Thursday 22 May 2014

A bit of wrestling, a lot of assessing, some personal development and an award!

I've had a couple of great if slightly exhausting weeks. First up, two weeks of performance assessments. I saw some terrific stuff during the fortnight: some really thoughtful, interesting takes on the brief. The two performance courses I teach are pretty tough for first year students to get their heads around, but, by and large, folks did a great job.

As a break halfway through, I attended a totally brilliant personal development workshop called (wait for it...) Woman of Power. Despite sounding rather scary, it was actually terrific. I learnt a heap about body language, selling yourself and identifying your talents. It was very interesting to see that my talents are also my weaknesses. If you are around the Lincoln area then keep a look out for Sue Ritchie's training workshops. She is pretty ace. We have a follow up meeting in a couple of weeks and I have a lot of thinking/prep to do.

For those of you who don't know (or woebetide you, don't care) the WWE has been in town and D and I went to Nottingham to watch the house show. D got front row tickets. There were some terrific matches and being so close to the guys was amazing. Not only did the very lovely Mark Henry throw me his shirt (a useful size 4XL btw) but I got pictures take with Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins, two members of my current favourite group: The Shield. Here I am with the delectably amazing Roman:


Awesome huh? 

This week I have been down in London to accept an award from the Society for Theatre Research. I am so grateful to the Society for recognising my work. I was a lovely night of celebration. 

We have a lovely quiet weekend in store: riding, tidying, marking and perhaps a film. I am starting to make the transition from teaching into research mode and am setting some pretty tough targets for myself. We'll see how they go. For now, I'm off to do a workout and finish the washing up. Always rock n' roll chez Warden.

CSW

Saturday 3 May 2014

Tech

This week I have been mostly learning about tech. It is 'tech week' in the department and students have been busily messing around with lighting and audio things in readiness for performance fortnight which starts on Monday. While this means my days become pretty fragmented and bitty, I do quite enjoy tech week. There's going to be some great stuff coming up... Other than tech stuff I have spent the week doing lots of little jobs: booking conferences, reading books, completing abstracts, finishing dissertation marking.

We have just finished our first BBQ of the year Chez Warden. It has been a rather beautiful day although it's pretty chilly right now. We are now preparing for a rather bigger BBQ on Monday when our dear friends come to visit from Leeds.

This week I was involved in a transatlantic communication through the power of Google docs. It was pretty amazing to be able to realtime chat over such huge distances and to see my colleague edit our collaborative document which changed immediately on my screen. This is all leading to a edited collection on pro-wrestling and performance. Initially I always thought that my pro-wrestling work would just be a fun aside for those days when modernism just didn't float my boat. But it's ended up being a major part of my research portfolio. Rather remarkable really!

Anyways, having spent the afternoon writing an article on the Kelpies, I think it is probably time to shut down the computer, do a bit of yoga and have a chilled evening.

CSW