Online Talk: Violet Alford’s Pyrenean Festivals and Antonin Artaud’s Peyote Dance Travels in Search of Authentic Performance

• 09/09/2025
• 19:00-20:30
• online talk

Photo: Peter Harrop

Violet Alford’s Pyrenean Festivals and Antonin Artaud’s Peyote Dance: Travels in Search of Authentic Performance

A Folklore Society Online Talk by

Prof. Peter Harrop (University of Chester)

Tuesday 9 September 2025, 19:00 BST

In the 1930s, an English folklorist and a French theatre director, made individual journeys in search of authentic performance. The English folklorist Violet Alford’s extensive fieldwork in France and Spain was published in 1936 as Pyrenean Festivals. During the same year the French writer, actor and director, Antonin Artaud, received a grant to travel to Mexico where he visited the Rarámuri people in the Sierra Madre range of northern Mexico. Alford published a partly autobiographical work, The Singing of the Travels, in 1956 and Artaud’s self-reflective writings on his trip were collected and published posthumously in 1971 as part of his collected works, later as The Peyote Dance. The talk explores points of contact between these two personal quests, regarding them as pioneering explorations of performance, and of the expressive qualities of custom and ritual.

Peter Harrop is Professor Emeritus in Drama at the University of Chester. He co-edited The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance (2021) and is the author of Mummers’ Plays Revisited (2020). He is a member of the AHRC network Folklore without Borders.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code): log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/violet-alfords-pyrenean-festivals-and-antonin-artauds-peyote-dance-tickets-1382789182669?

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Photo: Peter Harrop