BADA Symposium: All Sessions

On the set of Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman admitted to not having slept for 72 hours. His sleep deprivation was an acting technique – a tool that would allow him to accurately portray his character. In response, his co-star Laurence Olivier asked him, ‘why don’t you just try acting?’ This possibly apocryphal story encapsulates the supposedly oppositional attitudes taken by Americans and Brits – method acting for the Americans and highly technical approaches developed for classical texts for the Brits.

Bringing together scholars and practitioners, the symposium will challenge such simplistic binary narratives and explore how encounters between acting systems and theatre cultures have been enriched by the transatlantic movement of marginalised communities. Through interviews, panels, workshops and performance, we will explore how innovation and identity intersect across borders.

Sunday 15th March 2026 (all times are in GMT)

Session 1:

• 9.30-10.00: Coffee and Registration
• 10.00-10.15: Welcome
• 10.15-11.45: Stonewall to Soho: Transatlantic Exchanges in Queer Theatre and Performance (speakers tbc)
• 11.45-12.00: Break
• 12.00-1.00: Sam and the Globe (Patrick Spottiswoode, Founder, Globe Education - Shakespeare's Globe and Zoë Wanamaker)
• 1.00-2.00: Lunch (included in ticket price)

Session 2:

• 2.00-4.00: Jewish Methods: How Jewish-American Practitioners Influenced Contemporary British Actor Training (Lola Cohen, Conrad Cohen and Margaret Coldiron)
• 4.00-4.15: Break
• 4.15 - 5.15: American Theatre Artists and their British Cultural Inheritance (Simon Godwin, Drew Lichtenberg and Deborah C. Payne)

Monday 16th March 2026

Session 1:

• 9.45-10.15: Coffee and Registration
• 10.15-12.00: Beyond the Hollywood Ten: 'Un-American' Americans and the British Theatre Industry (Paul Prescott, Rebecca Prime, Hakim Adi and Tom Kuhn)

Session 2 (this session will take place at Shakespeare's Globe):

• 2.00-3.45: 'Lifting It Up': Hip-hop, Shakespeare and the Poetics of Black Speech (Jonzi D, Sideeq Heard, Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu and Miriam A. Hyman/Robyn Hood MIO' 10)
• 3.45-4.00: Break
• 4.00-5.00: Phylicia Rashad and Joseph Mydell MIO' 84 in conversation
• 7.30-10.00: Deep Azure at Shakespeare's Globe (participants are required to buy their tickets directly from the Globe website )