Alan Meggs ‘Reclaims Cabaret’ in a REG talk that transports us all to 1980s Italy…
Join Alan Meggs, one of our brilliant doctoral researchers in Creative Writing and REG member, as he whisks you back into his memories, conjures some hauntings and argues with passion for reclaiming the lost stories of touring cabaret performers…
Watch the talk HERE!
Reclaiming Cabaret: A queer haunted auto ethnography of real, researched and imagined stories from cabaret past and present
A patchwork tribe of suitcased entertainers. A queer haunted autoethnography of real, researched and imagined stories from the cabaret nightclubs of Europe past and present.
During the 1980s, British dancers, including Alan and his peers, worked abroad, taking jobs as a means of acquiring an Equity card, or for work security and regular wage, or to see the world. With no known accounts of this period of recent dance history online, he approached The Stage, Equity, Dancing Times, The National Resource Centre for Dance andUNESCO’s International Dance Council, to enquire about records or archives of the time. Negative replies told me something had to be done or the undocumented lives and the styles of choreography no longer performed, would be lost forever.
Using autoethnography, hauntology and queer theory, Alan’s innovative Creative Writing doctoral project here at the University of Brighton recounts his life in a small touring cabaret dance company in Italy between 1980-1986. It also examines people and places from the origins of the modern cabaret in fin-de-siècle Paris and brings the past andpresent together in a magically real space where real, researched andimagined lives meet, haunt and interact within his lived experience.
Alan Meggs, University of Brighton
Alan Meggs trained in dance at the Arts Educational Schools in London at the end of the 1970s. After a long performing career that spanned cabaret, West End Theatre, T.V., film and national/international tours, he stepped ‘behind the scenes’ working across almost every aspect of live entertainment from dance captain to choreographer, actor to director, dresser to wardrobe supervisor, stage hand to production manager, arriving in academia in 2018. (www.alanmeggs.com<http://www.alanmeggs.com>😉