Center for Contemporary and Digital Performance
Research Seminar Series
Brunel Universiity
Coproduction with danceTech TV
ALL 2010 series
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Site venue: School of Arts, Brunel University, West London
Time:
4 pm (GMT) 11:oo am EST
Wednesday October 13th
Fiona Templeton, Brunel University
Speaking for Performance
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Wednesday October 27th
Johannes Birringer, Brunel University
‘Dispositif: Performance Repositions’
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Wednesday November 3rd
Misha Myers, University College Falmouth
Is that a pistol in your pocket...?’: Corral Consciousness and the Performance of Enclosure and Concealment
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Wednesday November 10th
Mike Pearson, University of Plymouth
'Fighting in Built-Up Areas': staging The Persians with the British Army
Wednesday November 24th
Guillerme Mendonça, Brunel University
Title: TBA
Wednesday December 8th
Rachel Fensham, University of Surrey
Title: TBA
DESCRIPTIONS
Wednesday October 13th: Fiona Templeton, Brunel University
Speaking for Performance
I will introduce a method I use in the last few years to generate text
without writing, described in my article ‘Speaking for Performance’ in
Sensualities/Technologies, and used particularly in my work The Medead.
I’ll also talk about voice, not only physiologically and musically but
about the notion of voice in the sense of authorial position/ persona in
performance / inhabitation / ventriloquism. This relates to my current
work in progress, and also to another very brief article/note about the
work I directed last June by Leslie Scalapino. That article, entitled
'Acting Brackets' is about directing decisions about the non-lexical
aspects of the text to reflect Scalapino’s and my own interest in the
above notions.
Fiona Templeton is currently director of New York based The
Relationship, an international performance group, and was a founder of
The Theatre of Mistakes in the 70s. Her work ranges across theatre,
poetry and installation, and she has won awards and published 12 books
in several disciplines. Her You-The City (1988) was a pioneering work
in the genre of the site-specific performance journey. Recent
productions include the 6-part performance epic The Medead, and L’Ile, a
recreation of the dreams of the people of Lille in the places dreamt
of.
Wednesday October 27th Johannes Birringer, Brunel University
‘Dispositif: Performance Repositions’
In this speculative lecture, Birringer seeks to develop methodological
frameworks for grappling with the daunting challenges that underlie a
sociological or pragmatist/materialist analysis of contemporary
"interfacial installations." After introducing the notion of the
"performative dispositif" (extending studies of cinematic and
scenographic arrangements), questions will address the material
processes in installations and what it might mean to advance knowledge
or explore sensory perception. How do performer-participants assess or
value attributes or affordances of "technical beings," of programmed
responsive environments or hybrid media spaces which behave with and
towards the visitor-participant – as if becoming living, moving, animate
matter, changing their vitality and displaying a range of symptoms in
their materiality (motion, agency, autonomy, protocol behavior, and
ritual aspect, etc.). With this research, Birringer proposes to place
more attention on how a particular dispositif enables the interface
relations technically while observing how human performers respond to
responsive environments or experience its sensate articulations.
Johannes Birringer is a choreographer and media artist. As artistic director of the Houston-based AlienNation Co.(www.aliennationcompany.com),
he has created numerous dance-theatre works, video installations and
digital projects in collaboration with artists in Europe, the Americas,
China, Japan and Australia. His digital oratorio Corpo, Carne e Espírito
premiered in Brasil at the FIT Theatre Festival in 2008; the
interactive dancework Suna no Onna was featured at Laban Centre and
Watermans, London. The mixed reality installation UKIYO toured Eastern
Europe in June 2010. He is founder of Interaktionslabor Göttelborn in
Germany (http://interaktionslabor.de)
and director of DAP-Lab at Brunel University, West London, where he is a
Professor of Performance Technologies in the School of Arts. His new
book, Performance, Technology and Science, was released by PAJ
Publications in 2009.
Wednesday November 3 Misha Myers, University of Falmouth
Is that a pistol in your pocket...?’:
Corral Consciousness and the Performance of Enclosure and Concealment
This presentation stages a performative ‘fictocritical’ dialogue with
Jimmie Durham on the strategies employed in his work to intervene in the
rituals of concealment and erasure which founded and continue founding
the unique brand of empire made in the political and ideological
narratives of the US.
This dialogue engages with Durham’s performance/installation works,
writings on cowboys, and his curation of the American West (2005) at
Compton Verney, UK, and his work Building a Nation (2006) at Matt’s
Gallery, London, through the persona, performance texts, lyrics, stage
directions and images of my own performance practice, including Yodel
Rodeo and Lonesome Long Gone and the installation/outpost Buffalo Sue’s
Wild West (2004), which were commissioned and performed as part of
Spacex Gallery and Relational’s Homeland exhibition in Exeter, UK. As a
method of researching Durham’s strategies of interruption, I staged a
re-enactment of a moment of Building a Nation for a Performance
Re-enactment Society (PRS) photo shoot. It is a kind of research that I
do through the doing of a thing. This involved a process of finding out
what something was, is or what it can become through a dynamic and
discursive relationship with ‘second hand’ memories, photographs, and
other relics of a performance archive.
Originally, from Mississippi, Dr. Misha Myers is a live artist and
Senior Lecturer in Theatre at University College Falmouth-incorporating
Dartington College of Arts. She creates socially engaged, dialogic and
participatory events that invite participants to reflect on and
articulate their experience of particular places and landscapes through
various spatial practices and performance mechanisms involving walking,
singing, moving and writing. Documentation and digital artworks from her
walk works way from home and Take me to a place, co-created with
refugees and asylum seekers and refugee support organisations in cities
across the UK, are online at www.homingplace.org.
Her recent work has been shown at Spacex Gallery’s public art
exhibition ‘Homelands’, in the Millais Gallery’s ‘Art in the Age of
Terrorism’ exhibition, and as part of Art Surgery and Newlyn Art
Gallery’s ‘Tract’, a programme of site-specific and live art. She has
published articles on her work and that of others in various journals,
including Visual Studies, Performance Research Journal, Leonardo
Electronic Almanac, Performance Paradigm, The International Journal of
Arts and Society, Research in Drama Education and in the book Art in the
Age of Terrorism.
Wednesday November 10th Mike Pearson, University of Plymouth
'Fighting in Built-Up Areas': staging The Persians with the British Army
This seminar will reflect upon matters of archaeology, landscape and
site-specificity theory and practice in relation to the production of
Aeschylus's The Persians that Mike Pearson directed in August for the
newly-founded National Theatre Wales.
Mike Pearson studied archaeology in University College, Cardiff
(1968–71). He was a member of R.A.T. Theatre (1972–3) and an artistic
director of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (1973–80) and Brith Gof
(1981–97). He continues to make performance as a solo artist and in
collaboration with artist/designer Mike Brookes as Pearson/Brookes
(1997–present). In August 2010 he directed a site-specific production of
Aeschylus’s The Persians for National Theatre Wales on the military
training ranges in mid-Wales. He is co-author with Michael Shanks of
Theatre/Archaeology (2001) and author of In Comes I: Performance, Memory
and Landscape (2006) and Site-Specific Performance (2010). The
monograph: All that remains: an imperfect archaeology of the Mickery
Theatre, Amsterdam is forthcoming in 2010. He is currently Professor of
Performance Studies, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies,
Aberystwyth University.
Wednesday November 24th Guillerme Mendonça, Research Student Brunel University
Title: TBA
Wednesday December 8th Rachel Fensham, University of Surrey
Title: TBA
For more information please contact
Gretchen.schiller@brunel.ac.uk
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