technē Conflux: Performance as Research Workshop 1
5th Apr 2019 9:15am-9:30pm
This workshop is offered as part of a TECHNE Conflux, an extended training, development, exhibition or performance programme which aims to enhance research or intellectual skills, or facilitate the sharing of expertise amongst doctoral students in the arts and humanities.
Venue: Studio and exhibition spaces Grand parade Arts Building, Brighton University
9.15 Registration and Welcome (Andy Kesson/Kate Aughterson)
10.00—12.00 Key note workshop:
Making a Laboratory: Introduction to Embodied Audiovisual Methods
Ben Spatz (Huddersfield University)
12.00- 1.00 Lunch
1.00 – 3.00 Workshopping Galathea Andy Kesson and Emma Frankland (Roehampton University)
3.00-3.30 Tea
3.15-5.15 Sarah Clifford (Theatre practitioner) Place-based Performance
5.30 Food for Thought: a performative feast - Workshop led by UoB PGRs Ellan Parry and Sarah Grange, exploring self-fashioning of gender & status through Early Modern humoral flux theories and dress, viewed through Halberstam’s work on Wildness as Queer theory. The workshop will lead into a conversational dinner party including special guests from various fields of live art and performance-making: Chris Goode (author of The Forest and the Field: Changing Theatre in a Changing World and Pauline Meyers (artistic provocateur) – and a few others. Includes Dinner.
7.30 Experimental poetry performances by visiting contemporary Greek poets, Patricia Kolaiti and others (Brighton University)
Abstracts and Bios
Making a Laboratory: Introduction to Embodied Audiovisual Methods
Ben Spatz | Brighton, UK | April 2019
This talk and workshop will offer a taste of new audiovisual research methods that can be used to articulate embodied knowledge and practice with an unprecedented level of rigor. Ontologically and epistemologically distinct from performance documentation, these methods integrate videographic recording within the timespace of practice and generate a new kind of video material, which can be used in the production of both academic and artistic publications, including peer-reviewed video essays, rhizomatic video catalogues, and video art. By cutting transversally through the space of embodied practice, these methods have the potential to reconfigure our understanding of what a body can do and to redefine the emergent relations of technique, identity, and place.
The methods to be introduced include a system for designing lab sessions by specifying initial conditions in terms of interactive roles and power relations; an approach to working with the “transversal” video material emerging from those labs, with special attention on co-authorship, editorial framing, and intellectual property issues; and an experimental format for artist exchange sessions that includes the complete editing cycle within a short period. In addition to these practical tools, Ben will introduce the Journal of Embodied Research, a newfully indexed and peer-reviewed videographic journal published by Open Library of Humanities, and the book series “Advanced Methods: New Research Ontologies” from Punctum Books; and will discuss the current state of methodological innovation in PaR and its potential to re-imagine and transform the university.
Note: The methods introduced in this workshop were developed, tested, and formalized during the 2017 Judaica project, with extensive contributions and co-authorship from Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel. They are described in detail in the book Making a Laboratory: Dynamic Configurations with Transversal Video, forthcoming from Punctum Books.
Ben Spatz is a nonbinary researcher and theorist of embodied practice. They are Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Huddersfield, UK; author of What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (Routledge 2015); and AHRC Leadership Fellow with the project “Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” (2016-2018). Ben is editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research from Open Library of Humanities and the Advanced Methods imprint from Punctum Books; co-convener of the Embodied Research Working Group within the International Federation for Theatre Research; and co-investigator on the ESRC project “Research with a Twist: A Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers” (2018-2019). Ben has recently been invited to speak at conferences on theatre, dance, martial arts, and intangible cultural heritage at the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, Kent, Aberdeen, Bedfordshire, Cardiff, Ghent, and Zagreb, New York University, City University of New York, Northwestern University, and University of the Arts Helsinki. Ben has more than two decades of experience as a performer and director of contemporary performance, working mainly in New York City from 2001 to 2013. For more information, please visit: <urbanresearchtheater.com>.
Workshopping Galathea Andy Kesson and Emma Frankland
This session will explore work-in-progress for Emma Frankland and Andy Kesson’s production of John Lyly’s Galatea. This sixteenth-century play features a predominantly female cast, a queer love story at its centre and a number of characters who question binary gender, and our production aims to restore this play to the contemporary classical repertory whilst also challenging current conversations about diversity and representation in classical theatre. This play had an impact on Shakespeare’s work – of interest to anyone interested in performance, early modern theatre and postmodern contemporary queer recuperation.
Andy Kesson is a Reader in Renaissance Literature at Roehampton who works on performance, theatre history and the literary canon. He ran a workshop on practice-as-research for the first TECHNE PhD conference and was the principal investigator for Before Shakespeare, a two-year project exploring the intersections between performance, theatre history and archaeology.
Emma Frankland is an award-winning theatre maker who bridges the worlds of classical theatre, Live Art and trans performance. Emma is collaborating with Andy Kesson on a production of Lyly's Galatea and will share work-in-progress from this production.
Sara Clifford www.saraclifford.com and www.inroads.org.uk
As a playwright and creative producer, I work with local communities to create participatory arts projects, exploring how the cultural and psycho-geography of a place can impact on a community based arts/heritage project.
During this workshop we will explore:
- What are the links between (cultural) memory and place and how are these transmitted when working with community group(s)? How is the site inhabited? How does a community’s memories differ?
- What do we mean by heritage and how does this link with cultural memory? How does a location impact on our perception and experience of it?
- How can site-specific ‘community theatre’ generate and empower communities?
- What is our role as an artist/ place-maker?
Theatre can often be seen as elitist and inaccessible to certain sections of the community, both in terms of subject matter and where the theatre is performed.
Sara Clifford’s recent theatre writing work, particularly in Newhaven in Sussex, aims to create theatre that tells a community’s story and locate it in a place that is local and not a traditional theatre space, to engender ownership and therefore be more likely to engage, participate and be spectators in both the process and product; and to offer opportunities for all to experience that art.
She takes an active role as writer, director of her own company (Inroads Productions) initiating projects, and leading the research through creative workshops that then inform the script.
Such projects have included The Port, the Beast and the Traveller, inspired by the Dieppe raid in 1942, which set off from Newhaven Fort. This was performed as a site specific piece at the Fort itself, by a mixed professional and community cast. Two other projects, Our Dancing Feet, about social dancing in the 50s, performed in a modern dance club in Brighton and in the Winter Garden in Eastbourne; and Home Fires, about the impact of World War One, again set in Newhaven Fort, followed the same model, of rooting the project in the local community, collecting local stories, memories and writings, running workshops with various community groups, and including local community groups in the final performances, with a script that I write, informed by this research.
Her work explores the role of cultural memory and place in this theatre work, and draws on interests in theatre, storytelling, social/local history, maps, ‘walking literature’ and psychogeography, visual/musical influences and the whole area of cultural memory and its transmission, in order to explore the complex inter-relationship of place and community, and to challenge our perceptions of culture and society.
Food for Thought: a performative feastSarah Grange and Ellan Parry
Details to come
Poetry on Stage: Experimental poetry
performances by contemporary Greek poets Orfeas Apergis, Sam Albatross, Marios Hatjiprokopiou, Katerina
Iliopoulou, Patricia Kolaiti, Pavlina Marvin,
Performance Room
225, Grand Parade Building,
In the decade of the Greek economic crisis, a dynamic generation of Greek poets has responded to recession by staking new artistic and theoretical ground. Although nurtured in a text-oriented literary tradition, the Greek poetic voices of this decade have taken poetry on stage, boldly experimenting on the interface between poetry and performance and creating innovative participatory and interactive events that not only bring poetry out to the wider public but also enable a new, broader construal of the poetic phenomenon itself. The cutting-edge Greek poetry journal FRMK, A synergy of the arts has played a pilot part in exploring and establishing these experimental endeavours. The poets that will perform in the event are among the most daring, and also critically and theoretically aware, new voices in contemporary Greek poetry. In the open discussion with the wider public, the poets will very briefly introduce an issue relating to their evolving agenda on the interface between poetry and performance just to give students and participants a starting point for discussion. The performances themselves from the ‘poetry on stage event’ wiil become a starting point for discussion at the day 2 workshop which follows (TECGHNE students interested can also attend this).
A collaboration of:
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