2nd Feb 2015 12:00pm-1:30pm
Sallis Benney Theatre
Dr Susan Croft is a writer, historian, curator and the Clive Barker Research Fellow at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. She is also Director, of Unfinished Histories, a major initiative to record the history of Alternative Theatre in Britain through oral histories and to preserve archives of the alternative theatre movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. In 2013-14 she led the project Unfinished Histories Company Links, which culminated in the exhibition and publication Re-Staging Revolutions: Alternative Theatre in Lambeth and Camden 1968-88, as well as curating 15 accompanying events. (see www.unfinishedhistories.com )
She was founder Director of New Playwrights Trust, and led the organisation from 1986-89. She then taught Creative Arts (Performance) at Nottingham Trent University, going on to be Senior Research Fellow in Performance Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.
From 1997-2005 she was Senior Curator (Contemporary Performance) at the V&A Theatre Museum where she worked on the National Video Archive of Performance. She also curated four major exhibitions including Let Paul Robeson Sing! and Architects of Fantasy and edited Black and Asian Performance at the Theatre Museum: a Users’ Guide along with establishing a range of other initiatives to record the history of black and Asian theatre in Britain.
She has also written extensively on women playwrights, publishing …She Also Wrote Plays: an International Guide to Women Playwrights from the 10th to the 21st Century (Faber and Faber, 2001) and edited the anthologies Votes for Women and Other Plays (2009) and Classic Plays by Women (2010) along with co-curating the exhibition How the Vote Was Won: Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage and its accompanying book (2010).
Her work focuses on historically marginalised voices and texts and emphasises the need to re-visit and engage with them critically and creatively and make them once more accessible.
The Monday Lecture series (since 1997) consists of presentations by contemporary artists and cultural practitioners who work across disciplines. This is an opportunity to hear artists, writers, cultural activists talk about the history of their practice and show examples of their work. The lecture series is curated by Mine Kaylan for The College of Arts and Humanities, as part of the Sallis Benney Theatre public lecture programme.
