Friday 16 June 2006

 

Conference

8–9am

Food and Performance Working Group Breakfast
Octagon

9–10.30am

Plenary
The Great Hall, The People's Palace

Key Note speech by Luiz Eduardo Soares, former National Secretary of Public Security, Brazil
Favor, Comenta Se For Algum Problema!: Invisibility, Violence and Art in the Process of Re-building Self
Chair: Paul Heritage
Luiz Eduardo Soares will talk about his experience as policy maker and politician in the State of Rio de Janeiro and as part of President Lula's federal government.

10.30–11am

Coffee break

11am–1pm

Morning panels

1–2pm

Lunch break

Sub-Committee Meetings:
Artists’ Committee
Emerging Scholars’ Committee
Undergraduate Performance Studies Committee
Graduate Students’ Committee
Conference Committee

The Arts Building
Room listings posted in The Arts Building Lobby

2–4pm

Afternoon panels

4–4.30pm

Coffee break

4.30–6.30pm

Late afternoon panels

6.30–7.30pm

Dinner

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Panels

Morning panels

11am–1pm

Body Matters
BMS 323
Chair: Joe Kelleher

  • Namita Chakravarty and John Preston (University of East London)
    Posturing on the Street is the New Theatre: Teens, Queers and Transgressive Performance in 'Uncontrolled' Public Space
  • Bridget Escolme (Queen Mary, University of London)
    Analogous Bloodshed: Shakespeare's Monumental Body on the Contemporary Stage
  • Ehren Fordyce (Stanford University)
    The King's Two Bodies and the Rhetoric of Corporate Rights

These three papers all consider how and why the body - as material fact, ideological construct and theatrical figure - might be the ground of rights or the site of their denial.

Memory Rites: A Roundtable
PP2
Chair: Catherine Cole

  • Laurie Beth Clark (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
  • Sandra Richards (Northwestern University)
  • Rebecca Schneider (Brown University) 

A roundtable discussion on the convergence of expressive cultures with legal of juridical cultures through memory acts.

Site Specificity and Activism II
PHY 602
Chair: Dee Heddon

  • Katherine Chavez (Brown University)
    Title to be confirmed
  • Anja Kanngieser (University of Melbourne)
    'Revolution is not "showing" life to other people, rather it is making them live.' An analysis of, and some propositions towards, an everyday radical aesthetic
  • Merav Yersushalmy (Essex University)
    Engaged Criticism: Critical Strategies of Participatory Practices

This is the second of two panels to explore questions of political activism, performance and site specificity. The first panel is on Thursday morning at 11am.

Identity Rights and Practices
PHY 609
Chair: Tom Maguire

  • John Fletcher (Louisiana State University)
    ...But Not Too Equal: Democratic Ideals, Hegemonic Realities, and Activist Productions
  • Eser Selen (New York University)
    The Work of Sacrifice: What is the Role of Women Here?
  • Ken Prestininzi (Brown University)
    The Impossibility of Sexuality: Performing Defiance and Intimacies of the Soul

Three papers that consider the performance of gender identity and/or sexuality and how cultural performance either challenges or succumbs to dominant social constructions of the gendered or sexual person.

Non-Violence
BMS 318
Chair: Jose Muñoz

  • Sruti Bala (University of Mainz)
    Khudai Khidmatgar: Fighters in a Non-violent Army
  • Beverly Redman (Ursinus College, Pennsylvania)
    Advocates of Armed Struggle or Just a Lot of Rhetoric?: The San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Anti-War Movement
  • Karen Krahulik (Brown University)
    A Peacekeeping Parody: Norwegian Troops as 'Beach Boys' in Kosovo

This panel considers practices of non-violence in contexts determined by war and its rhetorics.

Presence and Resistance
BMS 319
Chair: Sarah Gorman

  • Daphne Lei (University of California, Irvine)
    From Two Bullets to Funeral March: Performative Protests after the 2004 Taiwan Election
  • Elise Morrison (Brown University)
    Staging the Streets: Mutable Space in Military State
  • John Andreasen (Aarhus University)
    CAT - a Popular Theatre Project in Bangladesh
  • Brandi Catanese (University of California, Berkley)
    Freedom Summer Part 2?: The Politics and Performance of Contrition

This panel brings together analyses of political situations in four distinct contexts, each of which invites a consideration of the potential of theatre or performance to engage transformatively or productively in the political sphere.

Embodied Rights: Performance in/as Law in the Americas
BMS 326
Chair: Margaret Werry

  • Jill Lane (Yale University)
    Agency and Memory in Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Process
  • Fernando Rosenberg (Yale University)
    Rights, Appropriation and Practising the Human in Latin American
  • Karen Shimakawa (New York University)
    Adjudicating the US American Body

The panellists consider how the law implicitly relies on racialised conceptions of bodies and actions, and how performance practices can engage justice through the enactment of claims that have been made otherwise invisible or inadmissible in the context of 'official justice'.

The Right to Be a Victim
Arts Lecture Theatre
Chair: Peter Falkenberg

  • Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University)
    The Tyranny of Likeability
  • Jessica Chalmers (Notre Dame University)
    The Silent Treatment
  • Jon Erickson (Ohio State University)
    Sympathy for the Long Distance Sufferer: The Political Use of Victims
  • Sharon Mazer (University of Canterbury)
    Ain't I a Woman?: A Truth, or Two, about Women, Men and Gender Performance in Today's Academy

The universalisation of human rights in recent years may be seen to have been superseded by a commodified idea of the victim - given a material value, displayed and marketed for the more privileged to acquire according to our desires. This panel presents diverse views on the effects of the globalisation of victims' rights, the emergence of a new right: to be a victim.

Taking Action: Rights in/to the Health and the Body
PP1

  • Charles Garoian (Penn State University)
  • Pam Patterson (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto)
  • Faith Wilding (School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Vermont College of the Union Institute and University)

A roundtable discussion which looks at the creative performance strategies engaged by three performance artists and activists with regard to issues surrounding access to health, the body, disease, and health care.

Displaying Rights: Spaces of/for Performance
BMS 320
Chair: Rodrigo Tisi

  • Rodrigo Tisi (New York University)
    Public Versus Private: New Public Spaces in Chile
  • Jarrod Beck (University of Texas at Austin)
    Untitled (Disorderly Conduct)
  • Omar Khan (State University of New York at Buffalo)
    Remote Space: Environments for Distributed Performance
  • Dorita Hannah (New York University)
    The Place of Crime: The Place of Pardon

A panel composed of architects working in the fields of performance, visual arts and design interested in dialogue between performance and the production of spaces within the collective domains of contemporary cities

'For art, for equity, for mortality': Enacting Dissident Rights
BMS 321
Chair: Meiling Cheng
Moderator: Moira Roth

  • Midori Yoshimoto (New Jersey City University)
    Interventional Performance Art in Japan circa 1964
  • Yong Soon Min (University of California, Irvine)
    Interface: Enacting Transnational Identities in Korea
  • Meiling Cheng (University of Southern California)
    Dialogues with Death in Live Art, China

The panel considers work by practitioners of performative actions in three Asian countries, work which exemplifies the possibility of creating an expansive existential/psychic/liberatory space with little but resolve and imagination.

Performing Ethnography/ Performing Human Rights: The Ethics and Interventions of Human Rights in the Black Diaspora
BMS 322
Chair: Helen Gilbert

  • D Soyini Madison (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
    Queens and Slaves in the Narratives of Human Rights in Ghana, West Africa
  • Renee Jacqueline Alexander (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
    Performing Race, Gender and Operation Just Cause in Portobelo, Panama
  • Olga Idriss Davis (Arizona State University)
    Performance, Human Rights and Survivors of the Tulsa Race Riots 1921

The panel examines the impact of race on human rights and social justice as it affects the black field researcher working in Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA.

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Afternoon panels

2–4pm

Israel and Palestine
BMS 318
Chair: Alan Read

  • Barbara Rose Haum (New York University)
    Internet2 Distributed Performances: Torn Spaces and the Unmasking of Territories
  • Horit Peled (Oranim College, Tel Aviv)
    Violinist at the Checkpoint: Performance and Human Rights Under Occupation
  • Rayelle Niemann (Researcher and Multimedia Artist)
    Palestine: Artistic Strategies Opposing Restrictive Rights of Movement: The 'Silent' Intifada.

Three presentations shedding critical light on meaning creation and space, and strategies for resistance and political struggle in occupied Palestine.

Sexual Violence
BMS 319
Chair: Fiona Wilkie

  • Asma Mundrawala (Sussex University)
    Fitting the Bill: Commissioned Theatre Projects on Human Rights in the Work of Karachi-based Theatre Group Tehrik e Niswan (Pakistan)
  • Kanika Batra (Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi)
    A People's Theatre from New Delhi, India in Alliance with the Women's Movement
  • Jennifer Griffiths (Marymount College of Fordham University)
    Between Women: Trauma, Witnessing and the Legacy of Interracial Rape in Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape.
  • Kathryn Leader (University of Sydney)
    Traumatic Performance: Sexual Assault, Women and the Courtroom

This panel looks at both representations of sexual violence and the efforts of activist theatre and performance practice to engage socially in defence of those at risk of such violence and in support of women's rights.

Performance, Pedagogy and Public Education
BMS 320
Chair: Gary Maciag

  • Ruth Hellier-Tinoco (University of Winchester)
    Acting out the Geneva Conventions
  • Larry Bogad (University of California, Davis)
    Title to be confirmed
  • Heather Barfield Cole (University of Texas at Austin)
    No Shame Theatre: Performance, Play, Possibilities, and Problems to Performance

This panel includes papers which consider activism as a form of public pedagogy, and which present accounts of performance as both a strategy for developing positive engagement with norms and rights and as a means of subverting and challenging norms that oppress.

Carnival and Violence
BMS 321
Chair: Andrew Quick

  • Joshua Abrams (Roehampton University)
    The Right to Bear Arms: Carnvial as Rehearsal for Revolution and the Performance of Lawlessness
  • Dara Culhane (Simon Fraser University)
    Mardi Gras: Celebration? Protest? Surrender? Power, Performance and Public Space in an Inner City Neighbourhood
  • Adrienne MacIain (University of California, Santa Barbara)
    Fighting for Their Right to Party? Performing Resistance at Halloween in Isla Vista and Mardi Gras 2006

In moments of crisis - either sudden or endemic - violence, resistance and lawlessness take on a peculiarly ambiguous status. This panel explores some of this ambiguity through the theme of carnival (the revolution that isn't but might be).

Gandhi, the Body, the Debt
Arts Lecture Theatre
Chair: Michael Peterson

  • Carol Becker (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
    Gandhi's Body and Further Representations of War and Peace

Followed by two dialogic responses:

First Response: Gandhi's Body

  • Lin Hixson (Goat Island and School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
  • Lucy Cash (Performer, writer, sound artist and film-maker, and associate member of Goat Island)

Second Response: Gandhi's Debt

  • Matthew Goulish (Goat Island and School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
  • Abhay Ghiara (DeVry University)

Feminisms Now
PP1
Chair: Jen Harvie

  • Gianna Bouchard (Anglia Ruskin University)
    Nip/Tuck
  • Sarah Gorman (Roehampton University)
    'Rising to the (Table) Occasion' or 'How to cope with Bobby Baker'
  • Erin Hurley (McGill University)
    Emotional Labour

This panel will explore feminist activities in theatre and performance now, taking the word 'now' in two ways: as an invitation to diagnosis and description of recent and current activities; and as an imperative call to action, now!

Contesting the Comfort: Sexual Services and Issues of Compensation in Contemporary Japan
PHY 602
Chair: Tavia Nyong'o

  • Yoshiko Shimada (Artist)
  • Gunhild Borggreen (University of Copenhagen)
    Photography and Performative Strategies in Works by Shimada Yoshiko
  • Tze-yue Gigi Hu (Nayang Technological University of Singapore)
    Preserving the Sites of Comfort and Persuading the State
  • Sharon Kinsella (Oxford University and Camberwell College of the Arts)
    Prostitute Schoolgirls as Reminders of Female Sexual Servitude

Four presentations combining artistic and academic approaches, which focus on issues of sexual services and questions of compensation on various levels.

Expressing Black Subjectivities: Mapping the Politics of Nation, Culture and Ethnic Identity in Afro-Diasporic Performance Practices
BMS 322
Chair: D. Soyini Madison

  • Renee Alexander (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
    "EL Dia de la Etnia Negra" The Politics of Twentieth Century Black Identity in Panama
  • Meida McNeal (Northwestern University)
    (Post)Freedom Fighters: Choreographing (Trans)National Visions of Afro-Trinidadian Subjectivity
  • Meccasia Zabriskie (Northwestern University)
    Just Dance! meanings and Interaction between Black Dancers at a Summer Workshop
  • Mshai Mwangola (Northwestern University)
    Testimonies of Exile: Performing Home in the Borderlands

The panel tracks Afro-disaporic performance practices across the national and cultural landscapes of Trinidad, Panama, Kenya and the US.

Performing Justice, Breaking Law
PHY 609
Chair: Matthew Kaiser

  • Matthew Kaiser (Harvard University)
    Nautical Melodrama and the Politics of Fair Play
  • Sara Warner (Cornell University)
    Habeas Corpus, Bodies of Evidence, and 'Tails' of Injustice: Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus
  • Ken Urban (Rutgers University)
    Honor, the Law and the Behzti Controversy

This panel takes as its topic theatrical performances that highlight the uncomfortable, indeed, the violent tension that has historically existed between law and justice.

Patriot Acts
PP2

  • Peter Glazer (University of California, Berkeley)
    "Pre-mature anti-fascists", progressive dissents and legacies of resistance
  • Tracy Davis (Northwestern University)
    Dismantling Civil Defence
  • Nina Billone (University of California, Berkley)
    'Let the Prisoners Pick the Fruits': Immigration, Globalization and the Performance of the New Penal State

A panel examining the public and private performances that are being promoted as patriotic acts within the US.

The Staging of Justice: the Performance of Justice in a Post-conflict Situation
BMS 326
Chair: Tom Maguire

  • Carole-Anne Upton (University of Ulster)
    Read My Lips: Text, Performance and Authenticity in Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Enquiry
  • Jonathan Harden (University of Ulster)
    Seeing Justice Be Done: Crumlin Road Courthouse, Convictions and the Sight-Specifics of Performing Juridical Space
  • Angela Hegarty (University of Ulster)
    Stone Verdicts: Public Inquiries and the Delivery of Justice in Northern Ireland
  • Yvette Hutchinson (Warwick University)
    African Oral Law and the Performance of Justice in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The panel concerns the relationship between performance and justice in post-conflict situations, the movement between its practice and public display, and its stage representation.

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Late afternoon panels

4.30–6.30pm

Queer as F**k or Living with the Enemy: Towards Not Reconciling the State With Queers, Trannies and Children
BMS 318
Chair: Helen Nicholson

  • Stephen Farrier (Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London)
  • Catherine McNamara (Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London)
  • Selina Busby (Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London)

The panel considers the tension around the relationship of the state in the UK and the individual in terms of state intervention in acts of intimacy and identity.

Prison Break: Performance, Fantasy and Identity in Women's Penitentiary Systems
PP2

  • Suzy Khimm (Artist)
  • Peggy Shaw (Artist)
  • Carol Jacobsen (University of Michigan)

Reflecting on their work with incarcerated women in Brazil, the US, and the UK, the presenting panellists will discuss how performance can contribute to the (re)construction and recuperation of a prisoner's identity, both within and beyond the institution.

Language, Space and Time
BMS 319
Chair: Adrian Kear

  • David Grant (Queen's University, Belfast)
    Image and Orality: Freeing Performance from the Bond of Literacy
  • Hanne-Louise Johannesen (University of Copenhagen)
    The Right to Observe!
    Performance Space and the Sticky Sublime
  • Philip Stanier (University of Leeds)
    In Duration: Time and the Obligations of Performance

This panel focuses on questions of spectatorship and perception in theatre, performance and installation.

Figuring Hurt
BMS 320
Chair: Gianna Bouchard

  • Lynne Fanthome (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
    Figuring Injury: Speaking of David Morley, Looking at Matthew Shepard
  • Mary Richards (Brunel University)
    Sewing and Sealing - Speaking Silence
  • Rachel Zerihan (Nottingham Trent University)
    From 'Working out of fear to working more now out of strength': Catharsis in the Work of Karen Finley

Pain - remembered, inflicted, represented - has been a central concern of performance, which has developed its capacity to move beyond language into the places which pain inhabits. These papers consider how performance might 'figure' such experience and what politics and subjectivity might emerge from such 'figuring'.

Activism
BMS 321
Chair: Patricia Ybarra

  • Catherine Duffly (University of California, Berkeley)
    Revolting Bodies: Performing Abjection in a time of war
  • Richard Talbot (Artist, Triangle)
    Chico Talks
  • Diego Benegas (New York University)
    Escraches: Human Rights and Street Action in Post Dictatorship Argentina
  • The Vacuum Cleaner (Artist and activist)
    Manufacturing Dissent: Touches of Freedom, the Empire's New Clothes and Stealing with the Mainstream

This panel considers four examples of activist performance.

Transgression, Violence and Performance
BMS 322
Chair: Dominic Johnson

  • Peter Emeka Aniago (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
    Performance of Culture and Culture of Performance: Focus on Vicious Performances and Enactments of Pain and Aggression
  • Stephen Di Benedetto (University of Miami)
    The Cutting Edge: Transgression, Performance and Human Experience
  • Kélina Gotman (Columbia University)
    On Disobedience: Disobey, you motherf****r/The Yes Men, NSK, A Kojève & Co

Performance's capacity to transgress the boundaries of what an audience might consider acceptable, watchable and experienceable has been at the heart of many radical artistic projects. This panel brings together papers that consider such transgression in performance from diverse perspectives - cultural, aesthetic and philosophical.

Being, Event, Context: On the Limits of Action
BMS 323
Chair: Adrian Heathfield

  • Branislav Javovljevic (University of Minnesota)
    Dom Factotum's Dream of Electric Whips?
  • Hannah Higgins (University of Illinois, Chicago)
    Fluxus Event
  • Jenn Joy (New York University and Rhode Island School of Design)
    Witnessing Politics: Choreographies of Juliette Mapp and Julie Toronto

Can an actor ever fully organise and deploy her relation to an event? When does action constitute response? This panel engages different notions of the event in relation to action, which is always already political.

Performance Ecologies and Biotic Rights
Arts Lecture Theatre
Chair: Martin Welton

  • Baz Kershaw (University of Bristol)
  • Stephen Bottoms (University of Leeds)
  • Matthew Goulish (Goat Island, School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

The panel will consider several sightings/site-ings of humanism's ghost through an exploration of the 'performance ecologies' recently begun to be theorised and practised, in which performances are understood as literally sharing the characteristics of ecological systems.

Producing Public Spaces for Creative and Critical Dialogue: Performance as a Site for Postcolonial and Gender Critique in Japan
PHY 602

  • Yasuko Ikeuchi (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto)
  • Rebecca Jennison (Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto)
  • Lee Chong-hwa (Seikei University Tokyo)
  • Alicia Kitamura Arata (Director, performance artist)

The panel considers a number of performance and visual arts projects and their impact on human-rights advocacy in contemporary Japan.

Solo Performance
BMS 321
Chair: Jennifer Parker-Starbuck

  • Judy Bauerlein (University of California, Santa Barbara)
    Feminist Solo Performance: The Voice of Many Spoken by One
  • Jeff McMahon (Arizona State University)
    On the Ghoul Patrol: Delving into Disasters and Tragedies through Live Performance
  • Dee Heddon (University of Glasgow)
    The Ethics of Autobiographical Performance

This panel looks at solo and auto/biographical performance as an ethical and political practice.

Irishness in Global Performance
BMS 326
Chair: Ramon Rivera-Servera

  • Aoife Monks (Birkbeck College, University of London)
    Everyone Can be Irish for the Day: Performing Irish in the St Patrick's Day Parade and Riverdance
  • Matthew Causey (Trinity College, Dublin)
    Bio-Politics of Irish Identity: Performing Irish Violence on the New Immigrant
  • Sara Brady (New York University)
    'Irish Enough': Sport, Performance and Authenticity at New York's Gaelic Park

This panel examines the relationship between Irishness, human rights and the global in performance.

Journal Editors Panel
PP1
Chair: Jenn Joy

4–5.30pm - PSi12 Journal Panel with reception to follow.
A conversation among journal editors about editorial views, content, the submission process, and the role of the academic journal in the artistic and academic community. The panel will address issues confronting academic journals and invite writers and artists to ask questions and speak with editors. A reception celebrating TDR's 50th anniversary issue will follow.

  • Richard Schechner (Editor, TDR)
  • Mariellen R. Sandford (Associate Editor, TDR)
  • Ric Allsop (Editor, Performance Research)
  • Aldo Milhonic (Editor, Maska)
  • Martin Hargreaves (Editor, Dance Theatre Journal)
  • Maria Delgado (Editor, Contemporary Theatre Review)
  • David Saltz (Co-editor, Theatre Journal)
  • Marvin Carlson (Editor, Western European Stages)
  • Joshua Chambers-Letson and Jeanne Vaccaro (Editorial Board Collective, Women and Performance)
  • Marcela Fuentes (Managing Editor, e-misferica)

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