Croeso i drafodaeth 'da fi ar y we, gyda newyddion cerddoriaeth, ffilmiau, barddoniaeth, ffuglen, dramau, a storiau byr y Gymru. Welcome to my online symposium, your one source for news and reviews about new and old, Welsh Music, Film, Poetry, Fiction, Dramas, and Short Stories. A (mostly) English language forum of Minority Celtic Language, Culture & Politics in Music and Film.
Showing posts with label Steve Blandford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve Blandford. Show all posts
Pictured above: Associate Dean of Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan Professor Steve Blandford.]
The Almond and the Seahorse - Clwyd Theatr Cymru
Prestigious Appointment for Professor Blandford March 26, 2008
Professor Steve Blandford of the Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries has been appointed as a board member of the new English Language National Theatre for Wales.
Phil George, Chair of the organisation commented on the high calibre of applicants for the exciting and challenging positions as board members of the new Theatre company,
"I was delighted by the number and the strength of applications for board membership."
"It shows the tide of goodwill in support of the National Theatre. The new board is full of experience, energy and diverse skills".
[Pictured above: Phil George has been unveiled as the chair of new National English Language Theatre.]
Rhondda born, Phil George is the co-founder and Co-Creative Director of BAFTA award winning Television Production Company, Green Bay Media Ltd in Cardiff. Phil was educated at Porth County Grammar School before going on to read English at Oxford University. Formerly Head of Arts, Music and Features for BBC Wales, Phil co-founded Green Bay Media Limited in 2001, where he will continue with his role as Creative Director.
The National English Language Theatre will introduce different styles and imaginative theatre choices as well as introducing more varied directorial voices and developing collaborative partnerships.
It will feature star talent and will also nurture new talent in Wales.
The new company, once created, will not be building-based. This will give it the freedom to commission and create productions.
The National English Language Theatre will work closely with the existing theatrical infrastructure to create high profile productions that will sometimes move outside the traditional theatre space.
Selected Publications of Professor Steve Blandford:
Film, Drama and The Break-Up of Britain, Bristol, Intellect, 2007.
‘Dramatic Fictions in a ‘Postcolonial’ Wales’ in Aaron J and Chris Williams (ed) Postcolonial Wales, Cardiff, UWP, 2005.
‘BBC drama at the margins: the contrasting fortunes of Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh television drama in the 1990’s in Bignell J. and Stephen Lacey (ed) Popular television drama: Critical perspectives, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005.
‘Wales at the Oscars – Heritage Film and recent Welsh Cinema’, Cfyrwng, Vol 2, April 2005.
The Film Studies Dictionary (with Barry K. Grant and Jim Hillier), London, Edward Arnold, 2000.
Wales on Screen, Bridgend, Seren, 2000.
4 plays for theatre, Worcester, J.Garnett Miller, 1998.
Justin Kerrigan is shooting a new Welsh film in South Wales, and he's best known worldwide for his 'global youth party culture' film Human Traffic, set in Cardiff, Wales.
[Pictured above: Emmy nominee Robert Carlyle stars in Justin Kerrigan's newest film currently being shoot in South Wales.]
Emmy nominee Robert Carlyle, who found fame in 'The Full Monty' and 'Trainspotting' and whose credits have since included 'Carla's Song', 'The World is Not Enough' and '28 weeks later' is currently filming Cardiff born, Justin Kerrigan's new feature film 'I Know you Know' in Bridgend, and Port Talbot.
Kerrigan is often lumped together with similar directors who seem to be exploiting this transnational popular culture craze, making films that are loaded with codes and signifiers that 'only the kids' can understand.
Kerrigan is best known for his 1999 hit 'Human Traffic' for which, amidst several other awards, he won a BAFTA Cymru Award for Best Director and was nominated for a Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer at the BAFTA 2000 awards in London.
Human Traffic Trailer -- Miramax Films
How does Kerrigan fit into the pantheon of Welsh filmmakers who have overcome the odds to make a film and get it out of Wales?
How does Kerrigan fit into the array of recent 'Celtic Periphery' filmmakers, i.e., coming out of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales?
The Twang - Two Lovers -- Also directed by Justin Kerrigan
I've written about this elsewhere, and I include this excerpt of my new book on the National Cinema of Wales (not yet published) called, 'A Welsh New Wave?'
A Welsh ‘new wave’?
Blandford notes that the quartet he is describing created rumours of the beginnings of a new Welsh film ‘wave’ of production and freer expression, while they managed to offend the government, the tourist boards, the local communities where the films were shot, the Welsh religious establishment, and just about everyone else inclined to be offended.
Blandford alludes to a general weariness in Welsh society, surrounding the cultural controversy, and longs for a respite from the ‘dead-end arguments’
"During the next decade it will be interesting to see whether a film culture develops with the confidence to make films without even the ironic reference to traditional Welsh iconography that this latest wave has made" (Blandford 2000: 20)
Blandford seems to perceive that this ‘wave’ is related to a larger cultural malaise within a post-modern British and trans-national milieu, as he compares the quartet of Welsh films to similar films set in Scotland, Trainspotting (1996) and Wickerman (1973).
Martin McLoone identifies the same type of films becoming popular in the emerging economic and cultural ‘Celtic Tiger’ ascendancy of Ireland, and coins the name ‘hip hedonism’ to describe and explain the film waves’ meaning and impetus
"This might well explain the preponderance, in recent years, of another kind of urban-based film — what might be called a cinema of ‘hip hedonism’. This is a cinema that celebrates, even glorifies, an urban lifestyle dressed in the signifiers of contemporary global youth culture and populated by the beautiful people of Celtic Tiger Ireland" (McLoone 2006: 97)
Ruth Barton frames the films of post World War II Ireland in a chapter entitled ‘Negotiating Modernism’ (Barton 2004: 65), and one has to wonder if in some way, McLoone and Blandford are not describing Irish and Welsh cinemas, respectively, which are representing a new generation’s negotiation with the problems of trans-national post-modernism, including the paradox of rapidly rising incomes of younger professionals in Cardiff and Dublin paralleling the fatalism and political detachment implicit in the music and lifestyles of the nightclub, pub and ‘Rave Culture’, and its various cultural cousins.
Either way, the films of Scotland, Ireland and Wales in this period seem to be tapping the same vein of ‘I can’t be bothered’ attitudes endemic to the Celtic up-and-coming
"They are Irish, certainly, but they epitomize a kind of trans-global ‘cool’. Drugs and crime still form part of the background, but they are presented as lifestyle choices or get-rich schemes removed from any social consequences."
"Most importantly, these films are lighter in tone than the more political films, as well as being driven by a deliberately irreverent humour" (McLoone 2006: 97).
In the quartet of Welsh films that Blandford describes, which we will assert form the backbone of a Welsh version of McLoone’s designated Irish cinema of ‘hip hedonism,’ we need to ask what values are being challenged, and what social and cultural tensions are being transgressed or offended, and what possible meaning this might have.
Barton, R. (2004). Irish National Cinema. London, Routledge.
Berry, D. (1994). Wales and Cinema, The First Hundred Years. Cardiff, University of Wales Press.
Blandford, S., Ed. (2000). Wales on Screen. Bridgend, Wales, Seren, Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
Blandford, S. (2003). “Old Wales is Dead”, Film, Theatre and TV Drama in Contemporary Wales.” New Welsh Review, Theatre in Wales Supplement Autumn.
Blandford, S. (2003a). “Film, Theatre, and TV Drama in Contemporary Wales.” Culture+the State James Gifford & Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux, Editors (Culture+State Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada).
Blandford, S. (2005). Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britain. Inaugural Professorial Lecture, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, Wales, University of Glamorgan.
Blandford, S. (2005a). “Wales at the Oscars: ‘heritage’ cinema and Welshness in the 1990s.” Cyfrwng: Wales Media Journal 2.
Blandford, S. (2005b). Dramatic Fictions in a Postcolonial Wales. Postcolonial Wales. J. Aaron and C. Williams. Cardiff, University of Wales Press.
Blandford, S. (2007). Film, Drama and the Break Up of Britain. Bristol, England, Intellect Books.
Blandford, S., B. K. Grant, et al. (2001). The Film Studies Dictionary. London and New York, Arnold Publishers and Oxford University Press.
Hannan, P. (1999). The Welsh Illusion. Bridgend, Wales, Seren, Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
Hannan, P. (2002). 2001, A Year in Wales. Bridgend, Wales, Seren, Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
McLoone, M. (2001). ‘Internal Decolonisation? British Cinema in the Celtic Fringe.’ The British Cinema Book. R. Murphy.
McLoone, M. (2006). National Cinema in Ireland. Theorising National Cinema. V. Vitali and P. Willemen. London, British Film Institute: 88-99.
The Phrase Hip Hedonism was coined by Martin McLoone. Read more about his newest work here:
Film, Media and Popular Culture in Ireland Cityscapes, Landscapes, Soundscapes by Martin McLoone
This collection of essays from Martin McLoone takes a new look at contemporary culture in Ireland through the filter of three main developments – the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy in the South, the peace process in the North and the general rise in Ireland of ‘diasporan awareness’.
The book considers the impact of these three factors on the film, television, and music produced in Ireland, mostly since the 1990s, and speculates on how this popular culture reflects both what has been gained in the new Ireland but also what has been lost.
Specific concerns of the book are the secularisation of Ireland and popular culture’s assault on the Church generally (and the priest in particular); the changing cityscapes and landscapes of the new Ireland;
the ‘death’ of politics; sexual freedom and personal liberation; the problem of representing unionist culture in the North; Van Morrison’s Belfast and the rise of ‘possessive individualism’ in Ireland.
The book celebrates the new Ireland but also raises issues about the loss of aspects of Irish identity that were valuable and suggests the need for a new ‘collective imaginary’ that might reinvigorate Irish identity in the new millennium.
Is Wales Postcolonial? Scholars continue to debate this issue, and there are some very entrenched and opposing views:
Welsh historian Geraint H. Jenkins tells us,
"Some historians have simply presumed that the political assimilation of Wales by England necessarily meant that the history of this ‘internal colony’ was no more than a tranquil and uneventful interlude between the rebellions of the fifteenth century and the epoch-making industrial revolution." (Prys Morgan, Tempus Publishing Ltd. 2001: 74)
Describing Wales as an ‘internal colony’ of England during this or any period, or variously describing Wales as colony/former colony/neo-colony, etc. of England, raises the question as to whether postcolonial theory is applicable in the case of Wales, which is not without controversy.
'Postcolonial Wales' is a collection of edited essays derived from a one day conference “exploring aspects of contemporary Welsh cultural & political life from 'Postcolonial' theoretical and critical perspectives” considered this question on 13 July 2002 at the University of Glamorgan, Wales, and the papers from this conference address the question in a recently published book, edited by Jane Aaron and Chris Williams.
Media scholars tend to see Wales, at least as far as film and media are concerned, in some state of colonial or post-colonial status:
In his new book 'Film, Television and the Break Up of Britain' Professor Steve Blandford has asserted that, while some areas of governance of newly-devolved Wales have achieved a certain level of independence from England, i.e., ‘postcolonial Wales’, Welsh film and television are still subject to residual colonial controls based in London (Aaron and Williams 2005: 191; Blandford 2007: 91).
Professor Dave Barlow (in the recent book, 'The Media in Wales: Voices of a Small Nation' which he co-authored with Philip Mitchell, and Tom O'Malley) confirms that this continuing monopoly of news and copy-righted-entertainment production and marketing in Wales by England and Hollywood is pervasive not only in film and television, but extends throughout other media (Barlow, Mitchell et al. 2005: 34).
an Associate Professor from the Norwegian Universitetet i Tromsø, and former Visiting Professor of Border Studies at the Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan, has compared post-colonial Norway to post-colonial Wales in his lecture entitled:
"Like post-colonial Norway, post-colonial Wales has no aristocracy of its own. I mention this right at the end of my talk to give a hint of what is to come."
"The rise of a Welsh-speaking middle-class has lent prestige to the Welsh language, and has, with the help of the new Welsh-language media and education establishment moved the focal point of Welsh-language culture away from Y Fro Gymraeg - where Welsh-speakers top in percentages of local populations - and to the great cities of Swansea and Cardiff - where Welsh-speakers top in absolute numbers per square kilometre [Aitchinson 1994:91,94]."
"The tensions involved in this hardly expected turn in what we might call the ongoing crisis of representation in the Welsh nation must continue or be resolved, perhaps at some point providing new figurations of the gap between cultural and political borders."
Schimanski, Johan. "Cultural and Political Nationalism in Wales". In Nationalism in Small European Nations ("KULTs skriftserie"). Ed. Øystein Sørensen. Oslo: The Research Council of Norway, 1996.
We recommend both books, by scholars David M. Barlow, Philip Mitchell, and Tom O'Malley, and the collection edited by scholars Jane Aaron and Chris Williams.
Here's the published synopsis of Postcolonial Wales:
"Postcolonial Wales, edited by Jane Aaron and Chris Williams, is collection of essays that uses questions, hypotheses and concepts drawn from postcolonial theory to understand the culture and politics of post-devolution Wales."
"Beginning with discussions of how Wales as a nation has been understood historiographically, as well as historically, the book focuses in the next section on society and politics in post-devolution Wales. "
"The final section of the volume considers Welsh cultural difference in terms of literature, the mass media, music, drama and the visual arts. Flexible in approach and diverse in their approaches, each contribution aims to stimulate ideas and suggest new ways of thinking about contemporary Wales."
Zoë Brigley, a Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Warwick in her post entitled,
"In this essay, Williams begins by rejecting any models of Wales as a post-colonial nation, but he does embrace aspects of postcolonial theory such as ‘ambivalence, hybridity and post-nationality’ which might be useful in considering Wales as a marginal region (13)."
"William sees ambivalence as bound up with Wales’ complicity with the English and British. There is also hybridity in the ‘migration, settlement and intermarriage’ in Wales: what Williams calls ‘Wales’ “fuzzy borders” and its long inheritance of multicultural experiences, if not of multiculturalism’ (14). "
"Williams is adamant that hybridity has often been ignored by critics and commentators in Wales, yet possibilities might be found in the view of selfhood that defines postcolonial theory."
Pictured right: Professor Steve Blandford, Associate Dean of Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, is an expert in British film and television.
Professor Blandford will discuss his new book, 'Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britain' at tonight's film event at Chapter Arts Centre.
Special Film Event: Screening of the new film, 'This is England' plus a talk by Professor Steve Blandford (18)
Friday, 29 June 2007 20:15 Cinema 1 Fri 29 June / Gwener 29 Mehefin
UK/2006/100 mins/18. Dir: Shane Meadows. With Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Jo Hartley.
Shane Meadows’ most accomplished film to date is set in 1983, and focuses on a lonely 12-year-old who runs into a group of skinheads, but finds himself drawn into more uncomfortable territory when an older, overtly racist gang member is released from prison.
This screening will be preceded by a 30-minute talk on current British cinema by Steve Blandford, professor of theatre and media and associate dean of the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan, and author of the new book 'Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britain'.
Critics say that 'This is England' is "fizzing with energy and humour, powered by brilliantly engaging performances" -
Barely a week goes by, without more good news coming from the University of Glamorgan . . .
Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries Supports Menuhin Competition
June 15, 2007
The University of Glamorgan’s Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries and its partner the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, is delighted to announce that it is to host and sponsor the biennial Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists in April 2008.
The world’s leading international competition for violinists under the age of 22 will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year in Cardiff.
The competition attracts some of the most promising talent in violin playing from all over the world who will compete in two competitions: the Senior Section for competitors aged 16 to 21, with prize money of £5,000 and the Junior Section for competitors 15 and under, with prize money of £3,500.
Forty of the world’s leading young violinists will present a varied and exciting repertoire to the audience and all star jury.
Previous prize-winners are some of today’s most gifted violinists, they include: Lara St John, Julia Fischer, Nikolaj Znaider, Corina Belcea, Ilya Gringolts, Tasmin Little, Isabelle van Keulen and Daishin Kashimoto.
The competition is adjudicated by internationally renowned performers and esteemed violin professors.
The Menuhin competition is unique as it is the only violin competition which also asks its jury members to perform a concert and give public master classes.
Each Menuhin Competition comes with an exciting and entertaining programme of events, from violin concerts with star violinists and orchestras to chamber music and offers an outreach programme of school and community activities including master classes and exhibitions.
The Opening concert will be on Friday 11th April at St David’s Hall and will feature Maxim Vengerov, Jennifer Pike and Hrachua Avanesyan – the 2006 competition winner.
The competition rounds will be held between Saturday 12th April and Wednesday 16th April.
A gala concert at the Wales Millennium Centre on Sunday 20th April will close the competition and will feature Nikolaj Snaider and Rebecca Evans with the 2008 competition winners and the Welsh National Orchestra.
It promises to be a truly thrilling event; why not be amongst the first to receive concert, booking information and special offers by email by visiting the official competition website on
Congratulations to Professor Steve Blandford as his much anticipated, new book is hot off the presses -- This book engages with ideas that are highly topical and relevant: nationalism, nationhood and national identity as well as the relationship of these to post-colonialism. However, it does so within the broad field of drama.
Examining the debates around the relationship between culture and national identity, the book documents the contributions of actual dramatists and film-makers to the chronicling of an important historical moment.
The book breaks down what have been traditional barriers between theatre, film and television studies, considering the very broad range of ways in which the creators of dramatic fictions are telling us stories about ourselves at a time when the idea of being ‘British’ is increasingly problematic.
Much has been written on the ‘break up’ of Britain, but there has been very little to-date about the impact that this is having on drama in the theatre, on television and on film.
A very wide range of material is discussed in the book, ranging from box office hits such as The Full Monty to community based theatre in Scotland and Wales.
