2023/24

The Donors’ Celebration 2023/24: Film Screening of An Excavation by Maeve Brennan and Q&A with the artist and forensic archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis. 

Date: February 15th 2024 

We were delighted to invite the artist Maeve Brennan to showcase her film An Excavation (2022) for our Donor’s Celebration 2024. The film documents a forensic investigation into a crate of looted antiquities discovered at Geneva Freeport in 2014.  In total, 45 crates of looted antiquities were found, belonging to disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes. They contained tens of thousands of archaeological remnants worth around £7 million. After their confiscation by the Swiss and Italian authorities, the Italian Carabinieri sent three of the crates to the Aarhus University Museum of Ancient Art in Denmark, where forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov conducted further research. Since 2018, Brennan has observed and documented Tsirogiannis’ investigations, mapping the illicit antiquities network from looters and smugglers to auction houses and museums. Brennan’s works trace the circulation of objects through layered temporalities, focusing on figures such as restorers, joyriders and smugglers whose material actions and practices tie them to wider networks, histories and economies. An Excavation is a beautiful and thought-provoking account of the ongoing forensic investigation surrounding the looted antiquities – we were thrilled to host a screening of the film, which was followed by a lively discussion between Maeve Brennan and Dr Christos Tsirogiannis about their artistic and archaeological collaboration.  

2022/23 

The Donors’ Celebration Lecture 2022/3: Professor Jackie Murray on Race and Racecraft in Greek Epic 

Date: 14th December 2022  

For the Donors’ Celebration of 2022/3, we were delighted to welcomed Professor Jackie Murray, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky to deliver a lecture on ‘Race and Racecraft in Greek Epic’ using Apollonius’ Argonautica as a case study.  In her lecture, Professor Murray explored three episodes in the Argonautica in which the usually peaceable Argonauts engage in brutal and dehumanising violence against indigenous herders, acts which the poem presents as necessary precursors to the establishment of future Greek settlements, and examined how these herders are racialised as a means of justifying the Argonauts’ violence against them. As part of the Donors’ Celebrations, Professor Murray also led a workshop for undergraduate and postgraduate students, entitled ‘Doing something different with language,' during which she discussed with students her work on Patois Iliad, a creolising translation of the Homeric epic on which she is collaborating with fellow classicist Sasha-Mae Eccleston (Brown University), and poets Ishion Hutchinson and Claudia Rankine. Professor Murray led an initial discussion about issues of enslavement and sexual violence against women in the Iliad and explored with students the reasons behind the decision to set Patois Iliad in the context of the Napoleonic Wars.  

2021/22  

The Donors’ Celebration 2021/22: Performance of HERE SHE COMES by Jove Theatre Company 

Date: March 9th 2022 

For the Donors’ Celebration 2022 we were thrilled to host the Jove Theatre Company who presented a performance of HERE SHE COMES - an epic poem based on Euripides' Bacchae. This text-only performance was masterfully written and performed by SJ Brady and took place in the Wickham Theatre. The piece follows the life of a woman, Agave, who is invisible in the eyes of society, and is seeking the feeling of freedom.  Her bones burning with loneliness, she goes in search of liberation.  A vengeful god with a flair for the dramatic indulges her resistance to her son’s oppressive nature, and, before she knows it, she’s living in the wild. There are only women in this wild place and as they unite in ecstatic transcendence, Agave begins to lose her grip on reality. In response to this performance, Tom Bolton wrote: ‘Brady’s writing is rhythmic and full of variation, switching voices and eras to impressive effect’. 

2020/21 

The Donors' Celebration 2020/21- Sisyphe Film Premiere and pre-screening talk with Peter Relph and Owen Franklin 

Date: May 21st 2021 

In May 2021, the IGRCT was delighted to welcome composer Peter Relph and video producer and founder of the Bristol Film Festival Owen Franklin to premiere the new film/musical work, Sisyphe. 

Sisyphe seeks to reimagine a moment from Ovid's account of Orpheus and Euridice, where Orpheus descends to the underworld in an attempt to rescue his wife Eurydice. To persuade the gods of the underworld to let her go, he sings a song to convince them of his love for her. Sisyphus, for just a moment, stops his eternal task of rolling his boulder and sits on his rock, overcome by the beauty of Orpheus' playing. The reference comprises just five words - inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo (and you sat, Sisyphus, on your rock).

Franklin and Relph discussed how this moment can reflect personal experiences of art, music, and literature. Every now and again a work of art can induce a response in which we forget our day to day lives and problems (our 'rock'), and just sit and take a moment to appreciate the work of art in front of us. This idea, of a fleeting moment in which you are lost in a moment of wonder, was the basis for the music/film collaboration. 

Singers from Canada, the USA, and the UK came together to record parts of a score by Relph, which was then mixed together and set to a short film produced by Franklin. The film was well received, and generated much discussion from Dr Ellen O'Gorman (IGRCT Director) and members of the audience. The Premier can be watched online here: Sisyphe - Choral Music/Film - Anchorae Isolation Choir (youtube.com) 

 2019/20 

The Donors’ Celebration 2019/20: Professor Robert Fowler on The Eagle in The Clouds: Pindar and the Sublime

Date: November 8th 2019 

At this year’s Donors’ Celebration lecture, we welcome Professor Robert Fowler (Bristol) who delivered a fascinating lecture entitled The Eagle in the Clouds: Pindar and the Sublime. The lecture explored Pindar and his reception. Pindar, Professor Fowler reminded us, has not always received high critical esteem, although he was regarded as the greatest of the lyric poets in antiquity. Recent scholarship on Pindar’s poetry has tended to treat it as an anthropological document rather than a work of literature. Professor Fowler seeks to reopen the question of Pindar’s aesthetic qualities through a reconsideration of the concept of the sublime. He explored this concept as an oscillation between extremes of emotion – attraction and pleasure versus repulsion and terror – and extremes of condition – human life punctuated by encounters with gods. Through an illuminating reading of Pindar’s First Pythian Ode, Professor Fowler showed us how Pindar’s obscure and difficult Greek enabled him to pivot between these extremes in a single word or phrase, and provided the reader with glimpses of an unattainable divine realm. He vividly conveyed how the sublime continually encroaches on the limits of what can be thought, spoken, or experienced. The lecture can be revisited at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlORcUvDPzY. 

2018/19 

The Donors’ Celebration 2018/19: Poet Josephine Balmer Reads The Paths of Survival

Date: March 21st 2019 

How has ancient literature reached us in the modern world? What chain of events – luck and chance, selection and suppression, destruction and preservation – has allowed some texts to survive, and others to disappear? The exploration of these questions lay at the heart of this year’s Donors’ Celebration, at which acclaimed poet and translator Josephine Balmer read from her 2017 collection Paths of Survival. This sequence of poems centres on Aeschylus’ now-fragmentary Myrmidons, a tragedy that told of the Greek hero Achilles’ withdrawal from battle at Troy, a decision that resulted in the death of his lover Patroclus. The reading unfolded as a series of dramatic monologues moving backwards through time, starting with a present-day reader at Oxford’s Sackler Library examining a papyrus scrap of the play, and unspooling back across two and half millennia, finishing with the dying Aeschylus revising his work in Sicily. Dr Balmer’s immersive reading was accompanied by evocative projected images that brought the different time periods and voices alive. The reading was followed by a highly engaged audience discussion, chaired by IGRCT committee member Dr Vanda Zajko, which considered questions of how to approach lost literature and the aesthetics of the fragment more broadly. 

2017/18 

The Donors’ Celebration 2017/18: Concert performance of Mulier Fortis

Date: February 23rd 2018 

For this year’s Donors’ Celebration, the IGRCT teamed up with the University Madrigal Ensemble (led by David Bevan and Ailsa Campbell) and the University Baroque Ensemble (led by Stephen Nurse) to mount a concert performance of the Jesuit baroque musical drama, Mulier Fortis (‘Strong Woman’), at the Bristol Music Club. First produced in 1698 by Viennese Jesuit Johann Baptist Adolph and composer Johann Bernhardt Staudt, this fascinating piece celebrated in Latin the fictionalized martyrdom of Gracia Tama Hosokawa, a Japanese noblewoman who converted to Christianity in the sixteenth century. Director of the Institute, Professor Yasmin Haskell, and guest speaker, Dr Makoto Harris Takao (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin), gave introductory talks on the drama’s historical, dramatic, and musical context. It portrays the collision between Christian values and Japanese tradition in a classicising frame. The University Madrigal Ensemble and Baroque Ensembles then performed the musical sections, using historically appropriate instruments and vocal techniques. 

2016/17 

The Donors’ Celebration 2016/17: Professor Marina Warner on The Migrant Queen: Metamorphoses of Dido

Date: February 17th 2017 

For our 2016/17 Donors Celebration we were proud to welcome Dame Professor Marina Warner, DBE, FRSL, FBA to speak about the literary and artistic depictions of Dido, the founder and first queen of Carthage. Professor Warner (Birkbeck) is an acclaimed best-selling novelist, mythographer, scholar, and one of the Institute’s most esteemed Vice-Presidents. Some of her recent publications include The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought (Violette Editions, 2014); Once Upon a Time – A Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford University Press, 2014); and Fly Away Home (Salt Publishing, 2015). Professor Warner’s erudite lecture set out to redeem Dido’s character and status as migrant queen, juxtaposing this with the traditional depiction of her as a spurned lover and tragic suicide. Our thanks to all who came and made the evening a success - the Old Council Chamber was filled to capacity. An excerpt of Professor Warner’s lecture is available via the IGRCT YouTube channel: Meet your power suite (youtube.com)