Dr. SREENATH NAIR – Co-Director

Sreenath Nair is Senior Lecturer at the Lincoln School of Performing and Fine Arts, University of Lincoln, UK. Educated in India and UK, he received his PhD from the University of Aberystwyth, Wales in 2006. His research continues to explore embodied methodologies and practices of Kerala performance. Currently, he is working on Evocative Body, a project that explores the link between technique and knowledge in Indian performance practice. Nair was awarded the Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship in 2011 and he took up the Scholar-in Residence appointment at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2012. He is the Co-convener of the Asian Performance and Diaspora Working Group (TaPRA). He is the Editor of Indian Theatre Journal.

Links:

http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/snair

Indian Theatre Journal (ITJ)

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=249/

Dr. ARYA MADHAVAN – Co-Director

Arya Madhavan specialises in researching and writing on Indian Theatre, with particular reference to Kudiyattam, the oldest existing theatre form in the world.  She is a Kudiyattam performer with over twenty years of performance experience from both India and UK. Her research and writing focuses on the aesthetics and praxis of Kudiyattam with an intention to develop new theoretical concepts derived from its practice.  Arya completed her PhD from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University in 2008, which focused on the acting and actor-training of Kudiyattam from the perspective of consciousness studies. Since 2013, she has been developing a new research area, Women in Asian Performance that remains understudied till date. Arya organised the first international Women in Asian Theatre symposium in Lincoln on 14th September 2013 with delegates participating from across the world. She completed editing a journal special issue on Women in Asian Theatre for the Asian Theatre Journal (Fall 2015) and is commissioned to edit the Routledge anthology on Women in Asian Performance (2017). Arya also co-convenes the TaPRA Asian Performance and Diaspora working group that was constituted in 2015. She is also the Associate Editor for the upcoming Indian Theatre Journal.

Professor. Erika Fischer-Lichte – Keynote Speaker

Erika Fischer-Lichte is world’s leading theatre academic. She is a professor at the Department of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin since 1996.  Fischer-Lichte studied theatre, Slavic, German, philosophy, psychology and pedagogy at the Free university of Berlin and the university of Humburg between 1963-1970. She received her doctorate in 1972 at the Free University Berlin and she became a professor at the Institute for German language and literature of the Goethe University Frankfurt in 1973.. Fischer-Lichte became professor of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Bayreuth In 1986 and the Director of the Institute for Theatre Studies at the University of Mainz. Aesthetic enquiry of performance and performative forms the strong foundation of Fischer-Lichte’s research that offers a clear epistemological and performative clarification of the term performance in arts and humanities.