Witches can't be burned (2020-2021) [single-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 3392
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- A play script and contextualising information. Main performance delayed by COVID-19.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2021
- URL
-
https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.c.5224802
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- Witches Can’t Be Burned was originally scheduled to take place as a live performance at the Dorfman Theatre in July 2020. Due to the pandemic, the National Theatre postponed the 2020 festival until July 2021. As the pandemic continues, the National Theatre has now taken the decision to present the ten plays in its 2021 Connections Festival, including Witches Can't Be Burned, in an alternative medium. Rather than a live performance, the production of each of the selected plays will be professionally videoed at their home theatres and then shared online via social media in late July 2021.
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Witches Can’t Be Burned is a practice-based research project initiated by Silva Semerciyan, Drama Lecturer at Bath Spa University, wherein the creation of a playscript became both an instrument and a process for challenging institutional sexism. It was commissioned by the National Theatre as part of their Connections Festival 2020 in which 19 youth theatre companies across the UK would perform the play.
The play engaged with research, crucially Schissel’s ReDiscovering Witches in Arthur Miller’s the Crucible: A Feminist Reading, which analyses Miller’s problematic depiction of girls and women. This inspired the creation of a diverse narrative which sought to initiate dialogue within theatre education about the broader representation of girls and women in so-called ‘masterpieces’. By writing a play which would offer more rounded and positive depictions of womanhood and female friendships through naturalistic language, Semerciyan sought to contribute new ways of writing the female and rewriting aspects of the literary record. In addition, by allowing the play’s content to parallel its context of realisation, Semerciyan was able to offer education groups a chance to reflect on their own gender politics and experience of institutional sexism. Application of such devices as the play within a play and intertextuality worked to position the youth actors of Witches Can’t Be Burned as resisting readers and offered them tools with which to become resisting theatre practitioners of the future.
The research culminated in multiple performances across the UK in Feb 2020 and the script being published by the Methuen Drama imprint of Bloomsbury as part of the National Theatre Connections Anthology. The play’s performance has been available to view on YouTube throughout summer 2020 offering an educational resource that challenges representations of girls and women.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
