ResearchWorks: Tired Mummy is Making a Show: On Interrupted Time and Space

There are eight pages, just over halfway through Life Among the Savages, where author Shirley Jackson documents a long night in her house with her family, in which they all have the flu. The account is written as a list of moves involving family members, their objects, and their locations, on the second floor of their house. The list creates a portrait of the writer-mother as she makes her way through the domestic tasks of the night.

Susannah Henry found herself reading the list as a series of stage directions and wondering how it could be performed. Finding out meant organising a rehearsal process around a full-time job and an eighteen-month-old toddler.

This ResearchWorks event opens up the process of staging and rehearsing the sequence from Life Among the Savages, as a method for thinking through the twin responsibilities of maintaining a creative practice and motherhood, in a landscape of interrupted time and space.

Speaker

Dr. Susannah Henry is a practicing autoscenographer living in Essex, UK, with her partner Rhodri and her son Ivor. She teaches collaborative performance-making at Guildhall School and has a background in performance design.

Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the School and its guests with students, staff and the public.