Dr. Funmi Adewole Elliott
Funmi Adewole Elliott is a senior lecturer in Dance studies at De Montfort University Leicester, England and an independent practitioner involved in storytelling performance and dramaturgy. She began her career in Nigeria as a media practitioner and performance poet, moving into performance on relocating to England in 1994. Her touring credits include performances with Ritual Arts, Horse and Bamboo Mask and Puppetry Company, Artistes-in-Exile, Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble, and the Chomondeleys, a contemporary dance company. During this period of touring, which spanned about ten years, she also acquired, through self-directed study, voluntary work and paid work, a track record as an independent scholar, dance advocate and arts practitioner. Her academic work and creative practice work are very much in dialogue.
Much of her work centres around the Dance of the African Diaspora and the participation of Black dancers within professional and artistic contexts. In 2019 she was awarded a Life Time Achievement Award for contributions to the Dance of the African Diaspora. She also researches artistic citizenship and dance training and the production of knowledge in dance as a social justice and dance facilitation methods. She has an international reputation as a facilitator and has facilitated workshops, talks and labs for dance and theatre practitioners in South Africa, Canada, West Africa and around Europe. She is a member of the curatorial team for the MA Dance: Participation, Communities and Activism at the London Contemporary Dance School. She has a B.A in European Languages, an MA in Postcolonial Studies, a Professional Certificate in Education and a PhD in Dance Studies.
Prof. Dr. Alicia de Bánffy-Hall
Alicia de Bánffy-Hall is professor of music in social work / community music at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf / Germany. She leads the first national community music certificate, a course for practitioners, music students and social work students at the state music academy NRW. She has lectured at universities in Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Austria and she has delivered workshops to music practitioners, music teachers and consulted arts organisations on how to develop their community music practice (for example concert halls, a library or family centres). Between 2016 and 2021 Alicia worked as a lecturer at the University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt on the first MA in inclusive music education/community music in Germany, a course she co-wrote. Prior to her work in academia she worked for over ten years as a community musician in Liverpool, UK and Germany in arts, community and educational contexts.
Since 2021 she is leading the YouTube channel Community Music Learning and in collaboration with Prof. Roger Mantie she is hosting the community music conversations podcast series. She is an editorial board member for the International Journal of Community Music, chair of the Community Music Activity Commission (ISME) and chair of the Community Music Netzwerk Deutschland.
Prof. Dr. Peter W. Marx
Professor Peter W. Marx holds the Chair for Media and Theatre Studies at the University of Cologne. He is also director of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Cologne, one of the largest archives for theatre and performance culture in Germany.
His focus of research is theatre historiography, Shakespeare in Performance and the formation of theatre as a cultural practice in the Early Modern Period. In 2018, he published Hamlets Reise nach Deutschland. In 2024, Early Modern Media Culture has appeared with Cambridge UP and the English translation of his book Max Reinhardt: From Bourgeois Art to Metropolitan Culture appeared with Northwestern University Press.
In 2020, he published his monograph Macht|Spiele: Politisches Theater seit 1919 and edited the volume Dokumente, Pläne, Traumreste, a comprehensive catalogue and essay collection, celebrating the centenary of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung. In fall 2020, the Handbook on Theatre and Performance Historiography (co-edited with Tracy C. Davis) was published with Routledge. Here, they introduced the concept of Critical Media History.
In 2020, the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, together with partners at the DFF Frankfurt/Main and the Filmuniversität Babelsberg, acquired the collection fo Werner Nekes, one of the world’s largest collections of objects and apparatus of Visual Culture since the Early Modern Period. His most recent work is the field of Critical Media History, an approach he introduced together with Tracy C. Davis in the 2021 Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography.
Peter W. Marx received his PhD from Mainz University in 2000.
Research Interests:
Theatre History
Shakespeare in Performance
Critical Media History
Early Modern Media Ecology
Publications:
—. Macht|Spiele. Politisches Theater seit 1919. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2020.
—. Hamlets Reise nach Deutschland. Eine Kulturgeschichte. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2018.
Davis, Tracy C./ —. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography. London: Routledge 2021.
— (e.d). A Cultural History of Theatre: In the Age of Empire (1800-1920). London [etc.]: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Early Modern Media Ecology. (Cambridge Elements). 2024
