Dr Johanna Dale wins grant from UCL Culture in their Performance Lab seed funding competition

Johanna will run several workshops with Sarah Bowden (KCL German) to develop a piece based on the Munich Oswald. 

The Munich Oswald is a medieval German text in which the seventh-century Northumbrian saint-king Oswald journeys to the East in search of a bride.  In Latin and Old English accounts Oswald is depicted as an austere and pious king whose life and martyrdom is central to the story of the development of Christianity in England. In the Munich Oswald the king is divorced from this historical setting and transformed into a legendary figure who has as a companion a talking raven (with a tendency to sulk) and together they encounter mermaids and a golden stag on their travels. 

Dale & Bowden are collaborating with Sinéad O' Neill, an established director and producer of opera, who is directing the revival of Annabel Arden's Il Barbiere di Siviglia at this year's Glyndebourne Festival, Hannah Saunders, a Peterborough-based artist, and the education team at Peterborough Cathedral in the development of the piece, which will be staged in Peterborough Cathedral as part of a series of public and academic events in August 2021.  Several activities will also involve students in the project: Bowden will run a translation masterclass in the Michaelmas term and Dale, Bowden & Francesca Brooks (UCL English) will run an interdisciplinary medieval studies workshop in January 2020.

More information about UCL Culture can be found here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/

Image of Oswald from a C13th manuscript from Weingarten in Germany, which is now in the Morgan Library in New York.