Performance Network: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.
Interest in performance reflects a movement away from thinking in terms of immutable objects and singular subjects. It focuses attention on collective contexts. It also models a different way to mean: so performances, theatricality, theatre, and the arts in practice are relevant, too. But the group’s main focus is on the potential of the idea of performance as an umbrella approach to culture: a 'kind of thinking in its own right' (Cull/Minors 2012).
What does it mean to frame, stage, display or enact? In what sense might all forms of self-consciously public statements – art, politics, academic discourse – be seen as performance?
How is our post-print digital era, with its forces of equivalence and convergence, prompting reconsideration of traditional categories and boundaries – ie of the disciplinary itself?
How do we understand objects (fixed, a record) when they cannot exist separate from their experience on the part of somebody or other (time-bound, embodied)?
How do we understand the subject when it depends on imagined and actual collectivities to position itself?
Each session will be organized around two short but very different presentations, followed by a discussion. We hope that these discursive encounters might suggest some of the potential benefits of greater dialogue between disciplines, and between the academy and creative practice more generally.
Nancy Worman (Professor of Classics, Columbia University)
Karen Throsby (Associate Professor in Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds)
Marina Galetaki (Classics, University of Bristol)
Margaret Litvin (Associate Professor for Arabic and Comparative Literature, Boston University)
Karenjit Clare (Geography, University of Cambridge) Adriana Cobo (Architecture, Central Saint Martins) Tatjana Crossley (Design, Architectural Association) Mary Freedman (Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast) Natalie Morningstar (Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Maria Kahn (MML, University of Cambridge) Amena Amer (Social Psychology and Behavioural Studies, LSE)
Dr Rosie Wyles (Classical History and Literature, University of Kent) Matteo Augello (Centre for Fashion Curation, London College of Fashion) Ellen Robertson Martinez (Psychology, University of Cambridge)
The Medicalization of the Female Body: What Should Modern-Day Reproductive Technologies (not) Learn from Hippocrates and Aristotle?
Professor Emerita Helen King (Classical Studies, Open University) Dr Lucy van de Wiel (Reproductive Sociology Research Group, University of Cambridge) Dr Zeynep Gürtin (Lecturer in Women's Health, UCL) Dr Leah Astbury (Molina Fellow, History of Medicine, The Huntington Library)
Professor Victoria Vesna (Artist, Professor, Director of the Art|Sci Centre UCLA, and North American editor of the AI and Society Journal)
Victoria Vesna, presents excerpts of her work over 3 decades (20+ solo shows, 70+ group shows) followed by a Q & A and open discussion.
Victoria Vesna’s experimental creative research resides between disciplines. Through her participatory installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behaviour and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists. In speaking of a project with Nano Scientist Jim Gimzewski, 'Energy at the Edge of Art and Science', she says:
"Once an artist takes on the challenge of making the invisible visible, or the inaudible audible, he/she is almost immediately thrown into the realm of energy at the edge of art and science. The established art world based on visual culture finds it difficult to place this kind of work. The scientific community, used to working in this realm in a reductionist way, finds it hard to comprehend. Yet, the public seems to be drawn to artwork residing "in between," and there seems to be a universal need for a connection to the spiritual realm beyond what established religions offer." Victoria Vesna – Artist (2012)
http://victoriavesna.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n242FwID2s
CRASSH is not responsible for external websites
Masks, Face, Performance Identity in the Theatre of Surgery and Therapeutic Encounter
Professor Femi Oyebode (University of Birmingham) Dr Jan Parker (University of Cambridge) Emma Barnard (Artist)
At a time of a seemingly one-dimensional concept of 'performative identity', a psychiatrist and a medical artist will challenge the performance of self in the theatre of surgery and therapeutic encounter. Emma Barnard - exhibition ‘Primum non Nocere’:An Artist’s Perspective into the World of Medicine - explores patients’ and surgeons’ faces/masks/presentations, Psychiatrist Prof Oyebode discusses the clinician’s multi varied responses to the disjunction between face icon & emotional expression. Together with Dr Jan Parker, Senior Member of the Faculties of Classics and English, and Chair of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education Research, these three interlocutors creatively and critically explore the performances of self in and outside of theatre.
John Allen (Former Tutu aide, Communication Director of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Rabble-Rouser for Peace, 2006) in conversation with Louise Blythe (BBC).
South African journalist John Allen had a unique lifelong professional and personal relationship with ’the Arch’, and was intimately involved in some of the most dramatic events during the fall of apartheid in the 1980s, before being Communications Director for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Managing Editor of Africa’s largest news website, AllAfrica.com. Allen will discuss the aspects of Tutu’s character, attitudes and values - especially his early grasp of image-management politics - which helped him play such an effective role in the fall of apartheid in the 1980s. Tutu’s story asks what it means to publicly perform, and how media attention works as a political force - topical questions today. After excerpts of raw documentary footage from the 1980s, we will explore the thinking behind John’s authorised biography of Tutu, Rabble-Rouser for Peace (2006), and behind the screenplay based on the book, discussing medium, the media, and politics with the BBC’s Louise Blythe, who runs the training programmes which keep the BBC up to date with the skills to tell stories in the digital era - from social media to news to commissioners to platform-designers. Chaired by Clare Foster. Says Allen: 'Tutu understood the power of the press as an agent of change. He was always conscious of playing a part, whether in a pulpit, in vestments, in a Mao cap, or wearing a rich Republican green jersey in Ulster. He was "a stageprop", as he put it, helping draw attention to friends' causes’. At the same time, he understood race and identity as a public matter in which all of us are always participating, even in our most personal choices and private moments.
In collaboration with the Centre for the Future of Intelligence
Stephen Cave (Executive Director Leverhulme CFI) Hopes and Fears for AI: Four Dichotomies
Sarah Dillon (CFI) Displaying Gender
Kanta Dihal (CFI) Personhood
Beth Singler (CFI) AI and Film
Chair: Satinder Gill (CIPN)
Hopes and Fears for AI: Four Dichotomies
Rarely has a technology arrived more pre-loaded with associations than the intelligent machine. We categorise those associations into four dichotomies of hopes and fears:
Ease / Obsolescence Dominance / Subjugation Gratification / Alienation Immortality / Inhumanity Stephen Cave is Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow of Hughes Hall, at the University of Cambridge. Stephen earned a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge, then joined the British Foreign Office, where he spent a decade as a policy advisor and diplomat. His research interests currently focus on the nature, portrayal and governance of AI.
Displaying Gender
This paper will take a brief interdisciplinary and intersectorial look at the displaying and enacting of gender in artificial intelligence technology and the narratives surrounding. Films: Ex Machina, Conceiving Ada. Novels: M. John Harrison’s Empty Space.
Sarah Dillon is University Lecturer in Literature and Film in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She is author of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) and Deconstruction, Feminism, Film (2018). Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow at CFI, where she is co-Project Lead on the AI Narratives project, with the Royal Society. Sarah is a public advocate for the importance of the Arts and Humanities and broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.
Personhood
Personhood has been attributed to objects from cars to computers to the Berlin Wall; the latter has even been married. At the same time, some humans have been denied personhood. This talk will explore the issue of personhood in the age of artificial intelligence, with the two robot figures of Sophia and Pepper as key protagonists… or objects of investigation. TV series and films: Humans (UK)/Real Humans (Sweden); Ex Machina;
Kanta Dihal is the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AI Narratives project, and the Research Project Coordinator of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. In her research she explores the public understanding of AI as constructed by fictional and nonfictional narratives. She has recently submitted her DPhil thesis in science communication at the University of Oxford, titled ‘The Stories of Quantum Physics.
AI and Film
Dr Beth Singler will talk about the series of four short documentaries she is making on AI and robotics at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, with help from the CFI, Arm, and Little Dragon Films. She will show the first half of Pain in the Machine, the first in the series and the winner of the 2017 AHRC Best Research Film of the Year award. She will discuss how the dissemination of accounts of artificial intelligence can rely on dominant narratives and she will reflect on science, fiction, her films, and their role in public engagement. Pain in the Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODw5Eu6VbGc CRASSH is not responsible for external website
Beth Singler is the Research Associate on the “Human Identity in an age of Nearly-Human Machines” project at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, where she is exploring the social and religious implications of advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics. As an associate research fellow at the CFI she is collaborating on the Narratives of AI project, which is running in partnership with the Royal Society. Beth is an experienced social and digital anthropologist.
Satinder Gill is a Research Affiliate with the Music Faculty, based with the Centre for Music and Science. She is author of Tacit Engagement: Beyond Interaction (2015), editor of a forthcoming book on The Relational Interface: Where Art, Science, and Technology Meet (2018), and member of the Editorial Board of the AI & Society Journal since its establishment in 1987.
The Odissi Ensemble in Workshop
The Odissi Ensemble, an Indian classical dance troupe, to lead a practical workshop on the devotional, divine and human aspects of their dance practices. The ensemble work across dance, music and spoken word and their creations stem from a strong philosophical or humanitarian concept. Watch one of their latest performances at the Southbank Centre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa5-DZAddI0
CRASSH is not responsible for external websites
Odissi is a classical dance born in the temples of eastern India and found represented in carvings on the walls of caves and temples. The classical stage art we see today was formed by pioneering gurus of the mid-20th century who worked to revive the form as India gained its independence. The style is marked by its sculpturesque positions and the use of the torso to give a flowing, sensuous nature. Grounded positions lend an earthy quality to the dance, whilst detailed use of gesture and expression add emotional subtlety.
Dr Ankur Barua (Hindi Studies, Cambridge) Rvd Peterson Feital (King's College London) Rvd Andrew Hammond (King's College, Cambridge) Ms Rebecca Lees (Faculty of Classics, Cambridge) Dr Ayla Lepine (History of Art, Fellow of Essex) Professor Robin Osborne (Faculty of Classics, Cambridge)
Chaired by Dr Clare Foster (Writer and British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow (CRASSH))
Professor Leigh Payne (Department of Sociology, University of Oxford) Professor Paloma Aguilar (Department of Political Science, UNED)
Abstract
What happens when state perpetrators publicly confess to human rights violations in past dictatorships? The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission considered them crucial to delivering on the promise of truth and reconciliation. But Payne's study of perpetrators' confessions within and outside such commissions challenges that assumption. She finds that perpetrators' versions of the past, not always the truth, emerge. She further contends that conflict, and not reconciliation, is the outcome of these confessions. This conflict is not necessarily negative for democracy. She argues that "contentious coexistence" puts fundamental democratic values of participation, contestation, and expression in practice. She sets out this argument in her book Unsettling Accounts. In this presentation she will present a study she has begun on confessions made by left-wing forces involved in violence. Do these confessions have the same impact of contentious coexistence? She explores this in the Spanish context, drawing from her book with Paloma Aguilar on Revealing New Truths about Spain's Violent Past and adds a comparative--Latin American--dimension.
Leigh A Payne is professor of Sociology and Latin America at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. She received her PhD in Political Science at Yale University. She is the author of books, book chapters, and articles on legacies of authoritarianism, transitional justice, and human rights. Her current work continues to develop the topic of confessions by state perpetrators' of violence from her Unsettling Accounts book. She is extending that project to a book project on confessions from members of the armed left, tentatively titled Left Unsettled. Her new work also involves research on corporate complicity in human rights violations in authoritarian and armed conflict periods.
Michel Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh and the Performative and Material Body in the Documentary Fake Orgasm
Professor Ulrike Auga (Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University Berlin)
Chair: Rozelle Bosch (Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge)
A half-day workshop: 'Antigone's Revolt and the Performance of Protest': Staging radical disobedience, from Brecht to the 1960s and beyond.
Co-organised by Freddie Rokem (founding member, Performance Philosophy Network), Annalisa Sacchi (Principal Investigator, ERC-funded INCOMMON: Art and Politics in Italy 1959-79) and Clare Foster (British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, UCL).
Engagements with the Antigone across Europe and the US helped articulate a gradual revolt against the silence, repression and denial which followed the Second World War, re-emerging in the political crises and protests of 1968. How might this history illuminate the politics of protest more widely? And how does it continue to inform and influence us today?
Part of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN), series.
Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk
Speaker biographies
Freddie Rokem, Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University, is one of the founding members of the Performance Philosophy network and is co-editor of the associated Palgrave/Macmillan book series. His most recent book Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (Stanford UP, 2010; translated to Italian, Polish and German) focuses on the interactions between the discursive practices of philosophy and performance. He is also active as a dramaturg.
Annalisa Sacchi is the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded project “INCOMMON. In Praise of Community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979)”. She specialises in avant-garde theatre and performance art from Modernism, through Postmodernism to the present. Among her books are Il posto del re. Estetiche della regia teatrale nel modernismo e nel contemporaneo, Roma, Bulzoni, 2012; Itinera, trajectoires de la forme Tragedia Edogonidia, (with Enrico Pitozzi, Actes Sud, Arles, 2008); and Gli Shakespeare della Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, ETS, Pisa, 2014.
Dr Paul Connerton (University of Cambridge) Dr Mischa Twitchin (Queen Mary University of London)
Anthropologist Dr Paul Connerton and theatre researcher and practitioner Dr Mischa Twitchin will explore how politics, collective memory and performance intersect. To what extent is ‘making memory’ grounded in the theatrical? What can concepts in performance tell about the struggles over memory?
Paul Connerton is the author of How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1989), How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and The Spirit of Mourning (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His talk is taken from his upcoming book On the Nature of Relic.
Mischa Twitchin is a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at the Drama Dept., Queen Mary, University of London: http://www.sed.qmul.ac.uk/staff/twitchinm.html. His book The Theatre of Death: The Uncanny in Mimesis will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this summer. Besides his academic work, he also makes performances, examples of which can be seen on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/user13124826/videos.
Rachel Stroud (Music, University of Cambridge) in conversation with John Robb (Archaeology, University of Cambridge)
John Robb is Professor of European Prehistory at the University of Cambridge. He has received his PhD in anthropological archaeology from the University of Michigan and is director of the Material Culture laboratory at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on Archaeological and anthropological theory, European prehistory, Prehistoric art throughout Europe, and human skeletal analysis. He is author of a wide range of publications, including ‘Prehistoric Art in Europe: a Deep-Time Social History’ and ‘Beyond Agency’.
Rachel Stroud is a PhD candidate working on notation and performance in Beethoven's late string quartets, conceiving of the notation not as a codification of the composer's intentions, but as a social artefact. Other research interests include issues of sociality in ensemble playing, such as performing without a conductor. Rachel is also a professional baroque violinist and has performed all over the world in countries ranging from Latvia to Argentina, specialising in particular in the performance of early-nineteenth century repertoire on historical instruments.
Dave Beech (Valand Academy, Gothenburg, member of the art collective Freee, writer and Professor of Art) Revolting Places: Art’s Apparatus and Radical Social Transformation
Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh i(Temporary University Lecturer at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge)
Beech’s recent book Art and Value, published by Brill 2015, was shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize. His work has been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial and the Liverpool Biennial as well as BAK, Utrecht, Wysing Arts, Cambridge, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, the ICA, London, Centro Cultural, Montehermoso among others. He is a regularly contributor to Art Monthly, co-authored the book The Philistine Controversy, Verso (2002) with John Roberts, edited the MIT/Whitechapel book Beauty, and is a founding co-editor of Art and the Public Sphere journal.
Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh is a Temporary University Lecturer at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. Her research is on North Indian classical music, which she studies through a combination of ethnography and music analysis. She received her Ph.D. from SOAS, University of London (2013), for a dissertation on the semi-classical genre ṭhumrī. She is currently working on a project on expert listening and connoisseurship in North Indian classical music.
"At a typical North Indian classical concert, audience members can be remarkably active and noisy; music connoisseurs, or “rasikas”, are especially conspicuous, commenting out loud or gesturing whenever they hear something they like. Based on ethnography and interviews with musicians and music-lovers in Delhi, Mumbai and Pune, I explore what it means to listen in this context. I show how embodied listening practices are shaped by interrelated discourses about music, music history and about what it means to be a good listener; but I also show how they entail particular ways of experiencing musical sound, such that listeners orient themselves to certain features of the performance over others. Contributing an ethnographic study of North India to the diverse body of theoretical literature that has recently emerged on listening, my aim is to highlight the sociality of how people listen to music. I argue that ways of listening are weighted with meaning, value and ideology; that they are tied to issues of prestige, status and social class; and that they are a means through which individuals perform social identities".
Dr Joanna Melvin (Chelsea College of Arts, writer, curator and senior lecturer in Fine Art theory) in conversation with Dr Luke Skrebowski (Churchill College)
Jo Melvin is Reader in Archives and Special Collections at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL. Melvin has been investigating the interconnections between the archives of artists’, critics, museums, galleries and magazines from the 1960s to the present day since the early 90s. She recently curated the exhibition Christine Kozlov: Information at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (which is open until February 21st) and her work has recently appeared in the catalogue for Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art accompanying the current exhibition at the Stedlijk, Amsterdam. Melvin’s talk will be titled 'Artists conversations 1960s-70s: Inhabiting the archive and transgression re-performing networks', and she will talk about the milieu surrounding artist Christine Kozlov’s practice, strategies and tactics as a paradigm for archival performativity.
Luke Skrebowski is a Fellow in History of Art at Churchill College. His research and teaching focus on the history and theory of late modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on Conceptual art and its legacies. He is currently completing a book entitled The Politics of Anti-Aesthetics: Contesting Conceptual Art and is co-editor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, (Sternberg Press, 2011). His writing has appeared in journals including Art History, Grey Room, Manifesta Journal, Tate Papers, Third Text, as well as in numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogues.
Dr Satinder P. Gill (CMS, University of Cambridge) Michael Byrne (CMPCP, University of Cambridge)
Drawing from the fields of experimental psychology and dance, Dr Satinder P. Gill (CMS, University of Cambridge) and Michael Byrne (CMPCP, University of Cambridge) will interrogate some of the ways in which the body operates as a site of interactional sense-making, meaning and memory during performance.
Satinder Gill is a research affiliate of the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge, and the author of the recently published Tacit Engagement: Beyond Interaction (2015). Gill’s extensive work explores the processes that underlie knowledge transfer in human interaction, the function of rhythm in facilitating human communication, and the dynamics of technologically-mediated interaction.
Michael Byrne performs regularly within the narrative works of The Royal Ballet as an actor, and is currently completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge. Addressing themes of ageing and intergenerational creativity within Robert Helpmann’s 'lost' dance-dramas, Byrne’s research examines the ways in which the embodied histories of senior dancers can be reclaimed and enlivened on/off stage.
Victoria Miguel (Writer, Lecturer, Curator, and former assistant to the Director of the John Cage Trust) in conversation with Daniel Brine (Artistic Director and Chief Executive of The Cambridge Juction)
Miguel recounts: One day, over lunch John Cage and Willem de Kooning were discussing the nature of art. De Kooning made a rectangle with his fingers and said “If I put a frame around these breadcrumbs, that isn’t art.” Cage shook his head. This talk focuses on Cage’s ideas and works and considers how his conception of the frame and desire to blur the boundaries between art and life created new understandings of, and increasingly interactive relationships to, art.
Daniel Brine’s new motto for Cambridge Junction, relaunched as a regional centre for the creative and performing arts, is where ‘Art Meets Life’. Committed to integrating the arts and community, Brine was previously Artistic Director and CEO of Performance Space, Sydney Australia, an Associate Director of the UK’s Live Art Development Agency, a Visual Arts Officer for the Arts Council England, and has served on the boards of Blast Theory and Gob Squad UK.
Sanja Perovic (French, King’s College London) Stuart Brisley (Painter, Sculptor and Performance Artist, widely regarded as a key figure in British art)
Sanja Perovic in discussion with Stuart Brisley
Dr Perovic will give a specific account of her current and ongoing collaboration with the time-based performance art of Stuart Brisley: 'Dead History, Live Art: Encounters with Stuart Brisley’. This presentation will introduce the French Revolution calendar (the topic of Dr. Perovic's previous research) and then consider the implications of the calendar in Brisley's recent work to pose the question: what, if anything, can performance teach us about history and historical time?
Dr Sanja Perovic (The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Margaret Faultless (Cambridge University/Royal Academy of Music) in conversation with Margherita Laera (Drama and Theatre, University of Kent)
Can the score or text be re-conceived as a space that invites and activates social (inter)action, rather than a 'negative' category against which performance can be measured? How might networks of potential sociality be embedded in, and performed by, scores, texts, or scripts, themselves, whilst also leaving space for the creative agency of, and interaction, with social actors?
John Naughton (CRASSH) in conversation with Sheila Hayman (BAFTA award-winning filmmaker)
How might the concept of performance help us think through the implications, or itself be suggested by, a digital world?
John Naughton, a columnist for the Observer since 1987, is author of two well-known histories of the Internet: A Brief History of the Future (2000) and From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the Internet (2012). John’s seminal work explores the changes in our information ecosystem brought about by technological change (http://www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk/directory/johnnaughton). He is also a Senior Research Fellow at CRASSH (Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge,Technology, Democracy and the Digital Society and Director of the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy), Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, and was Vice-President of Wolfson College from 2011-2015.
Sheila Hayman spent a decade watching the future reframe itself as the digital world developed. Her documentary series, ‘A Short History of the Future’ traced the origins of our shared vision of a future shaped by technology (teleporters, videophones, self-driving cars, silver zoot suits, skyscraper buildings): ‘The Electronic Frontier’ showed how digital technology was already, in 1992, changing that shared future, as the solid certainties of the physical world dissolved into the virtual. She will show and discuss clips from these and other documentaries.
Special Event with Martin Puchner (Harvard University) (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~puchner/)
Martin Puchner, opens the CIPN’s third year of programming with a talk and discussion: 'Theater, Philosophy, Pedagogy’. After studying philosophy and subsequently comparative literature, Puchner has been working at the intersection of literature, theater, and philosophy for many years. He will briefly sketch how thinking about the relation between theater and philosophy became the basis for the new theater program which launches this year at Harvard, a university which had hitherto resisted such efforts. After a Q & A with the CIPN convenors the discussion will be open to the floor, and all are warmly invited to participate.
The First Annual Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network Free for All Symposium on the Concept of Performance
A graduate symposium about performance as an interdisciplinary concept, for all those in Cambridge interested in, working with, or curious about, ideas of performance, performativity, or practice as a way of thinking or angle of approach....
Graduate students (MAs and Phds) from all parts of the university and all departments and faculties, including music, history, sociology, divinity, english, politics, classics, philosophy, history of art, architecture, psychology, linguistics, modern and medieval languages or medicine (etc.) are invited to submit short papers, presentations, or other provocations, with complete freedom to choose whatever discursive frame they think best, providing their presentation is locatable within the Sidgwick site.
Addressed - in seven minutes or less - by Dr Ben Griffin (History), Dr Jennifer Wallace (English), Dr Les Joynes (Fine Art), Dr John Hopkins (Music) and Dr Lorna Collins (Film/Critical Theory). Followed by an intrapanel, then open discussion (chaired by Clare Foster).
The First Annual Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network Free for All Symposium on the Concept of Performance
A graduate symposium about performance as an interdisciplinary concept, for all those in Cambridge interested in, working with, or curious about, ideas of performance, performativity, or practice as a way of thinking or angle of approach....
Graduate students (MAs and Phds) from all parts of the university and all departments and faculties, including music, history, sociology, divinity, english, politics, classics, philosophy, history of art, architecture, psychology, linguistics, modern and medieval languages or medicine (etc.) are invited to submit short papers, presentations, or other provocations, with complete freedom to choose whatever discursive frame they think best, providing their presentation is locatable within the Sidgwick site.
The First Annual Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network Free for All Symposium on the Concept of Performance
A graduate symposium about performance as an interdisciplinary concept, for all those in Cambridge interested in, working with, or curious about, ideas of performance, performativity, or practice as a way of thinking or angle of approach....
Graduate students (MAs and Phds) from all parts of the university and all departments and faculties, including music, history, sociology, divinity, english, politics, classics, philosophy, history of art, architecture, psychology, linguistics, modern and medieval languages or medicine (etc.) are invited to submit short papers, presentations, or other provocations, with complete freedom to choose whatever discursive frame they think best, providing their presentation is locatable within the Sidgwick site.
The First Annual Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network Free for All Symposium on the Concept of Performance
A graduate symposium about performance as an interdisciplinary concept, for all those in Cambridge interested in, working with, or curious about, ideas of performance, performativity, or practice as a way of thinking or angle of approach....
Graduate students (MAs and Phds) from all parts of the university and all departments and faculties, including music, history, sociology, divinity, english, politics, classics, philosophy, history of art, architecture, psychology, linguistics, modern and medieval languages or medicine (etc.) are invited to submit short papers, presentations, or other provocations, with complete freedom to choose whatever discursive frame they think best, providing their presentation is locatable within the Sidgwick site.
The First Annual Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network Free for All Symposium on the Concept of Performance
A graduate symposium about performance as an interdisciplinary concept, for all those in Cambridge interested in, working with, or curious about, ideas of performance, performativity, or practice as a way of thinking or angle of approach....
Graduate students (MAs and Phds) from all parts of the university and all departments and faculties, including music, history, sociology, divinity, english, politics, classics, philosophy, history of art, architecture, psychology, linguistics, modern and medieval languages or medicine (etc.) are invited to submit short papers, presentations, or other provocations, with complete freedom to choose whatever discursive frame they think best, providing their presentation is locatable within the Sidgwick site.
How Art Performs Society: gifts, relations, and exchanges
Roger Sansi (Anthropology, Goldsmiths) in conversation with Dame Marilyn Strathern ( Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge)
Chaired by Jonas Tinius (Convenor, Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network)
Roger Sansi is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Senior Researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona. He has worked on Afro-brazilian Art (Fetishes and Monuments 2007, Berghahn), fetishism and sorcery (Sorcery in the Black Atlantic 2011, U. of Chicago Press), money (Economies of Relation: Money and Personalism in the Lusophone World, 2013, Tagus press) and more recently on contemporary art and politics in Spain. His recent monograph, Art, anthropology and the Gift ( Bloomsbury, 2014) has been described by George Marcus as "the most comprehensive assessment yet of the considerable history, present, and hoped for future relationship between ethnographic and artistic practices."
Marilyn Strathern DBE, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge, and former Mistress of Girton College, has recently been made Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists; she is an Honorary fellow of Trinity College. Her interests have been divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. She is probably most well known for The gender of the gift (1988), a critique of anthropological theories of society and gender relations applied to Melanesia, which she pairs with After nature (1992), a comment on the cultural revolution at home. Projects over the last twenty years are reflected in publications on reproductive technologies, and intellectual and cultural property rights, while ‘critique of good practice’ has been the umbrella under which she has written about audit, accountability and interdisciplinarity.
What do images do? Picturing Africa and Islam
Dr Massimilano Fusari (Centre for Media Studies, SOAS) Dr Branwyn Poleykett (Visual Plague, CRASSH)
Chairs: Dr Christos Lynteris (Principal Investigator, Visual Plague, CRASSH)
This seminar discusses the performativity of images: what can be pictured, represented, or done through images, and what cannot? Case studies will be drawn for the work of Massimilano Fusari and Branwyn Poleykett, followed by a chaired discussion by Christos Lynteris.
Massimiliano Fusari is a digital consultant, scholar and results-driven visual strategist with established education and experience on the Muslim World. As a multimedia journalist he worked from Morocco to China, bridging academia with the media industries to produce interactive online projects. Since 1994, Massimiliano has been focusing on the politics of representation of the Muslim world. In 2002, he launched his career as a photojournalist and multimedia consultant for private, public and third sector assets. After a series of funded collaborations with IOM and UNESCO, he pursued a PhD at the University of Exeter (2013), assessing, both in theory and practice, the passage from the ‘photograph’ to the ‘Meta-Image.’ In his 2014 AHRC Post-Doctoral fellowship at the University of Durham, he further developed the PhD findings using a research on the Cairo tentmakers to finalise the notion of ‘Post-Produced Cultures.’ The interactive multimedia project is available online on CairoTentmakers.com, and his latest exhibition will remain at the Brunei Gallery of London till June 20. He currently teaches at SOAS and the module, entitled Contemporary Visual Cultures of the Middle East, explores the nexus between theory and practice in today’s cultural and media industries, with a specific attention to multimedia storytelling and digital communication. Massimedia.com is his online laboratory. More information can be found on: http://www.linkedin.com/in/massimedia.
Branwyn Poleykett is a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC-funded 5-year project Visual Represtations of the Third Plague Pandemic, led by Dr Christos Lynteris. Her research focuses on the historical and anthropological study of science, public health, and medical research in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her PhD thesis examined the postcolonial history of the sanitary regulation of commercial sex work in Dakar, Senegal. Before joining CRASSH Branwyn worked with the Anthropologies of African Biosciences research group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her postdoctoral research project was based on fieldwork conducted in Tanzania and Uganda and examined the connections between the postcolonial Africanisation of scientific research and contemporary arrangements of transnational scientific capacity building. Taking the practical field course as an archive of scientific practice and global health in Africa, the project explored how different capacities in science are gained, distributed, experienced, and lived through time. As a researcher on the Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic project Branwyn will collect and analyse visual materials relating to plague in Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, Madagascar and Angola.
Christos Lynteris is researching plague photography on a regional and global scale as the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded 5-year project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic. His work investigates visual representations of outbreaks in China between 1855 and 1959, with a particular focus on the Hong Kong bubonic plague outbreak of 1894 and the Manchurian pneumonic plague outbreak in 1910-11. In comparing the two, his research focuses on the entanglement of visualisation strategies and biopolitical and geopolitical aspects of the epidemics. Of particular interest is the depiction of Chinese migrant workers (so-called "coolies") as carriers of disease, and the representation of "coolie" urban environment and housing as an imagined source of infection. On a global scale Dr Lynteris' research engages in a comparative analysis, focusing on regimes of visibility and invisibility of plague. The work focuses on the inter-constitution of epistemological and ethical questions and strategies pertaining to how the causes and effects of plague are made visual. Key to the study, is the exploration of the implications of this complex nexus of symbolic and performative practices on ways in which we today visualise epidemics such as Ebola and bird flu.
Professor Patrick Baert (Sociology, Cambridge) Dr Marcus Morgan (Sociology, Cambridge) Jonas Tinius (Socail Anthropology, Cambridge) Chair: Floris Schuiling (Music, Cambridge)
What is the relation between intellectual life and performance? What does it mean to speak about the performance or the performativity of intellectuals and experts? How does a concern for these ‘dramas of ideas’ intersect with the positioning of intellectuals in the public sphere? If we understand performance as a form of ‘enacting knowledge’, how does this shed new light on what we understand as knowledge-production and therefore intellectual life?
Patrick Baert is Professor of Social Theory at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selywn College. His more recent work lies at the intersection of social theory, the sociology of intellectuals and intellectual history. He has developed a new theoretical perspective for studying intellectuals, based on insights from positioning theory and cultural sociology. One of his case-studies centres round Sartre’s sudden celebrity status in the 1940s in France. The other case-study, developed with Marcus Morgan, deals with the introduction of structuralism (or what was labelled as structuralism) in the study of English at Cambridge. This year, two books will come out: The Existentialist Moment; Sartre’s Rise as a Public Intellectual (Polity 2015) and (co-authored with Marcus Morgan) Conflict in the Academy; A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals (Palgrave 2015).
Marcus Morgan is a Research Associate in the Sociology Department at Cambridge, working on the circulation of ideas within the postwar social sciences and humanities as part of a collaborative EC-funded project. He has recently co-authored Conflict in the Academy with Prof Patrick Baert, and is currently working on a book in defence of the role humanism within the social sciences. He is a Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.
Jonas Tinius is a PhD Candidate in the Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge and a fellow at the theatre collection, Institute for Media Culture and Theatre, University of Cologne. His fieldwork in Berlin and Germany’s postindustrial Ruhr valley addresses questions of creative labour, aesthetic traditions, and patronage in performing arts institutions. He is co-convenor of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) in Cambridge (with Dr Clare Foster) and of the Anthropologies of Art (A/A) Network (with Dr Alex Flynn). Forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan (May 2015): Anthropology, Theatre, and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance (with Alex Flynn).
Floris Schuiling was trained as a musicologist and philosopher at Utrecht University and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. His PhD investigates the repertoire of Amsterdam-based improvising collective ICP Orchestra as a source of creativity in improvised performance. Schuiling’s further research interests explore the use of diverse musical notations in different genres more widely, and what this means for common conceptions of language, orality and literacy in music as well as anthropological theory.
Dr Andrea Grant (Social Anthropology/African Studies, Cambridge) Dr Ananda Breed (Performing Arts Development, University of East London)
Chairs: Dr Timothy Jenkins (Anthropology and Religion, Cambridge) Ariana Phillips (Cultural Musicology, Cambridge)
This seminar discusses how truth and reconciliation have become tense and negotiated notions subject to legal, emotional, artistic, and popular performance in Rwanda and other contexts in Africa and beyond. Performance here is understood as an interdisciplinary concept that touches upon the performativity of legal acts, but also to peoples’ subjective positioning in society through the arts, political rhetoric, and popular expression.
Biographies
Ananda Breed is Reader in the School of Arts & Digital Industries at the University of East London. Breed is the author of Performing the Nation: Genocide, Justice, Reconciliation (Seagull Books, 2014) that analyses performances and performatives related to the gacaca courts in Rwanda, in addition to several publications that address transitional systems of governance and the arts. She has worked as a consultant for IREX and UNICEF in Kyrgyzstan on issues concerning conflict negotiation and conducted workshops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Indonesia, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Palestine, Rwanda and Turkey. Breed is co-director of the Centre for Performing Arts Development (CPAD) at the University of East London and former research fellow of the International Research Centre 'Interweaving Performance Cultures' (2013-2014) at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Andrea Grant is a Research Fellow in Social Anthropology and African Studies at Emmanuel College. Her research focuses on religion and popular culture in Rwanda.
Tim Jenkins is Reader in Anthropology and Religion in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and a Fellow of Jesus College. Recent publications include The Life of Property (2010) and Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists (2013), the one a study of land inheritance in south-west France, the other concerning the investigation of a flying saucer cult.
Ariana Phillips is a PhD student in cultural musicology at the University of Cambridge. Her current research examines how pieces of music mediate experiences of guilt, forgiveness, and redemption in the contemporary world.
Keynote:
Mike Pearson (Aberystwyth)
'No joke in petticoats’: interpreting the remains of early Antarctic expeditions
Performing African Laboratories
Wenzel Geissler (Oslo) - Tanzania Mariele Neudecker (Bath Spa) - Tanzania Guillaume Lachenal (Paris Diderot) - Cameroon John Manton (Cambridge) - Nigeria
Keynote:
Roger Kneebone (Imperial)
Backwards through the keyhole: re-enacting the surgical past
Dr Renaud Gagné (Classics, Cambridge) Professor Sir Patrick Bateson, emer., FRS (Ethology/Zoology, Cambridge).
Chair: Dr Anthony Pickles (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)
Dr Renaud Gagné recent Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy (2013) with Marianne Hopman, explored the simultaneous multiple referential potentials of the ancient Greek chorus. He will talk about some performative aspects of sympotic poetry ("The World in a Cup”: ekpomatics in and out of the symposium).
Professor Sir Patrick Bateson, emer., FRS. Author of Play, Playfulness, Creativity, and Innovation (2013, CUP), Prof. Bateson’s main interest has been in the development of collective behaviour. This has led him to analyse the impact of play on creativity and innovation.
Dr Anthony Pickles is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He conducted extensive research on card games, slot machines, betelnut markets, gambling events, and the character of calculation, money, and value in Papua New Guinea. His article 'Pocket Calculator' won the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute's writing prize.
To what extent can we compare rehearsal behaviours in the arts with those in our quotidian lives? What inclusions are performed by such framing, and recognition?
Rachel Davies (Filmmaker and Lecturer at Kingston University) Professor Tracy C. Davis (English/Theatre/Performance Studies, Northwestern University)
Chair: Clare Foster (Classics, Cambridge)
Rachel Davies trained in animation at the Royal College of Art before moving to working with choreography and performance in films and interdisciplinary works focussing on personal biography, collective memory, and the everyday. Her current project ‘They Tuck You Up (your Mum and Dad)’, involves film interactivity within a theatre setting, explores the performativity of family routines, aimed at an intergenerational audience.
Professor Tracy C. Davis is a specialist in performance theory, theatre historiography, and research methodology. Among other works, she is author of Theatricality (with Thomas Postlewait, CUP, 2004), The Performing Society (Palgrave, 2007), Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Defense (Duke, 2007), and The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (CUP, 2008). She is also editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Cambridge Studies in Theatre and Performance Theory and General Editor of the forthcoming six-volume Cultural History of Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Clare Foster is a writer and founding co-convenor of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network. She recently finished a PhD at Cambridge on the relationship between tradition and performance (‘A Very British Greek Play’). She teaches dramatic writing at Cambridge and is course director for UCL’s MA course Ancient Rome on Film.
How Do Groups – Both Hegemonic and Counter-Hegemonic - Imagine and Perform Themselves Politically? How is a Public Sphere already Implied by Artistic Activity?
Dr Anastasia Piliavsky (Social Anthropology, Cambridge/UCL) Dr Rafael Schacter (BA Postdoctoral Fellow)
Chair: Dr David Madden (Sociology/Cities Programme, LSE)
Dr Anastasia Piliavsky attempts to locate ‘the political’ as that which is outside the given legal and conventional frame of state-directed politics. Her work on corruption, petty crime and the informal economy in India has led her to form a concept of ‘actually existing politics’. She is editor of Patronage as Politics in South Asia (CUP, 2014) and currently involved in an ESRC-funded project on democratic cultures in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
Dr Rafael Schacter is an anthropologist, curator, and author who has undertaken research on graffiti and street-art for nearly a decade. He recently founded an arts production company and is author of The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti (Yale, 2013) and Ornament & Order: Graffiti, Street Art and the Parergon (Ashgate, 2014).
Dr David Madden is Assistant Professor in Sociology and teaches in the Cities Programme. He works on urban studies, political sociology and social theory. He has conducted qualitative, ethnographic and historical research in New York City, London and elsewhere, addressing topics including urban politics, gentrification, cultural development, public housing, public space, urban theory and planetary urbanisation. David has previously taught at Columbia University, New York University and Bard College. He holds a PhD from Columbia University and is a member of the editorial board of the journal CITY.
Praxis and Practice: Scientists as Artists and Artists as Scientists
Presentations from the Scientists and Artists’ Researchers’ Forum, and excerpts from a Science Festival performance. Professor Charlotte Tulinius (MD, PhD, MHPE, MRCGP, Associate professor of postgraduate medical education, Research Unit of General Practice, Copenhagen) Dr Paul McIntosh (Foundation for International Education, Research Fellow in Medical Education, QMUL) Olivia Winteringham (Kindle Theatre) Chair: Claire Summerfield (Independent Creative Producer)
*CRASSH is not responsible for the content of external websites
Charlotte Tulinius, a specialist in the education of GPs, has worked across disciplinary lines from medicine to ethnography, education, creativity and the arts, encompassing many different interdisciplinary and intercultural research projects. She is co-founder of the CRASSH-associated Science and Arts Researchers’ Forum, which explores how the arts and creativity can inspire data collection methods, and research communication methods. Paul McIntosh, who mixes careers in fine arts and healthcare, is currently developing arts-based research methodologies and teaching and learning strategies in medical education.
They will talk about the vision and strategy of their work in the Science and Arts Researchers Forum, and report back on their first ‘experimentarium’, about the definition of a ‘practitioner’.
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Olivia Winteringham, of Kindle Theatre, an Arts Council-funded associate company of The Birmingham Repertory Theatre,] was commissioned to explore the narratives and mythologies surrounding our definitions of illness. A Journey Round My Skull was created in collaboration with medical professionals working in anaesthetics and neuroscience. Inspired by the extraordinary medical memoir written by Hungarian satirist Frigyes Karinthy, it examines the complexity of the human brain via the perplexing world of auditory hallucinations, enveloping the audience in a fantastical sound-world to explore the role of the human brain in our perception of the world around us, and what happens when this astonishing organ is disrupted. Olivia Winteringham will offer a sneak preview of excerpts from the production, as well as discussing its genesis and the thinking behind it. www.kindletheatre.org.uk
‘A Journey Round My Skull’ will be performed at the Cambridge Junction as part of the Science Festival on Wednesday March 19th, at 9pm (http://www.junction.co.uk/).
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Claire Summerfield currently heads an Arts Council-funded regional initiative (‘Only the Lonely’) to explore how the creative industries and the sciences and technology sector can collaborate. She works with national and international touring companies and artists who use multiple forms of artistic expression to make work which often sits between boundaries of form. She has over 20 years’ experience of developing and presenting theatre, dance, cross-art form and collaborative projects ranging from one person shows to site-specific multi-disciplinary productions.
From Primitivism to Transnationalism: Dance as Ethnography in the 1913 Rite of Spring and in Pina Bausch's Cultural Olympiad
Dr Kate Elswit (University of Bristol) Dr Lucia Ruprecht (University of Cambridge) Chair: Daniel Siekhaus (University of Cambridge)
- CRASSH is not responsible for the content of external websites
Kate Elswit is an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies combines dance history, performance studies theory, German cultural studies, and experimental practice. After a PhD at Cambridge (2009) and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at Stanford University she is now Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She won the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars for her 2009 essay in TDR: The Drama Review, and the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research for her 2008 Modern Drama essay, and is an editor of Dance Theatre Journal. Her book Watching Weimar Dance is forthcoming (OUP, 2014) and she is at work on Movers, Shakers, and Circulators: Structures at Work. She will talk about Pina Bausch’s late style and the Cultural Olympiad. http://www.kateelswit.org/about
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Lucia Ruprecht’s current research project explores the concept of expression, and its relation to forms of authorship, in the literature, cinema and dance of German Expressionism. Her book Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (2006) won a Special Citation for the 2007 de la Torre Bueno Prize. She is co-editor of Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies (2003), Cultural Pleasure (2009), and New German Dance Studies (2012). She has completed a project on charisma and virtuosity which was carried out from 2005 to 2010 in collaboration with the research centre Kulturen des Performativen at the Free University Berlin. This resulted in a series of articles on virtuosity, especially in Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography, and the work of Robert Walser and W.G. Sebald. http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/german/staff/lr222/
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Daniel Siekhaus is a final-year PhD candidate in Management Studies at Judge Business School, Cambridge, and an Associate Researcher of the Institute for Capitalizing on Creativity at St Andrews, Scotland. His research project involved a one-year comparative ethnographic study of four European Opera Houses in London, Lyon, Munich, and St Petersburg. Trained as a choreographer at the Ernst Busch Academy of Drama in Berlin, Daniel has a keen interest in dance and recently choreographed the Marlowe Festival’s opening production, Dido Queen of Carthage. http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/icc/research/researchers/visitingscholars/ https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/research-mphils-phd/phd/phd- students-a-z/daniel-siekhaus/
Professor Simon Jones (University of Bristol) Floris Schuiling (PhD candidate, University of Cambridge) Chair: Dr Luke Skrebowski (Director of Studies and Fellow of Churchill College, Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Cambridge)
*CRASSH is not responsible for the content of external websites
Floris Schuiling is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Nicholas Cook. He studied musicology and philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His academic interests are performance, improvisation and textuality, philosophical pragmatism and new materialism. He will speak about the Amsterdam-based musical improvising collective, the Instant Composers Pool, founded in 1967 and still performing. With roots in jazz, political activism and performance art (especially Fluxus), not only do they define free improvisation as 'instant composition', but they use various forms of composition and notation to create different kinds of improvisatory opportunities, blurring the distinction between improvisation and composition. They suggest a view of ‘texts’ of all kinds in the arts and humanities, as not fixed authorities, but fluid, animated and animating objects.
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Prof Simon Jones Modelling Failure: Performance's Return to its Archives
Using the three-year AHRC-funded project Performing Documents, hosted by the University of Bristol, Prof Simon Jones will explore the relationship that performance- and theatre-makers have to their archives. Figuring this relationship as essentially technological and predicated on failure and incompleteness, he will go on to discuss how performance’s relation to technology in general accounts for its persistence in this digital age.
Simon Jones, Professor of Performance, University of Bristol, is a writer and scholar, founder and co-director of Bodies in Flight, which has to date produced 17 works and numerous documents of performance that have at their heart the encounter between flesh and text, where words move and flesh utters, most recently a chapter on their performance-walk Dream-work in Archaeologies of Presence (2012) and Performance and the Global City (2013). He has been visiting scholar at Amsterdam University (2001), a visiting artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002) and Banff Arts Centre (2008). He has published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Entropy Magazine, Liveartmagazine, Shattered Anatomies, The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Performance Research: on Beckett, co-edited Practice as Research in Performance and Screen (2009) and his work with Bodies in Flight features in Josephine Machon’s (Syn)aesthetics? Towards a Definition of Visceral Performance (2009). He is currently leading two major projects into the accessibility, preservation and creative re-use of live art archives – Into the Future and Performing Documents. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/performing-documents/
Recent publications include chapters in Hopkins and Solga (eds) Performance and the Global City (2013); Chatzichristodoulou and Zerihan (eds) Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance (2012) and Nick Kaye (ed) Archaeologies of Presence (2012). http://www.bristol.ac.uk/school-of-arts/people/simon-p-jones/index.html
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Luke Skrebowski is University Lecturer in the History of Art at Cambridge. He is is currently at work on a book entitled The Politics of Anti-Aesthetics: Contesting Conceptual Art and is co-editor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). His writing has appeared in journals including Art History, Grey Room, Manifesta Journal, Tate Papers, Third Text. Luke teaches and researches on the history and theory of late modern and contemporary art in its British, European and American contexts, with research interests in conceptual art, critical theory, and photography. http://www.hoart.cam.ac.uk/people/lacs2@cam.ac.uk
Dr Nicholas Ridout (Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies, Queen Mary University of London)
Professor Steven Connor (Grace 2 Professor of English, University of Cambridge)
Chair: Dr Zoë Svendsen (Director, Dramaturg and Lecturer in Drama, University of Cambridge)
Ridout, thinking about performance as a way of thinking about work, and inspired by a 1711 article in The Spectator (‘The Trunkmaker’, 235) will share some thoughts about slavery and spectatorship. He is the author of Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Theatre & Ethics (Palgrave 2009), and co-editor, with Joe Kelleher, of Contemporary Theatres in Europe (Routledge, 2006) and co-author, with Joe Kelleher and members of the company, of The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (Routledge, 2007).
Professor Connor is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who has published books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce and postmodernism, as well as on topics such as ventriloquism, skin, flies, and air. His most recent books are Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (2011) and A Philosophy of Sport (2011). His website at www.stevenconnor.com includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished work and work in progress.
As a dramaturg Zoë has most recently worked with Joe Hill-Gibbons on Edward II at the National Theatre, and The Changeling at the Young Vic (Maria: revived in main house, 2012) as well as with Polly Findlay on Arden of Faversham (RSC - forthcoming). Directing projects with her company METIS, include 3rd Ring Out (UK tour; TippingPoint Award) and World Factory (NT Studio; New Wolsey Theatre; Cambridge Junction). She is also a research fellow at Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Theatre.www.metisarts.co.uk
Objections to Objects: Locating “the work” in Live Art and Music
Clare Foster (University of Cambridge)
Professor Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (Professor of Music, King’s College London)
Chair: Professor John Rink (Professor of Musical Performance Studies, University of Cambridge)
Prof Leech-Wilkinson. By asking the question who needs musical works, Leech-Wilkinson uncovers some of the political and commercial pressures which have led to classical music being narrowly taught, practised and understood. Leech-Wilkinson studied at the Royal College of Music, King's College London and Clare College, Cambridge, becoming first a medievalist and then, since c. 2000, specialising in the implications of early recordings for the study of music. His current work deals with the restrictive nature of beliefs about musical history and ethics on musicians' interpretative options. See The Changing Sound of Music, and 'Compositions, Scores, Performances, Meanings' (Music Theory Online), both freely available online. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/music/people/acad/leechwilkinson/index.aspx
Professor Rink directs the £2.1 million AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which is based at the University of Cambridge in partnership with King’s College London, the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London, and in association with the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.