The Politics of Framing and Staging

Twitter Hashtag: #framing2014

Conveners

Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge) Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge) Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge) Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

Summary

This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.

Questions addressed will include:

How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically? Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa? In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible? How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique? How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames? How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’? How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?

In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.

Keynote speaker: Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.

Featuring: Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford), Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale); The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame); Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; METIS/World Factory; Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art; New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton); performance architect Helen Stratford; Associate director of the Young Vic Nathalie Abrahami; Eirini Kartsaki; Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL, Rachel Beckles Willson (Royal Holloway, Music) and others....

Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.

Supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) and the Judith E. Wilson Fund; in collaboration with Cambridge Junction and Hunt & Darton Cafe.