Techne Conflux: Art, Performance & Free Association
6th Dec 2019 10:00am-6:30pm
This workshop is offered as a technē 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.
Register with Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/art-performance-free-association-tickets-62640571636
This experiential study day explores 'free association' as both a method of enquiry pioneered by Freudian psychoanalysis and as an evocation of various kinds of collective practice – whether political, educational, artistic or spiritual – that are freely chosen and determined by those who take part, beyond familiar forms of belonging or organisation. Taking the dream as foundational for the theory and practice of free association, the day unfolds through a series of participatory sessions that engage with both the collective and the dream as intelligent things. Led by psychoanalyst and social theorist, Dr Raluca Soreanu (University of Essex) and Dr Simon Bayly, Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance (Roehampton), the day will be primarily shaped through the shared contributions of participants in response to joint tasks and readings.
Questions that we hope to hold in mind during the day include:
- How do collectives act, in moments when their actions appear to us as surprising forms of wisdom, aimed at preserving something valuable, including themselves?
- How do dreams act, so that through their composition, they appear as repositories of a particular form of knowledge or wisdom?
- What can the practices of free association tell us about normative constraints that tacitly shape ways of being, talking and acting together?
- How might reflecting on dreams, collectives or the figure of the ‘wise child’ allow a more expansive insight into the relationship between mastery and stupidity, failure and success, the professional and the unprofessional, sincerity and fraudulence in the experience of research within the academy?
The morning and afternoon sessions are designed for a maximum of 20 participants, so please book early. Preparatory readings and information will be distributed in advance to registered participants. In the event of these sessions being over-subscribed, a waiting list will be maintained should places become available. The evening seminar is a public event open to all.
Art, Performance & Free Association is the fourth in a series of six intensive study days over two years, hosted by the University of Roehampton. The days are designed for creative arts and critical theory candidates at doctoral level, and are open to technē researchers and associates at all technē partnership institutions and other interested PhD researchers within those institutions.
Each intensive day combines seminars, workshops and talks and hosts an international guest theorist or artist. Each day is organised around key concepts in i
nterdisciplinary thought that impact upon the study of
art and performance: materiality, the sonorous, political imagination, free assocation, mobility and temporality.