PVCRS is very much a companion publication to our ejournal New Voices in Classical Reception Studies and our Eseminar Archive. All add to the range of resources that are made freely available on the Open University Reception of Classical Texts Research Project website. New Voices provides a refereed platform for newer researchers to publish their work. The Eseminar Archive makes available the records of the annual seminar that discusses all aspects of classical reception. Practitioners' Voices is a response to the growing awareness that Classical Reception research has to recognise the full range of processes that shape the impact of classical material in new contexts. Its aim is to provide a Forum in which theatre directors, designers, dramaturgs, actors, poets, translators, and all involved in the creative practices that are so crucial to classical receptions can discuss the relationship between their work and the classical texts, themes and contexts on which they draw.

We hope that the Forum will also lead to further dialogue between creative practitioners and critics and academics (who are after all also practitioners).

Current Issue

Issue 8 (2017)

Special Issue: Australasian Practitioners

Marguerite Johnson introduces this special issue of Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies, which features conversations with three Australasian practitioners: Phillip Mann, Anna Jackson and Ben Ferris.

Phillip Mann

Phillip Mann was born in North Yorkshire, and studied Drama and English at Manchester University. He has worked extensively in Theatre in Europe and America and established the first programme of Drama Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 1970, where he was later made Professor of Drama. Recently he has been appointed MNZM (Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit). He takes a special pleasure in directing new plays and in finding ways of making Greek Classical Drama available to modern audiences. In addition to his theatre work, Phillip Mann is a freelance writer and has published Science Fiction novels as well as essays and works for younger readers.
This interview with John Davidson was recorded in Wellington on 21st October 2016.

Anna Jackson

Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet whose six collections include Catullus for Children (2003) and I, Clodia (2014). She has an article, ‘Catullus in the Playground’ in Living Classics, ed. Stephen Harrison (OUP, 2009) and two articles on writing in response to the Classics coming out in 2017, ‘Clodia through the looking-glass,’ in Antipodean Antiquities (Bloomsbury) and ‘I, Clodia: I had a dream I was a ghost’ in From Athens to Aotearoa (Victoria University Press). An Associate Professor in English at Victoria University of Wellington, she has published several academic books on topics ranging from Children’s Gothic to Verse Biography.
This interview with Maxine Lewis was recorded on January 25th 2016 at the University of Auckland.
Photograph by Elvira Edmonds.

Ben Ferris

Ben Ferris is a film writer/director whose films have screened at festivals throughout the world (in Paris, Athens, New York, Tokyo, Karlovy Vary, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Skopje, Singapore, Sydney). His short film The Kitchen (2003) won the Grand Prix at the Akira Kurosawa Memorial Short Film Festival in Tokyo in 2005, and his short film Ascension (2004) won the Grand Prix at the 4^th One Take Film Festival in Croatia in 2004.
His debut feature film Penelope, an Australian-Croatian co-production, screened in National Competition at the 56^th Pula Film Festival in Croatia in 2009, and won a Van Gogh Award for Best Fantasy Film at the Amsterdam Film Festival in 2010. His second feature film, 57 Lawson (2016), captures daily life in a social housing building in Redfern, under the shadow of impending development. Ben is currently the Artistic Director of the Sydney Film School which he co-founded in 2004. He was the curator of the Sydney Cinémathèque in 2015, and his writings on cinema have been published worldwide in both French and English.
This interview with Leanne Glass was recorded via Skype on 13th January 2016.

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