BA (Hons) Fine Art

An article published with The Society for Pirandello Studies, Volume 35 (2015), Creamer, Anne-Marie, ‘The Dilemmas of Adaptation: Making Treatment for Six Characters’, 106–15 The article concerns my adaption of Pirandello's plans for a prologue for Six Characters in Search of an Author in cinematic form. While in Rome on 2012 I adapted the text and using the original site of the production, Pirandello's home in Rome, the interiors of Teatro Valle, where the play premiered in 1921, and the environs of Rome.

This article discusses how we, a US poet and a UK visual artist, opened an enmeshed space of creative practice in collaborating on a site-specific film, ‘To Shining Clough’. The film’s ground is literally the Peak District’s Longdendale Valley, but it is also, by analogy, the shifting ground inherent in cross-disciplinary practice, particularly that predicated on ecology. As Tim Ingold argues, creative practice is synonymous with doing and making, with the thinking implicit in the doing. In doing together, even if asynchronously, we therefore thought together, even when transatlantically. Our collaboration involved dialogic improvisation and was informed by coincidence. It was also a form of correspondence, of co-responding to each other and to the texture and terrain of the Longdendale Valley. Taking as subject not just a location but the entangled fluxes present, ‘To Shining Clough’ embodies – as process and product – multiple ecopoetic contour lines.

For the last ten years of his life Pirandello wished to make a film that could act as a precursor to his seminal 1921 meta-play Six Characters in Search of an Author.1 This was to feature his encounters with a Roman family who unwittingly become catalysts for the development of his famous play in that he planned that the film would represent a fictional version of the creative process leading to Six Characters. Had the film been realized, there is speculation that it would have marked Pirandello’s acting debut, the better allowing him to frame his interest in the ambiguous ethics of the creative process within which a successful author’s projective imagination has a disastrous effect on the life of a ‘real’ family, ending in tragedy. Of course the real event of the premiere of Six Characters at the Teatro Valle in 1921 was a disaster for Pirandello—he had to flee the theatre having coins thrown at him—and it is interesting that the final part of Treatment for Six Characters also con...

Homosexuality in ancient Rome often differs markedly from the contemporary West. Latin lacks words that would precisely translate "homosexual" and "heterosexual". The primary dichotomy of ancient Roman sexuality was active/dominant/masculine and passive/submissive/feminine. Roman society was patriarchal, and the freeborn male citizen possessed political liberty (libertas) and the right to rule both himself and his household (familia). "Virtue" (virtus) was seen as an active quality through which a man (vir) defined himself. The conquest mentality and "cult of virility" shaped same-sex relations. Roman men were free to enjoy sex with other males without a perceived loss of masculinity or social status, as long as they took the dominant or penetrative role. Acceptable male partners were slaves and former slaves, sex workers, and entertainers, whose lifestyle placed them in the nebulous social realm of infamia, excluded from the normal protections accorded a citizen even if they were technically free. Although Roman men in general seem to have preferred youths between the ages of 12 and 20 as sexual partners, freeborn male minors were off limits at certain periods in Rome, though professional sex workers and entertainers might remain sexually available well into adulthood. Roman mosaic depicting the myth of Zeus and Ganymede Same-sex relations among women are far less documented and, if Roman writers are to be trusted, female homoeroticism may have been very rare, to the point that one poet in the Augustine era describes it as "unheard-of". However, there is scattered evidence-for example, a couple of spells in the Greek Magical Papyri-which attests to the existence of individual women in Roman-ruled provinces in the later Imperial period who fell in love with members of the same sex.

This paper examines the role of loss and historical memory evoked by allusive mechanism in the Merian/Zincgref Emblemata Ethico-Polticorum Centuria of 1619 and its subsequent re-printing in 1624. While loosely inspired by the Benjaminian concept of ‘trauer’, it extents the idea of mediums of mourning to the emblem as graft, hieroglyph or rebus, and self-reflexive historical commentary. Playing on the emblems of tree species and fruit, it reads the book through the lens of the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg and its subsequent descent into ruin during the Thirty Years War. Ultimately, this essay argues that as a coping mechanism, the emblems of the Emblemata Ethico-Polticorum Centuria are both bitter and sweet; restoring the sensation of a briefly harmonious past whilst at the same time, inoculating against, and foretelling the emotional consequences of, its destruction.

CONFERENCE PAPER TRANSCRIPTION: International Society for Emblem Studies,  Kiel 2014