Saturday 17 June 2006

 

Conference

9–10.30am

Plenary
The Great Hall, The People's Palace

Members of the panel have been asked to kick off a plenary discussion session with short responses to the theme of the conference, focused around the linked questions 'What can performance do for human rights?' and 'What can human rights do for performance?' The session chair will also be inviting short contributions from the floor throughout the session, so everyone is welcome to prepare in advance their own one-minute responses, as well as to engage in debate triggered by the contributions of the panellists.
Chair: Jen Harvie
Panellist Provocateurs include:  Bobby Baker, Helen Freshwater, Lois Keidan, Jill Lane, Naeem Mohaiemen, Nicholas Ridout, Nayse Lopez, Jon McKenzie, Asma Mundrawala

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

Embodied Knowledge
PHY 602
Chair: Martin Welton

  • Marcela Fuentes (New York University)
    Crisis and Representation, Embodied Collective Action in Argentina
  • Khai Nguyen (University of California, Berkeley)
    'Living within the Butcher's Skin': New Images of the Human Being in Luu Quang Vu's Truong Ba's Soul in the Butcher's Skin and the Vietnamese Theater of the Renovation
  • Elisavet Pakis (Lancaster University)
    Performance as a Practice of Survival, Queer World-making, and Freedom
  • Heike Gaessler
    Human Rights: A Portrait of the Indonesian Artist Heri Don

Performance is a way of making and communicating knowledge between human bodies. The right to maintain cultural traditions and to explore the figure of the human by means of live performance is at stake in this panel. Can a discourse of rights provide adequate accounts of embodied knowledges?

Orality / Public Speech
BMS 318
Chair: Sophie Nield

  • Valentina Pagliai (Oberlin College)
    Art, Insult and Freedom of Expression in Italian Contrasto Verbal Duels
  • Nana Sato-Rossberg (Ritsumeikan University)
    The Space of Freedom in Performative Writing: the Translations of Aynu Chanted Myths by Chiri Mashiho
  • Hypatia Vourloumis (New York University)
    The Right to Language: Indonesian Nationalist Forces and the Politics of Discourse
  • Robert Garot (Bowling Green State University)
    'Where You From!': How Teenagers Do and Undo Gangs

How, where and what you speak are questions subject to constant social and political negotiation and struggle. This panel presents four very specific instances of how such questions are in play and how political rights are bound up with words uttered in public.

Quotations of Women
PP2
Chair: Barabara Formis
Respondent: Rebecca Schneider

  • Alice Chauchat (Artist)
    Implications of Conventional Representation
  • Barbara Formis (Sorbonne University in Paris (Paris I))
    Quoting Democracy
  • Géraldine Gourbe (University of Paris 10 Nanterre, University of Metz)
    Nostalgia or Revolutionary Melancholy? Looking at Performance in the 60s and 70s

The panel explores the extent to which performance and politics can be considered similar methods of representation, insofar as they both attempt to give visibility to multiple bodies and conflicting individual ideas. The investigation will focus on a point where political and aesthetic representations diverge: the representation of women.

SUB Culture: Duty of Care
BMS 319
Chair: Johannes Birringer

  • Johannes Birringer (Brunel University)
  • Oron Catts (University of Western Australia)
  • Sarah Jane Pell (Edith Cowan University)
  • Ionat Zurr (University of Western Australia)

The panel involves a discussion of 'duty of care' in bioarts/life science and performance research practices, supported by films that show excerpts from lab experiments with S J Pell submerged in a human-scale aqueous bioreactor connected to a satellite of semi-living aquanauts in self-contained mini biospheres.

Puppets and Human Rights
PHY 609

  • John Bell (Emerson College)
    Performing Human Rights During the War on Terror: Bread and Puppet Theater
  • Matthew Isaac Cohen (Royal Holloway, University of London)
    Tell a Lie and Find a Troth: Puppetry, Dissimulated Performance and Human Rights
  • Cariad Astles (University of Plymouth)
    Agit-Prop and Private Consumption: Catalan Puppet Theatre During the Spanish Civil War and Under Franco's Dictatorship
  • Penny Francis (Central School of Speech and Drama)
    The Evolution of a Language
  • Kate Brehm (Independent Scholar)
    Agency “Real” Puppets and Political Puppets

This panel examines the performance of power and resistance in the struggle for human rights in terms of the metaphor of 'the puppet' and the performance of actual puppets.

Rights, Race and Performance: Owning the Racialised Body
BMS 321
Chair: Karen Shimakawa

  • Tavia Nyong'o (New York University)
    Anatomy of Panic: American Mongrels in the Circum-Atlantic Theater
  • Juana Rodriguez (University of California, Davis)
    Is Adoption Always Already Queer?
  • José Muñoz (New York University)
    The Vulnerability Artist: The Minoritarian Body and Discourse on 'Injury'

A panel investigating the intersections of performance, legal/symbolic citizenship, and control of the racialised body.

Asylum, Performance and Human Rights in Australia
BMS 326
Chair: Paul Dwyer

  • Tom Burvill (Macquarie University)
  • David Williams (University of New South Wales)
  • Gay McAuley (University of Sydney)
  • Helen Gilbert (Royal Holloway, University of London)

A panel approaching the topic of performance in relation to asylum and human rights from different critical angles. Whilst the focus is on Australian examples, the ambition is to help build scaffolding for work with an international scope.

On 'Performing Rights' in Contemporary Japan
BMS 322

  • Peter Eckersall (University of Melbourne)
    Performing Rites: New Left Protest and the Shutaisei Effect in the Cultural Space of 1960s Japan
  • Mika Eglinton-Sato (University of Tokyo)
    'Japanese Shakespeare' after the Millennium - Performing 'Rightly'?

The panel presents interdisciplinary research from historical and contemporary fields of cultural production in Japan.

Performing Citizenship in Latino/a America
BMS 323
Chair: Joshua Abrams

  • Patricia Ybarra (Brown University)
  • Judith Williams (University of Kansas)
    Performing Race, Rights and Black Realities in Rio de Janeiro: The Theatre of the Companhia do Comuns
  • Ramon Rivera-Servera (Arizona State University)

An exploration of how the articulation of rights in Latin/o America has often entailed performing citizenship in theatre and/or public spaces.

Bridging Investigations of Humanity: The Role of Performance in Creating Citizenship both Privately and Globally
PP1
Chair: Marvin Carlson (City University of New York)

  • Deb Margolin (Yale University)
    'To Speak is to Suffer' and Vice Versa
  • David Savran (City University of New York Graduate Center)
    Spectres of Sadism
  • Constance Zaytoun (City University of New York Graduate Center)
    Capturing the Ephemeral

This panel examines the role of performance as a vehicle for fostering new connections between disparate concepts of humanity and human rights. If we fail to consider the conditions creating human citizenship on a global scale, the interaction between performer and audience member may be constrained in its larger impact. Today we are witnessing myriad global events which devalue human rights and cause us to reflect on past atrocities. How can we as artists and scholars find the means to re-imagine a new connection between the humanizing effects of private performance and the dehumanizing effects of imperialist acts fuelled by capitalist globalisation?

Censorship
Arts Lecture Theatre
Chair: Helen Freshwater

  • Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv University)
    The Separation Wall as a Form of Censorship
  • Janelle Reinelt (University of California, Irvine)
  • Alan Read (King's College London)
    The Art of the Martyr: Gesture, Witness and Loss

This panel will explore different modes and forms of censorship in differing contexts.

Research Ethics Workshop
The Arts Building
Welcome: Richard Schoch
Convener: Paul Heritage

This is a session especially designed for research students and other postgraduates concerned with practical and ethical issues arising from research which involves the participation of others: other artists, participants in development or activist projects, subjects who become the 'objects' of research, etc
Sponsored by Queen Mary's Graduate School for the Humanities, Social Sciences and Laws, this is a practical workshop session, and will be followed by a lunch hosted by the Graduate School to launch the AHRC-funded National Performance Theory and Practice Doctoral Research Initiative.

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Afternoon panels

2–4pm

Performativity in the Global Rights Economy
Arts Lecture Theatre
Chair: Gavin Butt

  • Jon McKenzie (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
    Human Rights and Global Performativity
  • Yuichiro Takahashi (Dokkyo University)
    Performing/Counter-Performing Xenophobia: Undocumented Migrant Workers and the Politics of Visibility in Japan
  • Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York University)
    Visual Rights: Minority and the Contemporary

Three papers investigating the dynamics of the global flow of the human rights economy

Rights, Citizenship, Theatricality
PP2
Chair: Freddie Rokem

  • Marin Blazevic (Academy of Dramatic Arts, Zagreb)
    Violation of Performing Rights
  • P A Skantze (University of Glasgow)
    Mimetic Motion: Performance, Moving On and the Refugee
  • Praise Zenenga (University of Arizona)
    Community Theatre and the Struggle for Rights and Democracy in Post Independence Zimbabwe

This panel considers multiple ways in which theatre and theatrical thought participate in the construction, representation, contestation and allocation of rights, through engagements with political theory, instances of censorship and bans in Croatia, recent European performance and community theatre in Zimbabwe.

Performing Rights in the Postcolonial Arabo-Islamic Sphere
BMS 318

Chair: Janelle Reinelt

  • Khalid Amine (Abdelmalek Essadi University)
    Performing Gender on the Tremulous Moroccan Body: A Critique of Zoubeir ben Bouchta's Lalla J'mila
  • Laura Chakravarty Box (Colby College)
    The 9 Parts of Heather Raffo: Channelling America's New Wars Through the Arab-American Female Body
  • Joseph Shahadi (New York University)
    Materials of an Inciting Nature
  • Hazem M. Azmy (Beni Soueif University and American University in Cairo)
    When Negating the Other Becomes Law: Khaled El-Sawy's El L'eb fil Demagh and theLimits of Performance Activism in Post- 9/11 Egypt

The presentations and discussions on this panel will seek to explore the ways in which performance and other forms of symbolic cultural practices reflect, negotiate or intervene in this complex postcolonial Arabo-Islamic setup, particularly with the post-9/11 world changes tending to exacerbate this setup's already problematic condition.

Needs Must?: Performance, Biopower and the Staging of Ethics
PP1
Chair: Shannon Jackson

  • Adrian Kear (Roehampton University)
  • Helen Nicholson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  • Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (Roehampton University)
  • Dan Rebellato (Royal Holloway, University of London)

This panel brings into dialogue a range of competing and contesting viewpoints on the performative construction of human rights and attendant questions concerning the relationship between ontology and ethics. 

Panic Buttons: Performance, Crisis, Rights
PHY 609
Chair: Susie Lingham

  • Paul Rae (Artist, independent scholar)
  • Len Gen Bah (Artist and cognitive scientist)
  • Lee Weng Choy (Writer and artistic co-director The Substation, Singapore)
  • Kathy Rowland (Writer, activist, web publisher)
  • Chumpon Apisuk (Artist, activist)

Building on a PSi#12 affiliated event of the same title which took place in Kuala Lumpur in the week of 11 June this year, the panel will combine conceptual analysis with case studies from Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia to explore the relationship between performance and crisis.

Australian Ethics in an Era of (In)security
BMS 319
Chair: Philip Stanier

  • Peta Tait (La Trobe University)
    Dangerous Language in Public Spaces
  • Meredith Rogers (La Trobe University)
    A Raucous Sensorium: Transformational Performance in the Australian Context

The panel will examine how shifts in Australian political contexts have been reflected in aesthetic and public representations.

The Inhumanity of Dance: Choreographing Nation, Machines, Cruelty and Freedom
PHY 602

  • Katherine Mezur (Mills College)
    New Torture: Sweet, Soft and Cruel Choreography
  • Carrie Gaiser (University of California, Berkeley)
    That Dangerous Automaton (The Discursive Construction of the 'Human' in Objectivist Dance
  • Heather Crow (University of California, Berkeley)
    Gesturing Toward Olympia, or Whose Ghost is in my Machine?
  • Lane Harwell (University of California, Berkeley)
    'Who Cares' About Freedom?
  • Monica Stufft (University of California, Berkeley)
    Inhuman Humans: Chorus Girls and the Female Body En Masse
  • Heidi Gilpin (Amherst College)
    Building Bodies

This roundtable/panel addresses multiple issues surrounding the inhuman in various practices of dance and choreography in live performance, media, and on the 'national' stage. All the papers investigate the visceral/fleshy body in specific contexts where the 'rights' of the live or mediated body are at stake in some way.

Walk the Line: Ethics of Participation in Contemporary Performance
BMS 320
Chair: Carole-Anne Upton

  • Misha Myers (Director of the Homing Place Project, Dartington College of Arts)
  • Tracey Warr (Director of Arts and Cultural Management, Dartington College of Arts)
  • Avril Butler (Director of the Centre for Practice Learning, University of Plymouth)
  • James Thompson (Director of the In Place of War Project, University of Manchester)

This multi-disciplinary panel will offer provocations and questions for lively discussion and debate on the challenging and problematic issues of ethics in contemporary performance from the different perspectives of their own fields of practice.

Place and Belonging
BMS 321

  • Elizabeth Dempster (Victoria University)
    Welcome to Country: Performing Rights and the Pedagogy of Place
  • Ljubisa Matic (Stanford University)
    Hands-On Disenfranchisement
  • Suzana Milevska (Research Centre in Gender Studies, Skopje, Macedonia)
    Non-Schengen Art: the Phantasm of Belonging

This panel addresses issues of movement across borders, inclusion and displacement through considerations of art projects, interactive performance work and the uses of ceremony, in Europe and in Australia.

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Late afternoon panels

4.30–6.30pm

Performance Studies and Politics: Looking Ahead
PP1
Chair: Joe Kelleher

  • Richard Schechner (New York University)
  • Jen Harvie (Queen Mary, University of London)
  • Lee Weng Choy (Writer and artistic co-director, The Substation, Singapore)
  • Louise Owen (Queen Mary University of London)
  • Yuichiro Takahashi (Dokkoyo University, tbc)
  • Elin Diamond (Rutgers University, tbc)

A roundtable discussion reflecting on how Performance Studies might think its relationship with politics. Panellists will consider the potential for intervention and analysis and the possible limits to activist scholarship.

Camp Sincerity
Arts Lecture Theatre

  • Gavin Butt (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
    'Be Honest Mother Fucker, Stop That Acting!': Queer Emotion and Compulsory Authenticity
  • Julia Bryan-Wilson (Rhode Island School of Design)
    Yours Truly: Performance and the Politics of Direct Address
  • Dominic Johnson (Courtauld Insititute of Art)
    The Wound Kept Open: Camp Pleasure and Cultural Failure
  • Ann Pellegrini (New York University)
    Never Enough Already: Future Notes on Camp

Asking how camp and its close relatives parody, theatricality and humour act in the contemporary world, this panel seeks productively, and flirtatiously, to recast our relations to the 'true', the 'authentic' and the 'politically correct'.

Community Performance Working Group
BMS 318
Chair: Sonja Kuftinec

  • Community Performance: Practices, Challenges, Opportunities: An Open Forum

This is the second session of the Community Performance Working Group, and participants are invited to join the group for an open forum session.

Performance and Nature Working Group
Meeting Point: Registration Desk

The workshop 'Performance and Nature' will meet twice during the conference in Mile End Park, which was created for the Millennium festivities in 2000. We will discuss and experience the ideas of sustainability and also the 'native and invasive' quality of plants, nature, culture and people connected to the park and its influence on the visitors of Mile End Park. We plan interactive performative work and would welcome participants to join the group. You are welcome to join the internet workgroup, which will continue after the conference.

Preparatory group and artists:

  • Marilyn Arsem (USA)
  • Helga Franke (Germany)
  • Britt Hatzius (United Kingdom)
  • Ute Ritschel (Germany)
  • Regina Frank (Portugal/Germany)
  • Michael Peterson (USA)

Site Specific Working Group
Chair: Laurie Beth Clark

This working group will provide a networking opportunity for artists and scholars engaged with performance strategies, whether 'popular' or 'avant-garde', that are site-specific in structure and/or in content. The group will meet at a location on or around the conference site, to be agreed at its earlier planning meeting.

While all performance is de-facto situated, some performance is explicitly so. Postmodern site-specific performance can in part be understood as a remedy for ahistorical and decontextualising modernist approaches. Site-specific performance is very often performance-as-study: it is research intensive; it produces and/or gathers local knowledges. What we might call 'space-specific' performances engage with formal parameters, while what we might call 'place-specific' performances engage with cultural and social meanings; many or even most site-specific works engage with both space and place. Site-specific production is one of the core practices of contemporary performance, yet is perhaps the least amenable to conference presentation.

History in Performative Paradigms Working Group
BMS 326
Chair: Tracy Davis

Please note that this session will run until 7.30pm

The History in Performative Paradigms Working Group will be inaugurated with a round table discussion.

'What is retrievable, what is at the verge of irretrievability, and what is beyond it?'

Part I. Retrievability (Lisa Freeman and Nick Ridout)
What factors are comparable across time and place? Why?
How do organizing tropes for theatre history compare to descriptive tendencies in contemporary analysis and documentation?

Part II. The Verge of Irretrievability (Gilli Bush-Bailey and P A Skantze)
What are the potentials for deploying practice-based work for historical research?
Do we claim practice as a historical research methodology, an analytical paradigm, or a laboratory for generating hypotheses?

Part III. Beyond the Retrievable (Jacky Bratton and Heidi Holder)
How can the methods, or findings, of anthropology and ethnography inform historical research?  What are the limits, and why?
Is ephemerality a problem of method, or a symptom of analysis?

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