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Talk: Roost: Birds, Place and Art

The habit of gathering at dusk by birds – especially crows, starlings, thrushes, and gulls – shapes their lives, but the birds themselves can also radically alter the physical landscape itself. For centuries naturalists and artists have responded to this remarkable avian behaviour. In turn both the birds and their human observers help inform the way all of us see place and nature.

In a mixture of words, photographs and moving images, British author and naturalist, Mark Cocker, explores these issues in a presentation uniquely written for The Arts Institute, as part of our exploring...

Film: Love and Friendship (2016)

This is a deliciously sharp comedy based on the Jane Austen novella.

A tale of matchmaking and heart-breaking, centred around beautiful young widow Lady Susan Vernon who has come to Churchill, her in-laws' estate, to wait out the colourful rumours about her dalliances circulating through polite society. Whilst there, aided and abetted by her loyal friend Alicia she decides to secure husbands for herself and her long-suffering daughter Frederica.

Stillman is a natural fit for Austen and is on top form here with a gloriously witty and acerbic tale of romance and realism...

Music: London Mozart Players

We are delighted to welcome the highly celebrated London Mozart Players to Plymouth. The UK’s longest established chamber orchestra and known for its unmistakable British roots, the London Mozart Players has developed an outstanding reputation for adventurous, ambitious programming, from Baroque works through to contemporary music.

The all-Mozart programme for this exciting evening features three greatly contrasting works: the rarely-performed, humorous Seranata Notturna; the brooding and dramatic Piano Concerto in D minor, with pianist and Music Director of The Arts Institute, Dr...

Poetry reading: Rachael Allen and Professor Anthony Caleshu

Rachael Allen reads from her debut poetry collection 'Kingdomland', published with Faber and Faber. Rachael, born in Cornwall, is the co-author of Jolene, a collaborative book of poems and photographs with Guy Gormley, and 'Nights of Poor Sleep', a book of paintings and poems with Marie Jacotey. She is the recipient of a Northern Writers Award and an Eric Gregory Award, and was a Faber New Poet in 2014.

Professor Anthony Caleshu is the author of four books of poetry and three books of criticism about poetry. He is a professor of poetry and directs the MA...

Talk: Culture Shock: Travellers in Search of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe

Part of the Whigs, Powder and Paint series

The cultural tourism of the 18th Century is usually associated with the Grand Tour to Italy. Yet the 18th Century witnessed the rise of an alternative tour to Northern Europe, where travellers could take in the splendours of the Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish art or experience a quite different milieu to Naples or Rome.

Join Dr Harry Mount, an expert in 18th-century art criticism, for a fascinating exploration of cultural tourism to the North before the railway age. Harry is Programme Leader for History and History of Art at...

Talk: Rethinking the decline of witchcraft in early Modern England

Dr Peter Elmer provides an alternative approach to understanding one of the more complex and disputed aspects of witchcraft in early modern England, namely its demise. He discusses a wealth of new material, arguing that politics, rather than scientific or intellectual advance, provides a more convincing context in which to understand the gradual erosion of belief in witchcraft and an end to witch trials in late 17th- and early 18th-century England.

Peter is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Exeter.

www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/talk-...

Film: The Mercy (2017)

Professor Judy Edworthy, Director of the University’s Cognition Institute, will introduce this dramatic account of Donald Crowhurst’s disastrous attempt to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe without stopping and the struggles he confronted on the journey while his family awaited his return.

Judy, an applied psychologist, will discuss the risk-taking behaviour behind the tragic turn of events, along with personal recollections of contemporary responses in Teignmouth, where Crowhurst sailed from in 1968.

Part of the Celluloid Psychology series

Director: James...

Poetry reading: Edward Clarke and J.R. Carpenter

Edward Clarke reads from his latest collection 'Eighteen Psalms', published by Periplum Press.

Edward is a poet and author of two books of criticism: 'The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry', and 'The Later Affluence of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens'. He is an editor of the web-zine Cassandra Voices.

J. R. Carpenter will read from her debut poetry collection 'An Ocean of Static', published by Penned in the Margins and Highly Commended by the Forward Prizes in 2018. 'An Ocean of Static' transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the...

Film: The Madness of King George (1994)

Nigel Hawthorne stars as the British monarch who seemingly became mentally disturbed during his reign and had to endure barbaric 'cures'. Based on Alan Bennett's acclaimed play, The Madness of King George takes a dark-humoured look at the mental decline of the King.

The film's story begins nearly three decades into George's reign, in 1788, as the unstable king begins to show signs of increasing dementia, from violent fits of foul language to bouts of forgetfulness. This weakness seems like the perfect chance to overthrow the unpopular George in favour of...

Performance: At the end we begin - Richard Chappell Dance

Following its creation on Studio Wayne McGregor's 2017 FreeSpace Program and first UK Tour, Richard Chappell Dance presents At the end we begin. The company's dynamic, compelling and first full-length work uses T.S. Eliot's classic series Four Quartets as a point of departure by representing each poem with four arresting and emotionally fuelled quartets of dance, named after each poem.

At the end we begin questions how time's circular nature affects our understanding of ourselves and inhabits the sensitive and sometimes turbulent landscape of Eliot's poetry...

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