Techne Conflux: Art, Performance & The Act
19th Feb 2020 10:00am-7:30pm
This workshop is offered as 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.
Register with Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/art-performance-the-act-tickets-86131388301
Convened by Joe Kelleher, the event will consider the nature of acts and actions - acts of speech, acts of making and appearing, acts of observation, acts of faith, acts of violence etc - in theatricalised contexts. Are the consequences of such acts of a different order than of actions in the world? How might we conceive the responsibility - and complicity - of makers, actors, spectators, in ways other than normative ethical frameworks? How might we consider the figure of the actor as bearing a particular weight of consciousness with regard to their act or action? And how might an ethics of research practice interface with new understandings of the act in performance?
The study day is intended as a collaborative exploration of such topics, between Romeo and the study day participants, who will work together towards staging a public conversation for the evening section of the event.
Romeo Castellucci is one of the world's leading theatre-makers and directors, renowned both for his work with Societas Raffaello Sanzio, which he co-founded in 1981 with Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi, and for his own work in both theatre and opera. We expect this to be a very popular event.
Our Techne study days are intensive and intimate seminars with a high demand for attendance and very limited capacity: please do not book a ticket for this event unless you are absolutely certain of your attendance.
Art, Performance & The Act is the fifth 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 interdisciplinary thought that impact upon the study of art and performance: materiality, the sonorous, political imagination, free association, the act and mobility.
This event is funded by technē; technē Scholars & Associates will be given priority booking. Lunch is included. If you are a doctoral candidate at a partner university but not a technē-funded student, you will be asked for a donation of £5 on the door to cover your lunch. If you would prefer to eat lunch elsewhere, there are numerous other options available on the University of Roehampton campus.
Details of presentation format for study day participants, along with sample materials and suggested reading for this event will be emailed to you after registration.
Schedule
10-10.30am
Registration
10-30-11.45am
The Act in Performance. Frameworks, questions, agenda-setting. Seminar with Joe Kelleher.
11.45am-12pm
Break
12-1.30pm
Dramaturgies of the Act. Conversation with Romeo Castellucci, led by Joe Kelleher and Flora Pitrolo (who will also be assisting with English-Italian interpretation). The conversation will circulate around a selection of images, texts and other materials associated with Romeo’s work.
1.30-2.45pm
Lunch
2.45-4.45pm
Acts and Practices. The afternoon session will be responsive to short presentations and sharings by study day participants: texts, images, objects, audio and video clips. Examples of research materials, and associated questions of study and enactment. What sorts of acts is your research concerned with? How might you think of your research in terms of acts rather than practices? What questions are raised – ethical, practical, aesthetic, political – of method and approach?
Details of presentation format will be circulated in advance of the event. The intention is to keep presentations brief, and focused on the sharing of concrete examples, to facilitate the development of discussion among the whole group. Joe Kelleher and Flora Pitrolo will curate – loosely speaking – an order of presentation and thematic clustering for the session.
4.45-5.30pm
Break
5.30-7.30pm
Evening event:
Art, Performance and the Act. A public conversation with Romeo Castellucci. The conversation will be led by Joe Kelleher and Flora Pitrolo and structured around a series of prompts that have emerged from the same day’s discussions with postgraduate research students. How do new understandings of the act in performance impact on the ethics of creative and research practice?
Participants
Romeo Castellucci studied painting and scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. In 1981 he founded the theatre collective Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio with Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi. He has created and directed numerous productions, for which he also designed the sets, costumes and lighting. Romeo Castellucci is known world-wide as a theatre artist whose work is based on the totality of the arts and aims at creating an integral, holistic perception. He has also written several theoretical essays on directing, drawing on his own experience of the theatre. His productions are characterized by dramatic lines that are not subject to the primacy of literature, but rather make of theatre a plastic, complex art, rich with visions. Since 2006 he has undertaken several projects independently of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. These include: Sul concetto di volto nel figlio di Dio with Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (2011), Wagner’s Parsifal (2011), The Four Seasons Restaurant with the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (2012), Hyperion: Briefe eines Terroristen after Hölderlin (2013), Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice (2014), Morton Feldman’s Neither (2014), Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (2014), Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron at the Paris Opéra (2015, revived at Madrid’s Teatro Real in 2016), Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher at the Opéra de Lyon (2017), Tannhäuser at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (2017), Henze’s Das Floß der Medusa at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam (2018), Salome at the Salzburg Festival (2018), Die Zauberflöte at La Monnaie in Brussels (2018), La Vita Nuova at Kanal Centre Pompidou Brussels (2018), Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il primo omicidio at the Paris Opéra (2019), and Mozart’s Requiem at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2019). In 2005 Romeo was the director of the theatre section of the Venice Biennale and in 2008 he was an associate artist of the 62nd edition of the Festival d’Avignon. Romeo Castellucci has received numerous prizes and awards. In 2000 he received the European Theatre Prize for New Theatrical Realities and in 2002 was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture. In 2013 the Venice Biennale awarded him its Golden Lion for his life’s work. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music and theatre by his alma mater the University of Bologna.
Joe Kelleher is Professor of Theatre and Performance at University of Roehampton, London. He is co-author with Claudia and Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi and Nicholas Ridout of The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio(Routledge 2007). His other books include The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images (Routledge 2015) and Theatre & Politics (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). With Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear and Heike Roms he co-edited Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (Methuen Drama 2019). With the same colleagues he is co-editor of the book series Thinking Through Theatre, also for Bloomsbury Methuen. He was a performing member of the London live-arts based company PUR, and more recently made a series of performance duets with Eirini Kartsaki. He is currently collaborating on a book with theatre artist Edit Kaldor, Inventory of Powerlessness.
Flora Pitrolo is a cultural critic whose work concentrates on experimental European scenes and archives from the 1980s to the present. She writes as a scholar and as a journalist about performance and electronic music, teaches at Birkbeck College and Syracuse University London, broadcasts as A Colder Consciousness on Resonance FM, and makes performance and installation work under the name The International Western. She is currently co-editing a volume on non-Anglophone disco scenes (forthcoming Palgrave 2020) and running a series of events in collaboration with the Skopje-based cultural association 5060.