Cultivating Research – spring
2014
Thursday 20th February,
5.15pm – Martin Harris Centre SL01
Professor Helen Nicholson (Royal
Holloway, University of London)
Participation: Commodity or Community?
This paper will open
questions about the politics of participation. Historically, debates in applied
theatre tended to make sharp distinctions between active participation and
passive consumption - with assumptions that see participation as necessarily
emancipatory or morally virtuous. This view seems outdated in a context in which
many different forms of theatre invite participation, where museums have become
participatory theme parks, and when shopping is regarded as integral to an
experience economy. Affect sells, and participation has been commodified. So
what’s left?
The first part of the
talk will open some of these assumptions about the political porousness of
participation for critical scrutiny, asking how participation in theatre shifted
from a utopian ideal of communitarian equality to a valuable commodity.
Thereafter, a forum-style discussion will consider examples of practice that
challenge, test or affirm the perception that participatory performance (in its
broadest sense) is being reshaped and reconceptualised in the 21st
century.
Thursday 20th March, 5.15pm
– Martin Harris Centre SL01
Professor Maggie Gale and Dr. Jenny
Hughes (University of Manchester)
In the Beginning was the
Grant…
In this session,
Maggie and Jenny will each introduce and discuss their new research projects,
starting in 2014, that are funded respectively by Leverhulme and AHRC grants
(brief info below). The discussion will also open up to consider the challenges
and benefits of pursuing extended grant awards.
A Social History of
British Performance Cultures 1900 -1939: Law, Surveillance and the Body.
Maggie Gale’s new
project will develop research that critically interrogates early
twentieth-century British performance cultures. The research explores the ways
in which repeated motifs of estrangement, fear of the ‘other’, and
transformations in the experience of identity and citizenship, can be understood
through a social history of cultural production.
Poor theatres: a
critical examination of theatre, performance and economic
precarity. Jenny Hughes’s
project explores the relationship between theatre, performance and poverty by
interrogating their interstices at three distinct historical junctures (in the
1830s, 1980s, and the 2010s). The research develops a contribution to the
understanding of social welfare and resource management systems in times of
economic austerity and ecological uncertainty.
Wednesday 14th May – 5.00pm
Martin Harris Centre G16
Professor Simon Shaw-Miller
(University of Bristol)
The Art of Marcel Duchamp, Nam June
Paik and the Modernist Musical Paradigm
This is the first
guest lecture in a series curated specifically to bring together colleagues
across the Division comprising Music, Drama, Art History and
Visual Studies, within the larger of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures.
It considers two avant-garde figures of importance in all three fields.
“Marcel Duchamp has
already done everything there is to do – except video. He widened the entry but
narrowed the exit. That very narrow door is video art and only through video art
can we get ahead of Marcel Duchamp.” So said Nam June
Paik in 1974. This talk will pause on the notion of ‘video’ (sight) and link it
to ideas about music (sound), for it is with music that both Paik and Duchamp’s
aesthetic have foundational roots. The talk addresses key moments in the
formation of modernism and argues for the centrality of ideas about music as a
governing paradigm, moving from idea to object to action.
No comments:
Post a Comment