BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival 2019
Sage Gateshead
29-31 March 2019
Welcome to the Free Thinking Festival from BBC Radio 3. All weekend here at Sage Gateshead we’re gathering together a throng of talented individuals to wrestle, debate and celebrate the theme of this year’s festival: Emotion. Whether it’s the angry turn in contemporary politics, the cultural specificity of emotions, how film and tv teach us to feel, anxiety and the teenage brain, emotion in diplomacy, the benefits of sublimating feelings…..
http://www.sagegateshead.com/tour-dates/bbc-radio-3-free-thinking-festival-2019
Festival events Shahidha Bari is chairing as part of the festival:
“Calm Down Dear” – How Angry Should Politics Get?
Saturday 30th March, 2019. 3.45pm – 4.45pm
Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of sexism when he put-down an impassioned female MP. But what is the role of anger in politics and campaigning – from suffragism and black activism to Brexit? What does it mean to feel that your political position is righteous? At a time of rising tempers among electorates, should we all “calm down” – or harness our rage? Shahidha Bari chairs.
How They Manipulate Our Emotions
Sunday 31 March, 1.05pm – 2.05pm
According to Madmen’s ad executive Don Draper, “what you call love was invented by guys like me …to sell nylons.” So how does advertising and gaming grabs us by our emotions? Can we know when we’re being manipulated? And is there anything we can do about it?
Presenter Shahidha Bari is joined by former adman Robert Heath, BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind presenter Claudia Hammond, lecturer in digital games Darshana Jayemanne and game designer May Abdalla.
The Actors’ Guide to the Emotions
Sunday 31 March, 5.45pm – 7pm
Shahidha Bari hosts an evening of live drama and conversation tracing the changing portrayal of emotions onstage. When “the first modern actor” David Garrick stepped onstage in 1741, people were stunned by his realistic emotions. But you might have guessed that from the first Greek tragedies onwards, simulating strong feelings has been the essence of theatre. So what’s changed? The actor Sandy Grierson is joined by an ensemble from Northern Stage, theatre director Lorne Campbell and Professor Jen Harvie to perform and discuss the long history of emotion on stage, the public’s changing tastes and the ways that actors prepare themselves to perform “emotionally.”