music. Through a study of the musicalities and sonic expressions of Awaking, the paper seeks to explore the implications of such cultural-musical juxtapositions. The paper engages, specifically, with the problematics and possibilities of music as a ‘universal language’ as implied by Ong’s concordance of Eastern and Western sounds in the final act. It further considers the politics of an intercultural soundscape and the acoustemologies of such an intercultural approach.

Live Project love: building a framework for Live Projects

Live projects adopt a wide range of approaches: design/ build, community engagement, participation, protest, analysis, etc. They are driven by tutors with passion, expertise and the ability to manage risk, in ways that exhibit fluency and high levels of skill. They also offer sites of student-led and community co-learning, can support research, demonstrate ‘impact’ and satisfy universities’ policies on outreach. Whilst the breadth and reach of Live Projects is now demonstrably wide, we still fail to fully locate Live Projects within a pedagogical context, tending instead to limit our descriptions and hence analysis to the architectural process and outcome. This failure to locate Live Projects within a pedagogical framework means we still struggle to encapsulate, critique, progress, and indeed, elevate the work.

This chapter draws on some of the case studies presented in recent papers and international conferences in order to provide educators with signposts and important overviews around which and in respect to they can develop their own pedagogical frameworks.

So Great Is Their Love

A soundscape composition intended for installation in a sound art exhibition. This short project is a contribution to practice-led research that questions that nature of authorial identity, and the composer's responsibility for the sounds produced. First made public in The Braid, Ballymena, 25 September 2013

From Beijing with love: The global dimension of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor

Famous for being the first foreign feature film that obtained permission to shoot in the Forbidden City, The Last Emperor (1987) is also one of the most ambitious and expensive independent productions of its time, awarded four Golden Globes and nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. In addition, The Last Emperor can be considered as one of the first attempts of cinematic collaboration between West and East, in a period of cultural and economic transformations witnessed by China. This article aims to offer an overview of the production history of The Last Emperor, focusing on the co-production collaborations and the outcomes of a western auteur’s gaze on Chinese history. Questions of Orientalism, travel narrative and critical reception are taken into account in order to engage with the transnational implications of Bertolucci’s film and the western fascination with China.