MIGRATING TO WORDPRESS

I am migrating my current blog to wordpress and although this will be active for the next several weeks, please see latest posts here:

www.longdistanceideas.wordpress.com

Thanks,

Rob.

Collisions, Colloquium Day at CSSD

Last week saw the culmination of months of work and design, curatorial work and detailed communications for the Collisions Festival Colloquium, which was held on Saturday 9th October, at Central School of Speech and Drama. The Brief for the day was to explore: Merging Interactions, exploring new approaches to Dramaturgy, Now and for the Future and involved academic panels alongside practical workshops and installations / performances.

The work of the day was fascinating and built a conversation which I hope will inform the work of the participants over the coming months, both Luis and I admittedly were thrilled to be able to test the brief that we wrote so many months ago now.

The day was documented in part, by the participants, myself and Luis and I have included some of that here, in photographic, youtube and written form.

Dr Fred McVitie's Conference Report Youtube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/conferencereport

The day, selfishly was a way of opening up conversations of dramaturgy, sometimes explicitly and sometimes just by experiencing or hearing of the work of our speakers. Dramaturgy in the UK is a concept that due to its lack of history and heritage in our theatre tradition can feel in-accessible, not taught or discussed openly. This is not satisfactory, for me personally, as so much work now more than ever is beginning to push the boundaries of what is performance and in this muddy territory of the deconstruction of performance and the opening up and out towards new audiences and new technologies, who is shaping meaning, controlling understanding?

We have a tradition of the director, the leader of the creative process, however where does the director go when there is no obvious text, no obvious performer and the audience are dispersed, listening on headphones and allowed to roam? Here is where our conversations began to get interesting, Dr McVitie, exposed us to how YouTube is a platform for discussion and performance, the creation of a video of his presentation was part performance, part documentation. Cara Davies took this further by taking us through her various projects that are in themselves part installation, performance, documentation and archive, leading us in with a beautiful presentation of her work.

There is a lot to pick up on and I will be feeding this in via twitter and here on the blog but what I am interested in now is one conversation with Luis whilst waiting for an installation and before closing the day down. We were discussing the nature of the conference vs. the nature of performance - how can a performance conference be performed and how can the content of an academic paper be less performance as research and more research as performance?! I am reminded of the talk given at the CPR Directors Forum with relation to the:

PERFORMANCE STUDIES iNTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE # 15 (HERE)

I then want to explore these propositions / aims of that conference in a new format, to open up a discussion of how academies can inspire the participants and speakers, leaders and performance makers to contribute academic work that is not just the retelling or re framing of practice as academic research but rather extend the performance into the presentation, something like Dr Fred McVitie's work but something that pushes ever further, here is what I am left considering, (taken from the PSi Website for #15)

What determines the success and what is the role of “mistake” as an unavoidable (demystifying) element, not only in the realization of a performance but also in its being perceived, appreciated, understood, and interpreted as performance?

Are there “good” and “bad”, humorous and tragic, ethically and/or aesthetically “acceptable” and “unacceptable” performance mistakes?

The misconstrued, the misinterpreted, the misread, the misunderstood – are these culturally fertile or a threat, a pernicious vehicle of ideological distortions and abuses of power, or a royal road to new perspectives and even to resistance to power?

How do bodies fail to perform not only the heterosexual norms of sex/gender identity, but also their very humanity (malformed, sick and disabled bodies, for instance) in art and life?

How do misapplications of forms hybridize cultural gaps (for instance, in the westernization of the post-socialist East and vice versa)?

How to treat revolution as a performative: hence, what could be termed as a failed revolution – a mis-revolution or a missed revolution?

If we take into consideration Virillio’s idea that “new technologies convey a certain kind of accident, one that is no longer local and precisely situated [...] but general and affecting the entire world,” can we look at new global technologies of power in the light of accident? What is the role of accident and mishap in the new notion of war?

In what ways are previously misfit, liminal, resistant, or counter-performances being appropriated by the art market and institutions, as well as by the academy and the discursive power of theory?

How does misreading contribute to the queering and, moreover, the “evaporation” of a theory?

Performance is intimately related to humor precisely though misperformance. Bergson defined the comic as the effect of mistake, failure, and quite literally, of slippage. What is the place of the comic in contemporary performance practice?