T. Kilicel Kilicel

Shift Abstract: Historically, the cabaret has served as a forum for great performative experiments in aesthetics and politics, from the futurists in Zürich, to sexual revolutions rehearsed in Weimar Berlin, to the coffeehouse folk of 1960’s New York. These are just a few examples of how theory and practice, ideas and art, can collide in exciting ways, stimulating performers and audiences to think new thoughts and rethink old ones. Moreover, as performance scholars, we are dedicated to expanding our notions of how intellectual dialogue can be shared and what forms register as meaningful.

Acting on a desire aired at last year’s conference, we are interested in providing graduate students with a cabaret space to showcase rigorous artistic and performance work that might not otherwise find a venue at the PSi conference. We have assembled a roster of student artists who utilize the Cabaret format in its widest sense: a performance salon placing visual art, dance, poetry, video, audio, puppetry, performance, and theater together in front of an audience, in segments ranging from 30 seconds to ten minutes. We use the cabaret form to test the boundaries between theory and practice, to engage with the conference theme Performing Publics, and to stage performances that interrogate the notions of performance, studies, and the international. The graduate student cabaret will serve as a means of bringing together emerging scholars and artists from around the world and a stage for rigorous new work to be shared amongst each other as well as with the wider public of PSi.