Updating the website

I've just updated the conference website. The intention is to have links to the speakers and discussants own webpages and, nearer the time the texts of the talks and some pictures and sound clips.

Something rotten...

Off to Denmark tomorrow for a conference on theory and practice in nursing education... in Aarhus. It seems so much better organised than mine is going to be.

She should have died hereafter

Back from Macbeth in the rain. What you hope for, under these circumstances, is that the sublime of the poetry makes you forget that you are sitting in a raincoat and hat in the rain. It did. The supporting actors were rather weak but Macbeth himself was played very strongly, with energy and passion. He was especially good near the beginning when he was distracted by his dark ambition rather than completely lost to evil, madness and blood, with a beautifully played uneasy gaze and indecision. His relationship with lady Macbeth was electric in parts. He had an age and presence that the others lacked which was used to good effect. Malcolm and even MacDuff were callow in comparison to his macho confidence. As often in Shakespeare, the villains are more attractive, more alive. I wonder why this is so in the arts because in 'life' villains from local criminals to world leaders seem the complete opposite to living life to the full.
Finally, I wish the actors had let the poetry reverberate with its own power sometimes rather than deliver it all with unvarying force and volume - but perhaps you need to do that outside on a rainy night.

Talking of performance...

Its been raining all day here in Camridge, and still is, and tonight I am going to see Macbeth sitting in the gardens of Downing College.

What this is about...

performing our practice
practising our performance
intuition and expertise in the wake of the evidence movements

a day conference exploring professional practice and identity in
healthcare, psychoanalysis and the arts 8 November 2005
VENUE: The Old Refectory University College London Gower Street, UK

Its a chance for people involved in and/or studying the practice of healthcare (by doctors, nurses, arts therapists among others) and performers, artists of various kinds to discuss issues they all face in the context of a rise in an 'evidence' culture. In medicine a movement called Evidence Based Medicine rose to prominence in the early 1990s in the UK and North America and other places as well. It forced people to think again about rather hallowed notions like clinical judgement, expertise, the 'art' of practice and intuition. For me the different ways that the medical and nursing professions have responded to it are fascinating.

I'm not so familiar with how a similar change and tension plays out in the performing and other arts - and psychoanalysis - but am aware that some artists, chiefly those with links to universities, are having to learn how to describe their work as 'research' in order to maximise their, and their university department's, profile, 'performance' and funding.

The day conference is organised by Middlesex University in conjunction with UCL and City University, all in London, UK.