Hooligan Art Community Film Screenings and Q&A Discussion
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme
In collaboration with Voices of Ukraine.
Hooligan Art Community Film Screenings and Q&A Discussion
Saturday 8th July at 12.30pm
The Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford
Book tickets here
The screening will present two films created by Hooligan Art Community, a theatre company founded in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2019 and displaced by the war.
HOOLIGAN: IN THE FIELD (20 mins, 2020) follows three Ukrainian artists as they adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic. Filmed in Ukraine in May 2020, the film is a triptych of personal responses to the freedoms and restrictions encountered during lockdown. A film by Hooligan Art Community.
24.RECONSTRUCTION (13 mins, 2022) Director Liubov Sliusareva portrays the experiences of five female Ukrainian artists as they adjust to being in Germany after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Through poetic and lyrical visual language, the film examines the derealisation and disassociation experienced by displaced people.
Following the screening, a discussion between Professor Wes Williams, Director Pete Cant and members of the company will explore Hooligan Art Community's work in film and theatre. There will also be an audience Q&A.
Pete Cant
Peter is a director, producer and librettist. He began his career at the Young Vic in London and Odeon Theatre, Paris, as assistant director to Patrice Chereau and Luc Bondy. After training with Jerwood Opera Writing Foundation he collaborated with composers including Luke Styles, Marcin Stanczyk and Trish Clowes on new music-theatre pieces for stage and radio. In 2015 he wrote and directed the opera, ‘Unborn in America’ at Vault Festival. Together with the artist Krzysztof Honowski he directed and performed in a series of experimental live-video performances including ‘Alexandria’ and ‘Kustom Kar Kommandos Karaoke’ which were presented at Tropez in Berlin, Atopos in Athens and at the Yard Theatre, London. Peter has written and staged many youth and community operas, including at Glyndebourne, Britten Pears Arts, Mahogany Opera and the Barbican. Between 2016 and 2019, he was a regular director of new work for ENO Baylis's youth programme. In 2016 Peter began devising performances in Kyiv with a group of Ukrainian acting graduates. In 2019 he co-founded Hooligan Art Community with the group. He has directed four shows for the company, including ‘Hooligan’ at Mystetskyi Arsenal and ‘Radiation’ at Dnipro Centre of Contemporary Culture and Kosmos Tabir, Kyiv. In 2022 Peter produced and directed ‘Bunker Cabaret’, Hooligan’s first touring show, in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The company’s performances, films and installations have been met with acclaim in Ukraine, UK, Ireland and Germany.
Prof Wes WiIliams
Wes Williams is the Director of TORCH, Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, and also a Fellow in Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall.
His main research interests are in the field of Renaissance studies; the critical study of genre and subjectivity; and the intersection of theory and practice in the literary, political, religious, and professional cultures of the early modern period. He also works on contemporary theory and film.
His first book – Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (OUP, 1999) – was the first full-length study of the place of the Jerusalem pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. He continues to work on narratives of travel and encounter, displacement and diaspora throughout the early modern period.
His second major study, Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture; Mighty Magic (OUP, 2012) explores the cultural, medical, and theological significance of monsters from Rabelais to Racine -- by way of Montaigne, Shakespeare, Titian, Pascal, Corneille, and a host of others. Political monsters (from Nero to the present) are a focus of his most recent work in this field. He is currently writing a short Life of Rabelais, an account of the strange case of Magdeleine d’Auvermont, and a study of the long, enduring history of ‘voluntary servitude’.
Alongside award-winning work writing and directing for the theatre, he has also contributed to a number of radio broadcasts and films. Deputy Director of the Balzan Interdisciplinary Seminar , which explored a range of cognitive approaches to literary understanding, he was also a founder-member of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, and is Geddes Fellow at St Edmund Hall. He has a long-standing interest in fostering cultural collaborations and exchanges that amplify, diversify, and transform our collective intellectual and social resources.
Prior to becoming the Director of TORCH, Wes was the Humanities Knowledge Exchange Champion. Before that, he undertook a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, Storming Utopia - a partnership between Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, and early modern academic colleagues at the University of Oxford. As an exercise in practical utopianism, the two aims of the project were: exploring ways of making contemporary theatrical sense of Thomas More's ground-breaking fantasy/blue-print for a 'brave new world' (Utopia, first published some 500 years ago in 1516) and; developing and extending an existing creative partnership between Pegasus and the University.
Professor Williams is also Shaping Destiny’s co-Principal Investigator. He joined Shaping Destiny after discussing the project with Professor Shankar Srinivas and Dr Tomoko Wantabe. Professor Williams is a master storyteller whose book ‘Mighty Magic’ forms the basis for the humanities side of the Shaping Destiny project. In his book, he explores the power of the imagination, the concept of monsters, and what constitutes the human norm in different cultures. Professor Williams is also a theatre maker and the insights of his research to co-create a community engagement theatre piece is an invaluable asset for the Shaping Destiny project.
Photo credit: Steve Tanner
