Brunel Seminars 010: Misha Myers, Is that a pistol in your pocket...?’: Corral Consciousness and the Performance of Enclosure and Concealment"

Wednesday November 3, 2010 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. The Centre broadcasts selected Performance Research Seminars live from the Brunel Drama Studio - making them available to anyone in the world interested in the subject. Johannes Birringer and Marlon Barrios Solano are co-producing the talks and discussions as live webcasts webcast live on dance tech net TV . The partnership between the Centre and dance-techTV, is an experiment in collaborative video broadcasting (the channel is dedicated to interdisciplinary explorations of the performance of movement. The channel allows worldwide 24/7 linear broadcasting of selected programs, LIVE streaming and Video On-demand).

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Brunel Seminars 010: Misha Myers, Is that a pistol in your pocket...?’: Corral Consciousness and the Performance of Enclosure and Concealment"

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