Keynote Speakers

 

Edward Bond

Edward Bond is one of the most important and prolific post-war playwrights. He was born in London in 1934. He had virtually no formal education and left school at 15. The Royal Court Theatre staged Saved in 1965. The play created a national scandal, which was instrumental in the abolition of censorship of the English stage, and established Bond as major British playwright. He has written more than 50 plays, including Lear, The Sea, Bingo, The Woman, Restoration, The War Plays and ‘The Paris Pentad’ (Coffee, Crime of the Twenty-first Century, Born, People, Innocence). Many of these have attained the status of radical classics. He has also written poetry as well as texts for the cinema and opera, and a large body of theoretical work on drama. He also works as director (often of his own work).

Bond’s influence on young writers is prodigious. The Abbey Theatre (Dublin) described him as the most influential English dramatist of all times. He is increasingly credited with creating a new form of committed theatre to replace Brecht and Stanislavski. The current revivals of Bond’s plays in both Britain and Germany not only celebrate one of the most significant British dramatists, in a culture which promotes the “survival of the richest”, they provide points of resistance, because “the only way we have of making ourselves human is drama”.

     
 

Doris Kolesch


Doris Kolesch is professor for Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the Junge Akademie at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She studied comparative literature, Romance languages and literature, philosophy and publishing and media studies in Mainz and Paris. She has taught and done research at the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, the interdisciplinary postgraduate programme “Theatre as a Paradigm of Modernity” and the Freie Universität Berlin.

She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Berne, Stockholm University and the University of St. Gallen with research trips to Paris and to the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities, Los Angeles. In her research, Doris Kolesch has worked extensively on the voice and bodies on stage. She is currently director of research of the DFG-funded project “Voices as Paradigms of the Performative” (part of the SFB “Cultures of the Performative”). In 2009, she co-published Stimm-Welten. Philosophische, medientheoretische und ästhetische Perspektiven.

     

Deirdre Osborne

Australian-born Deirdre Osborne is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and promotes the work of black British writers in all contexts in which she has taught, from universities to high security prisons. She has interviewed and published critical essays on black British writers over the past decade (Kwame Kwei-Armah, Andrea Levy, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, Dona Daley and Courttia Newland), in a range of journals and books. Her other research interests include late-Victorian women writers, motherhood and colonial ideology (her PhD subject), together with work about women and espionage in World War II, and theatre, gender and prisons in the UK.

 

  

     

Michael Raab

Michael Raab is a translator, journalist and lecturer. He has worked as an editor for German television channel ZDF and as dramaturg at the Staatstheater Stuttgart, the Staatstheater Mainz, the Munich Kammerspiele and the Schauspiel Leipzig. His main field of work is new British and Irish drama, on which he has published numerous books and articles. In 2009, he received the journalism prize of the Anglistentag. In 2011, he was translator-in-residence at the University of Tübingen. He has taught at various drama schools and universities. Among the broad range of contemporary plays he has translated are texts by David Hare, Alistair Beaton and Lucy Prebble.

  
     
     
 

SuAndi

SuAndi is a proactive creator, using the arts as a vehicle for learning and understanding across diverse communities.  Having travelled different routes across the arts, she can comfortably wear the attire of a curator of visual arts, a producer and a director of community-based performances in partnership with National Black Arts Alliance artists. She has been the freelance Cultural Director since 1985.


SuAndi has not limited herself to desk, pen and paper; she has taken to the stage as a live artist, keynote speaker, panel contributor and, in her best clothes (her words), as the poet.


SuAndi goes to creative family reunions in North America and across Europe; visiting “cousins” in Brazil and India. She particularly enjoys travel across England because there are so many new people to meet and meet again. In 1999, she received the Queen’s OBE for her work nationally in Black Arts and Culture. Her aim is to empower each individual’s self-worth by helping to heal wounds and eradicate misconceptions that can develop into blatant racism. SuAndi loves the power of laughter, the depth of wisdom and a good piece of gossip.