Author: Ali Jones

Professor Didier Plassard is a leading scholar in theatre studies and puppetry at Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University in France. He has spent the last five years exploring the rich history of puppet theatre in Europe and its contribution to the development of a common European cultural identity.“Puppets have helped to build a shared cultural consciousness across Europe,” Plassard said.Puppet theatre compendiumPlassard is leading a six-year EU-funded project called PuppetPlays which aims to collect and study puppet and marionette plays from across Western Europe from the 1600s to the present day.By collecting and analysing puppet performances that have travelled Europe over…

The common perception is that archaeologists spend their time crawling around a dusty dig on all fours, but Serbian researcher Nenad Jončić could not be more different. He uses drones and digital technology to document archaeological sites at risk of disappearing.In January 2016, Jončić, then a postgraduate archaeology student at the University of Belgrade, was seconded to a technology company operating in Slovakia that specialised in documenting archaeological sites and artefacts. Digital reconstructionHis work was part of an EU-funded collaboration aimed at safeguarding cultural history in Eastern Europe. Called CONPRA, the research initiative ran from 2013 to December 2016. It brought together…

With all the fanfare of the Eurovision Song Contest in May this year, it is possible that many missed another European song contest that was taking place at around the same time – the Polifonia Song Contest. Organised by Polifonia, an EU-funded research initiative aimed at protecting and promoting Europe’s musical heritage, the competition sought to draw attention to the vast wealth of musical material contained in the newly launched Polifonia Portal.The competition invited musicians from all over Europe to create the ‘soundtrack of our history’ using material from Polifonia’s online musical database, including sounds as diverse as Italian church bells, Dutch organs,…