Talking Emojis and Minoan Dancers: Read Between The Lines Fest

On Tuesday 11th November, 'Read Between The Lines Fest' took over Cheney for a few hours!

Events kicked off with some circus-style fun at our outdoor labyrinth, where Jonathan performed a range of feats for a large crowd of Cheney students. At the same time across the other side of school, our first performance of a brand new play featuring a time-travelling emoji was happening in L1 for an audience of Cheney linguists and historians, followed by a panel discussion. 

After this, Cheney students and visitors flooded in to explore thirty different activity stalls all exploring ancient scripts, linguistics, and ancient culture. The 'scripts room' featured activity stalls run by a team of researchers from the University of Oxford and Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. Topics included Anatolian scripts, Linear B, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian cuneiform, and the layout of texts. 

In the Minoan room, the Bodleian library had brought a hand press for printing lego labyrinths, Myth and Voice ran an activity exploring the saffron gatherers mural from Akrotiri which new novel Flower Gatherers by museum director Lorna Robinson is inspired by. Mosaicists could help create a large mosaic of the young woman picking saffron in the mural, and a Year Eight Museum council stall involved locating creatures in Crete! Finally there was a stall where people could make flower headbands and wreaths.

In two rooms, Museum Council students from Year Eight to Twelve run a wide and imaginative range of stalls. There was cave painting, Aztec logograms, transliteration, Japanese comics and calligraphy, a trail, a quiz, ancient Greek, bookmarks, name origins, creative writing club, and languages in films and shows!

In the Foyer, there were refreshments kindly run by Cheney Friends, emojis by the University of Oxford, emoji facepainting with Carole Hooper and Cheney students, and clay emojis with Year Ten Museum Council. 

Alongside all this, there were mesmerising Minoan dancers performing every fifteen minutes at the labyrinth. 

The whole event finished with another circus-style labyrinth show for students, staff and visitors! 

We are hugely grateful to the University of Oxford and Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia for all their work, and especially Dr Philomen Probert for organising all the research activities. We are also very grateful to the Bodleian Library and Myth and Voice Initiative, to all our actors and performers, and all our amazing students for a fabulous array of activities and performances. 

This project has been supported by the University of Oxford’s PCER Fund; the Philological Society; the TORCH Performance Research Hub (University of Oxford); the Faculty of Classics (University of Oxford); the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics (University of Oxford); the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford); Wolfson College, Oxford; the Institute of Classical Studies; the General Fund for Assyriology (University of Oxford); the Iris Project; and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.