And so on: On Repetition

Date: Saturday 30 November 2013
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge campus

Within visual arts, music, contemporary performance, dance practices, craft and writing, repetition can be seen as an important element at work. Repetition has been used as a mode of production, staging or dramatic structure. For example, Edvard Munch's repetition of The Vampire or The Weeping Woman, or Yayoi Kusama's Peep Shows reveal a fascination with the same subject. Romeo Castellucci, on the other hand, employs in his work acts of termination that appear interminable; a sense of ritual emerges here. Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer's Leaves of Grass uses repetition as a mode of production to create fantasy figures for an unimaginable puppet theatre.

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EMSAR 2013 - Electronic Music Symposium at Anglia Ruskin

Date: Saturday, 11 May 2013
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Invited Speakers: Professor Monty Adkins (University of Huddersfield), Dr Till Bovermann (Media Lab Helsinki), Professor Simon Emmerson (De Montfort University), Dr Mick Grierson (Goldsmiths), Professor Peter Manning (Durham University), Dr James Mooney (University of Leeds) and Dr Peter Zinovieff.

Electronic and computer music relies on the materiality of its associated hardware and equipment variously for its realisation, transmission, storage and restoration. This one day symposium will focus on these and related issues from a variety of perspectives, examining the possible futures of electronic and computer music of the past and present from the perspectives of musicologist, archivist, music technologist, composer and performer.

It will conclude with an evening concert celebrating the 80th birthday of electronic music pioneer Dr Peter Zinovieff.

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Music Therapy and Dramatherapy with Children in Educational and other Settings

Dates: 30 November - 1 December 2012
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Keynote Speakers: Clare Flower, Dr Phil Jones

Music Therapy and Dramatherapy with Children in Educational and other Settings is one of the first conferences to bring together music therapists and dramatherapists interested in working with children. We are inviting speakers to reflect particularly on:

• How educational settings affect therapeutic work with children
• How music and drama may be combined to work therapeutically with children

However, we also encourage proposals on any aspect of music therapy and/or dramatherapy with children.

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Music and Transcendence

Date: 29 November 2011
Times: 09:00 - 21:30
Venue: Cambridge Union Society, 9a Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB2 1UB

Keynote speakers: Professor Roger Scruton; Professor Bruce Ellis Benson; Professor Christopher Page

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the ways in which music relates to transcendence. Papers will consider the ways in which music relates to infinite and 'ultimate' meaning as well as the ways in which music enables the creation of meaning and fulfilment within an 'immanent' frame.

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The Music of Music Therapy

Dates: 26-27 February 2010
Times: 13.00 (Friday) - 17.30 (Saturday)
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Keynote speakers: Rachel Darnley-Smith, University of Durham; Mercédès Pavlicevic PhD, Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy

Discussions of the clinical process in music therapy have in common their recognition of the value of music as part, or all, of the means of emotional communication and therapeutic exchange. On that basis, music therapists have turned in addition to theoretical ideas drawn from, or held in common with, other therapeutic traditions, such as psychoanalysis or developmental psychology, or from theories related to specific pathologies or client groups.

At this conference we turned our attention to the nature of the music itself.

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Extreme: Visual Representation and the Body

Date: Thursday 25 and Friday 26 June 2009
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Keynote speakers: Professor Lisa Coulthard (University of British Columbia); Dr Dominic Johnson (Queen Mary, University of London)

This interdisciplinary event explored the notion of the extreme in visual representations of the body in the context of both critical theories and artistic practices.

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Sarah Kane: A Reassessment

Date: Saturday 16 February 2008
Time: 10.00-19.00
Venue: Judith E Wilson Drama Studio

Sarah Kane's plays are performed all over the world; books and articles on her work are starting to appear; she is a standard reference for contemporary theatre historians and young theatre makers. But which Sarah Kane do these histories construct? What aspects of her work have we forgotten, obscured or denied? What are the continuities and discontinuities between Kane, her predecessors and her contemporaries? Thirteen years on from Blasted's debut at the Royal Court, this conference was an opportunity to revisit Kane's work and place it in a new critical light.

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Trauma: Current Thinking and Practice in Music Therapy

Date: 23-24 November 2007
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Keynote Speaker: Dr Julie Sutton

Increasingly, trauma is being recognised as the source of a wide range of pathologies and manifestations of psychological distress. At this conference, music therapists from the UK, Israel, Slovenia and Germany presented work with people who had been traumatised as a result of a range of experiences including war and conflict, abuse, disability, maternal separation and depression and brain injury.

More information on the 'Trauma: Current Thinking and Practice in Music Therapy' conference.