News 21 UK dance contest at Essex


SXDance in action


SXDance is once again hosting the inter-university dance competition Expression 2013 following the success of last year’s debut event.


The Sports Centre at the Colchester Campus will play host to more than 300 dancers from university teams across the UK. The event on Sunday 24 February will include advanced and intermediate categories for ballet, jazz, lyrical, contemporary, tap, latin and street.


The club has already had a great start to the year, performing at the I Am Music charity


Review Aefled and


Eleanor: A Poet’s Tale, by Val Morgan (Austin Macauley, 2012)


Val Morgan,


long-known in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies as


teacher, lecturer and scholarly writer, will now also be known as a very fine novelist. This, her first novel, set in East Anglia in the year 1081, deals with cultural clashes, cruelties and incipient friendships between the Normans and the English. Thoroughly researched and powerfully written, it imagines the rural life of that time, including murders and childbirths, prophetic ‘seeings’ and


fundraising event at Colchester’s Charter Hall which was organised by former SXDance members and Essex graduates Samir Diss and Unyime Udo. The event raised more than £3,000 for Danceaid.


SXDance is looking to build on the success of the previous academic year after being named social club of the year by the Students’ Union, winning numerous competitions all over the UK and securing Best Overall University at Dance in Rimini, Italy, on Tour 2012 for the fourth year running. The dancers are already hard at work,


secret bardic singings reconnecting people to ‘the ancient dignities of language and land’.


Aefled is a 15-year-old village girl born the day the English were defeated in the Battle of Hastings. Her life is profoundly changed when the local Norman lord re-names her ‘Eleanor’ and summons her to his great Lodge, where she joins ‘the melancholy sisterhood of Norman rape’. The book’s subtitle, however, is all-important. The talented Aefled – who has learnt much from a wandering Jewish scholar – dreams of composing an epic poem about her own experience of the Norman conquest; her inspired writing of poetry makes for some of the novel’s greatest passages. I strongly recommend this book to everyone interested in literature, history and the spirit of survival.


Angela Livingstone, Emeritus Professor, Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies


choreographing and training for this year’s competitions.


Diverse


SXDance also offers a diverse weekly timetable of fun classes at student prices, the chance to be part in the annual show at the Lakeside Theatre, the opportunity to go on the Salou Tour 2013 plus fundraising flash mobs and weekly social events.


For more information about how to get involved, please contact Hannah Burns at: hcburn@essex.ac.uk.


Funding for innovation


Funding of up to £10,000 is available to support innovative approaches to improving learning or the development of existing good practice.


The closing date for applications to the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund (TALIF) is 5pm on 7 December 2012. Learning and Development is particularly interested in collaborative bids which have Faculty-wide or University-wide impact.


www.essex.ac.uk/ldev


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