Contagion Cabaret
Chipping Norton Theatre, working alongside researchers, academics, and medical professionals from Oxford University, created an online performance that took the long view on the COVID-19 pandemic. Killer germs, superbugs and pestilential plagues have long fascinated writers and musicians, and the Contagion Cabaret is riddled with infectious extracts of plays, poems, journalism and music, past and present.
In a panel discussion that followed the screening of this performance, a cast of actors, scientists, and literary researchers discussed the role of performance and theatre during a pandemic.
About the Academic
Sally Shuttleworth is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She has published extensively on the inter-relations of medicine, science and culture, and between 2014-19 ran the large ERC research project, ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’, as well as the AHRC project, ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19 th and 21 st Centuries’, in partnership with the Natural History Museum, London, the Royal Society, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Her most recent books are the co-authored Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019), and the co-edited volume Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities (2020). She is currently Treasurer and Vice President of the British Academy.
About the Ecologist
Raghavendra Gadagkar heads a school of research at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He used the little known eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata for his original research. The wasp has helped his team showcase new perspectives on the evolution of animals’ social lives.
About the Physician-Scientist
Gagandeep Kang is a Professor of Microbiology at Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory, and the at the Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore. With her team, she conducts inter-disciplinary research on enteric infections and child health. She works on gut infections in children, focusing on issues of nutrition, water and sanitation.
About the Literary Scholar
Teja Varma Pusapati is an Assistant Professor in English at Shiv Nadar University, India. She works on Victorian literature and culture, with a specific focus on gender and the periodical press. In her teaching and research, she aims to examine the striking ability of print culture to shape our understanding of time and timeliness, the momentary and the historical.
About the Director
John Terry is Artistic Director of Chipping Norton Theatre, a small independent producing theatre in the UK. John’s professional debut was the UK premiere of Unsent Letters at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London.
About the Actor
Anna Tolputt is an actor, director and acting tutor. Her theatre credits include Connie’s Colander (Human Story), Twelfth Night, King Lear, As You Like it and the Tempest (at the Minack Theatre), Spring Storm(National Theatre and Northampton Royal & Derngate), and Fahrenheit 45 (International Tour) among others.