Confessions of a Showwoman: Reinventing and Documenting 'Extraordinary' Live Entertainments For New Audiences.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A modern day showwoman, Marisa Carnesky has been at the forefront of innovative theatre practice and new circus for over a decade. Carnesky is an Olivier Award-winning artist whose work can be viewed as part of the current western cultural trend in contemporary performance, which draws reference to the cornucopia of nineteenth-century popular entertainments. Carnesky seeks to create a unique body of practice-based research and documentation that fuses historical archival material with milestone developments in her own practice, by being based as a research fellow in the National Fairground Archive (NFA) at the University of Sheffield.Confessions of a Showwoman will develop in a series of historical and chronological phases. It would enable the recording of the research process by following the reworking of Carnesky's Ghost Train as a permanent show in Blackpool and documenting its reception within the community. The material generated would initiate the formation of an artist's journal that draws on this practice alongside historical archival research into fairground rides that utilize live performance. The historical research on the role of showwomen at the NFA and how this informs Carnesky's practice, would then lead to a second artists journal. All the material combined would form the basis of an artist's book to be published in the final year of the fellowship.Both the archival findings and the new material created through the research process, would be curated into a touring performance-lecture and traveling exhibit, Carnesky's Wunder Kabinets. Containing archival materials from the NFA and creative research ephemera, these Kabinets would be accompanied by related practical performance workshops. This tour would disseminate the findings of the fellowship and would situate the research within established academic and cultural contexts, specifically in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, and Cultural History. Dissemination of the research process, and dialogue between historians, theatre academics and performance practitioners would be further enabled through a one-day symposium, curated by Carnesky in association with Dr Vanessa Toulmin. This would take place at Blackpool's Winter Gardens, one of the most important historical venues relating to popular entertainment in the United Kingdom still remaining.This project would enhance, document and disseminate Carnesky's performance-related research, as a modern day showwoman. Moreover, the research findings will contribute to an understanding of contemporary large-scale arts projects that draw on fairground, circus, magic and burlesque traditions, continuing the largely unwritten histories of spectacular and 'extraordinary' entertainments.