Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Salford
Bell in the Ball - Broadcast Radio 4 play
Commissioned comedy-drama broadcast radio script.
Transmission date BBC Radio 4 June 25 2010.
Repeated: BBC Radio 4, June 14 2012.
Radio Cable Retransmission (CR): Eire (17 January 2012)
Radio CR: Belgium (21 September 2011)
The narrative concerns a sightless sportsman’s attempt to regain dignity and self-confidence by playing ‘blind cricket’. The original subject and style of the drama deals with challenging issues that focus on the topic of violence and blindness.
The dramatic performance, script and attendant commentary explores aural methodologies and techniques to more successfully engage, and ‘authentically’ connect, the complexities of the blind sensory environment with the experience of audience ‘blindness’ through ‘mainstream’ radio drama. The production disrupts audio perspective by subverting linear narrative and employing non-naturalistic techniques by the creation of soundscapes, fractured and improvised over-lapping dialogue.
The output responds to critical discourses around the relationship between contemporary practice and disability, such as Bodies in Commotion – Disability and Performance (Eds. Sandahl, Carrie and Auslander, 2008, Universitty of Michigan, USA) and Petra Kuppers’ work Disability and Contemporary Performance - Bodies on Edge (2003, Routledge, Oxford). Research included personal interviews with John M. Hull (Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, 1990 SPCK, London), BBC broadcaster Peter White and playing with Old Sharston C.C. a blind cricket team in West Yorkshire. Following broadcast, critical enquiry of the play included a personal interview on In Touch (BBC Radio 4, June 8 2010).
Further dissemination and discussion of these issues also occurred when the article was presented at:
Politics, Poetics and Practice Colloquium (Canterbury Christchurch University, May 6th
2011).
The representation of visual disability on screen, stage and in radio
Drama (International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), Disability and Performance Working Group panel (Santiago, Chile, July 2012)).
