NORTHERN LIGHTS
Karin Fernald, performer, independent lecturer, Arts Society, United Kingdom
Monday 26–Wednesday 28 January 9.15 am COURSE FEES R345; Staff and students R173
This course will highlight past conflicts and traumatic events in the Nordic countries. The first lecture discusses the brief Empire of Sweden, its struggle against the Danes, and its heroes Gustav I Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII. We then look at the life and work of Carl Linnaeus, who hoped to make his country ‘great again’ through the nurture and export of edible plants. The second lecture examines how the Enlightenment arrived in absolutist Denmark – too suddenly and too soon – in the person of a German doctor. King Christian Vll is mad; the doctor calms him; his young English queen falls in love with the doctor. It all ends badly, but the doctor’s idealism sows the seeds of a future Denmark. The final lecture focuses on ninth-century Swedish, Norwegian and Danish artists, each in search of a national landscape. In Sweden the beautiful province of Dalarna is iconic, in Norway the mountains and western fjords, and in Denmark the sand dunes of northern Jutland where two seas meet.
Lecture titles
- Lions of the north
- A right royal Danish drama (not Hamlet)
- The blue hour
Recommended reading
Enquist, PO and Nunally, TN. 2003. The Visit of the Royal Physician. London: Vintage/Ebury. Koerner, L. 1999. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Larsson, C. 1991. The World of Carl Larsson. New York: Simon and Schuster.
The Arts Council of Great Britain. 1986. Dreams of a Summer Night. Manchester.
TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/performance.aspx?itemid=1575242027
Karin trained at RADA in the performing arts and went on to play roles ranging from Sally Bowles in CABARET to Elizabeth Bennet in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and Jessica to Sir Ralph Richardson’s Shylock at London’s Haymarket Theatre. On TV she was Anne Forsyte in THE FORSYTE SAGA. She branched out to research and compile programmes for BBC Radio 3, and to write a novel for young readers on the childhood of Queen Victoria, THE DUMPY PRINCESS, published by Frances Lincoln Children’s Books. Today she is an accredited Arts Society speaker on artistic and literary personalities from the l8th and l9th centuries; English and Nordic. Some of her subjects are artists themselves, though better known in other contexts – Queen Victoria and HC Andersen to name but a few. Others are artistically inclined, such as Florence Nightingale. All her entertaining lectures are illustrated with a wide variety of pictures, portraits and caricatures of the day She has been invited to most AS Societies in Europe, New Zealand and Australia, and several times to UCTT.