PSi 16 – performing publics

Thank you for your submissions

Thank you to all those who submitted proposals for Performing Publics. We received proposals from over 700 individuals and from countries around the world! We look forward to reading these applications, and we will send responses in January.

Check out our CFP!

Our CFP is now up on the website. We look forward to receiving your submission. »

Coming soon!

We will be updating the site with news and updates shortly.

Zita Nyarady

Dancing Space Detectives: Exploring possibilities of dance improvisation in public spaces

My performative paper explores the intricacies of learning about a public space by engaging with the place through dance improvisation.

When I moved to Toronto I became involved in a series of outdoor performance projects involving dance improvisation in public space. These performances often called upon public space performance as a mode of marketing theatre-based shows; however, it was through dancing on street corners, parking spaces, parks and subways that I gained knowledge about social and geographical tensions found in my new city. These experiences spark questions on what possibilities can be generated from the intersection of dance improvisation and public space. How can dance improvisation be used as a way to understand and/or re-imagine space? What happens when moving bodies are placed in locations that are usually avoided or passed by? What can a space learn from dance and what can dance learn from a space? To investigate these questions I turn to Attack of the Ragamuffins, an international dance collective of which I am a member, and a project called Space Detectives. In Space Detectives the dancers consider the aforementioned questions of dance and space and are working towards developing a practice of performing dance improvisation in public space in Canada, United States and Jamaica. I argue that while learning about a public space through dance improvisation might come across as a utopian idea, there is merit for how dance can re-imagine and define space.

Zachary Lamdin

Improper Laughter?: Performing Contention in Theatre of Reconciliation

Paying particular attention to the example of South Africa’s transition to multi-racial democracy, this paper will offer an intervention in the dialogue between performance and political reconciliation. This paper reflects on my own encounter with a video-taped performance of Ubu and the Truth Commission, and specifically the unexpected occurrence of (improper?) audience laughter during one of the play’s verbatim accounts of brutal violence. Whilst this is probably the most widely discussed play to deal with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this contentious irruption of laughter has been elided from critical accounts of the play in performance. This paper will ask why, suggesting that the performance event as experienced does not fit the critical narratives constructed about this play, and theatre of reconciliation more generally; that is, that such performances invoke publics collectively bearing witness to trauma. Bringing together scholarship on political reconciliation and performance studies, this paper will attempt to unsettle the claims about traumatic realism and performances of bearing witness that are made by post-traumatic readings of theatre of reconciliation. Drawing on Nicholas Ridout’s discussion of accidental laughter as constituting ‘ruptures in the representational operations of theatrical impersonation,’ I will suggest that the potential for a truly political reconciliation exists in the ruptures opened when publics perform their own unscripted – and unexpected – challenges to traumatic realism, such as in the contentious irruption of improper laughter.

Zachary Lamdin

Panel Abstract: It has been 12 years since the Good Friday Agreement, which articulated the constitutional steps towards peace and was the catalyst for the decommissioning of arms by major paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland. However, since 1998 the idea and reality of peace – as an absence of violence or a state of political equilibrium – has been continually challenged by elected politicians, dissident paramilitary factions and citizens who are dissatisfied with the re-articulation of the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. Despite this, and because of it, peace is not a given, it is a constantly negotiated and performed state. Additionally, unlike in other newly defined states, such as South Africa, there has been no formal political process of reconciliation between communities in Northern Ireland. Rather, the ‘post’ peace process period has been marked by absence and gaps in the acknowledgment of trauma in the memories of the Troubles. This absence places theatre artists in a particularly politicized position of producing art that negotiates, interrogates or even produces processes of reconciliation that do not figure in the political landscape. This panel will survey, investigate and critique theatre and performance practices which reveal the social and political realities of Northern Ireland in the early twenty first century – practices which question the assumption that The Troubles are over and that peace is a done deal rather than a continually performed act.

This panel will engage with the performative dimensions of the peace process and the theatrical responses to, and interventions into that process. The central focus of the issue is on the theatricality of the political and cultural processes of peace in Northern Ireland, and the ways in which theatre performance has encountered and interrogated these processes. Rather than offering distinct papers, the speakers will engage in a dialogue with each other, and the audience, about these concerns, touching on a range of relevant performance practices and contexts such as dark tourism, site and space, performances of reconciliation, the economics of cross-border performance, and responses to the Saville Enquiry (the Bloody Sunday Tribunal).

Willmar Sauter

Anna Odell’s Art Work as Event

An artist stages a suicide attempt by disposing her clothes in order to jump from a high bridge. Passers-by – seeing a real body in danger – call the police; the police bring the resisting body to a hospital; the next morning the doctors are told that this event was filmed as part of an art installation.

After the public media upheaval with all its pro and cons, the question remains: in what terms are we speaking about such actions? Did the artist play a role or was she herself? What was the medium of her actions? To what degree appear the observers, the police and the hospital warden as authentic – and there is obviously a certain value in this kind of authenticity, at least when one sees the video in the frame of an installation in an art gallery.

This paper might raise more questions that it can answer, but the attempt will be made to point toward (the necessity of) a new approach to acting theories. A model of possible thinking will be indicated, thereby referring to numerous bodily appearances outside the traditional playhouses.

Will Daddario

manifesto

From Latin, manifestare: to make public, to reveal, disclose, clarify

Etymologically, the manifesto has immediate associations with performing and the public. Manifestos are traditionally understood to involve putting ideas on show, making thoughts conspicuous, or with publicising a particular philosophy or worldview. In turn, as Martin Puchner has noted, both manifesto and theatre refer to the act of making visible: manifesto is derived from the Latin verb manifestare, which means to bring into the open, to make manifest and theatre from the Greek theatron, a place of seeing (Puchner 2002: 449).

Puchner has also discussed the performative nature of the manifesto, as that which construes words as having the power to change the world, rather than merely represent it. In particular, he suggests, the manifesto wants to manifest a futurist performativity in which the present act of revolt, the manifesto performed is understood to mark the beginning of a new future.

The PSi Performance and Philosophy working group invites participation and contributions to A Manifesto Workshop to be held at PSi 16 in Toronto.

This workshop will explore the dimensions of the manifesto’s performativity:

* an act of self-situating and self-explicating;

* writing towards an invisible public or a people-to-come;

* as a critical practice;

* thinking the manifesto as a genre vs. the manifesto as a highly contextualized act

The workshop will operate in two parts:

(1) Seminar with sub-groups who will read around prior to arrival at the conference and

(2) Presentations/Performances in manifesto form.

In particular, the co-ordinators are interested in facilitating a relay of manifestos prior to the conference, such that we might perform a public manifesto conversation between multiple parties. In this instance, a manifesto could be a letter, object, image, or any combination of these that can be passed along to another for a response.

Will Daddario

Shift Abstract:

manifesto

From Latin, manifestare: to make public, to reveal, disclose, clarify

Etymologically, the manifesto has immediate associations with performing and the public. Manifestos are traditionally understood to involve putting ideas on show, making thoughts conspicuous, or with publicising a particular philosophy or worldview. In turn, as Martin Puchner has noted, both manifesto and theatre refer to the act of making visible: manifesto is derived from the Latin verb manifestare, which means to bring into the open, to make manifest and theatre from the Greek theatron, a place of seeing (Puchner 2002: 449).

Puchner has also discussed the performative nature of the manifesto, as that which construes words as having the power to change the world, rather than merely represent it. In particular, he suggests, the manifesto wants to manifest a futurist performativity in which the present act of revolt, the manifesto performed is understood to mark the beginning of a new future.

The PSi Performance and Philosophy working group invites participation and contributions to A Manifesto Workshop to be held at PSi 16 in Toronto.

This workshop will explore the dimensions of the manifesto’s performativity:

* an act of self-situating and self-explicating;

* writing towards an invisible public or a people-to-come;

* as a critical practice;

* thinking the manifesto as a genre vs. the manifesto as a highly contextualized act

The workshop will operate in two parts:

(1) Seminar with sub-groups who will read around prior to arrival at the conference and

(2) Presentations/Performances in manifesto form.

In particular, the co-ordinators are interested in facilitating a relay of manifestos prior to the conference, such that we might perform a public manifesto conversation between multiple parties. In this instance, a manifesto could be a letter, object, image, or any combination of these that can be passed along to another for a response.

Wade Hollingshaus

Redistributing the Sensible: The Disappearing Public of the NAKAMATA and Their (Video) Performance of Human Rights

This panel is about the possibilities suggested when the work of philosophy toward a radical politics is used as a starting point or frame in critical and theoretical work on performance. We draw from the recent work of philosophers such as Badiou, Zizek, Agamben and Ranciere, as well as other political theorists. We specifically take as our critical, cultural and historical location a capitalism that appears as various neoliberalisms across the globe.

In this panel, loosely hinged to the theme of the conference, we ask the following: What are ways to reconsider the notion of the public, and of the private, which is not so much the opposite of the public but its constitutive, if sometimes masked, element? What are theoretical forms of space, collectivity, subjectivation, and opposition that can be imagined to intervene in the circulation of the public/private figuration of capitalism, or what Badiou calls democratic materialism? We are interested in the assumptions that development, rights, NGO and civil society discourses make, or perpetuate about the bond, including their promotion of tolerance as a public virtue, and democracy as the political practice of a remade or ideal public. We’re interested in the ways these discourses shape and professionalize an activist and humanitarian public. And, we’re interested in the ways that these discourses evacuate political potential from publics and public spaces assembled by them. Who might be different kinds of political subjects and in what kinds of spaces might they thrive?

Vivian Huang

Reimaging Kinship, Reimagining Belonging in Zhang’s A Stream Bends for a Thousand Li

How is it that public cultures hail private intimacies as a public concern? What does family in the United States mean for us now, and how can family be thought to be the very hinge between private and public? Further, how does transnational adoption complicate notions of legally recognized families? My paper considers the utopia posed by Beijing-Manhattan artist O Zhang in her multimedia installation A Stream Bends for a Thousand Li and its images of American families made possible by adoption from China. The photos feature white American men and young Chinese girls posed in father-daughter couples amidst lush surroundings. The overdetermined pairings of bodies across difference, juxtaposed with the Edenesque environment, are captured in striking images, both troubling and hopeful. With an interest in thinking alongside Donna Haraway and her provocation of becoming with as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s work on utopia, my paper traces the ambivalence that accompanies an outward gaze and the political work of such ambivalence. How do these images of family speak to public discomforts around race, sexuality, gender and nationality? How might these pictures offer us other ways to look and to know? Shifting the conversation from same-sex marriage to the related discussion around kinship formation, Reimaging Kinship, Reimagining Belonging in Zhang’s A Stream Bends for a Thousand Li is invested in a queer politics that welcomes forms of belonging that make space and time for the fruition of utopian possibilities.

Virginie Magnat

Conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of performance studies, experimental ethnography, and indigenous methodologies

While advocating interdisciplinary research, the field of performance studies has yet to integrate the epistemological and methodological revolution that has taken place in qualitative research over the last two decades, a revolution that was significantly informed by what Norman K. Denzin identifies as the performance turn in the social sciences. Moreover, the recently published Handbook of Critical & Indigenous Methodologies (2008), edited by Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, calls for a strategic alliance between critical theory, indigenous research, and performance ethnography. For Native Canadian, Hawaiian, Maori, and American Indian scholars, the ?increasingly virulent relationship between human beings and the rest of nature– lies at the heart of our world’s current spiritual crisis. They respond by proposing a respectful performance pedagogy [that] works to construct a vision of the person, ecology, and environment — in accordance with Indigenous worldviews (13 -14).

While Indigenous decolonizing research methods are designed by and for Indigenous scholars and activists working within their own communities, Cree scholar Shawn Wilson remarks in Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008): So much the better if dominant universities and researchers adopt [Indigenous research principles] as well (59). Since Denzin, Lincoln and Smith acknowledge that the limitations of the Handbook include their inability to locate persons who could write chapters from a number of perspectives, including arts-based methodologies and Indigenous performance studies, I examine the relevance of Indigenous research epistemologies and methodologies for the field of performance studies.

Virginia Preston

Stage and Sovereignty: Watching 21st Century War, from a Ghost Town in Saxony

Panel Abstract: The contributors to this panel address exclusions from the public sphere in popular culture, art and media works, particularly with respect to race, gender and sexuality. The arenas in which we evolve this inquiry include policed and military sites as well as zones of sexual commerce and surveillance. People of color, the homeless and U.S. soldiers are subjects and objects of the performances addressed in these papers. What publics exist under conditions of erasure? Who is excluded from (or construed outside) the ‘publics’ of the arts and security? And what goes without saying in constituting a ‘public’ writ large? Communities of color, queer television spectators and a visual artist’s theater staged in an East German ghost town appear in these essays as sites of critical negotiation between economic systems, the carceral, military and industrial complexes and commodified desire. This panel poses questions about groups constituted by violence, sites that challenge orthodoxies of the public sphere and activate the space between public and private worlds. Prisons, troops traveling to battlefields and other concealed communities draw our attention to the violent, and silenced, conditions of possibility underwriting the public. As unmarked publics and counterpublics, these groups–an urban community in the United States that includes drug addicts, queers, and residents of color; a small village in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in an age of US global hegemony; and industrial and post-industrial black ghettoes–each exist under conditions of erasure.

Victoria Stanton

Roadside Attractions (Toronto)

For PSi #16, I will present Roadside Attractions (Toronto), a 25-minute performative work that combines live narration with projected, looped video segments and repeated live, physical actions.

Arriving from another city, this piece employs a mini-residency structure, in which I conduct performance research by carrying out and documenting several micro-interventions in my new environment. Walking and visually mapping a variety of routes, these taped interventions are a record of recently located landmarks (or what I think of as flash landmarks) – the places that become my instant reference for orientation/navigation. Within a set time-frame (for example 4 days) I accumulate footage, review the images and then edit a short video. In the final instance a montage of the taped segments become a backdrop for the conference-performance: rhythmic repetitive actions (such as skipping in place) punctuated by inter-textual narration – reflections related to being a body moving through, responding, and connecting, to space, place, and ephemeral forms of architecture.

As negotiating public terrain is the central premise of this site-specific work, I focus on parallels between performance and travel, of extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory (Solnit, 2005, 5) while examining comprehensive states of performative consciousness, investing a performative presence within multiple spaces / times. This poetic form of investment is multi-faceted as well, as it potentially re-invigorates a landscape for those who inhabit it; public sculpture, local signage and even local businesses become the subjects (and objects) of reconsideration once they have been incorporated (and distilled) into a performative moment.

Seen in succession and placed in counterpoint to each other, the images and actions (both on and off-screen) come to visually embody a disjointed process of arriving while also proposing a strategy for Being. Here. Now.

Victor Vicente

Acoustic Clash: The Politics of a Sufi Musical Performance at Aya Sofia Square, Istanbul

In August 2009, at the opening of the holy month of Ramadan, a Sufi music concert was staged in the large cobblestone square in front of the famous Aya Sofia in the heart of Istanbul, Turkey. The Aya Sofia, once the center of the Christian world, was an important mosque for nearly five centuries, but it became a museum in 1935 when the secular government attempted unsuccessfully to neutralize the influence of religion in the public sphere. In the decades since, the adjacent plaza has served as the main public performance venue in the old city. Performances here are inevitably charged with the explosive political energies that reverberate across the ancient cobblestones, for Aya Sofia Square, lying at the crossroads of opposing Christian, Muslim, and secularist ideologies, remains one of the most hotly contested public spaces in the world.

This paper provides an ethnographic description and analysis of just how volatile this performance venue has become in recent years by focusing on a single performance of Sufi music and ritual. As a nexus of competing agendas, this performance reveals the nuanced ways in which politicians, citizens, tourists, worshipers, and performers vie with one another in their efforts to use and control public space. Ultimately, in reclaiming sacred space from secularism, this performance proves to be one of the key fronts in which the battle to fundamentally transform public life in Turkey is being waged.

Vinja Rogoi

Private/Public?: Personalising the City by Shadow Casters

Starting from the metaphor of the city as a vessel which shapes the liquid of our everyday life, performing collective Shadow Casters (Zagreb, Croatia) regrets contemporary distancing of urban population from the public space, which various parts are increasingly neglected, labelled as dangerous, turned into a non-place (Augé), or controlled and restricted in use. However, rather than rehabilitating public space as public, they tend to reframe it as private — the space of one’s stories, memories, experience — while striving towards present positive image of home or private commercial property. Thus, the hypertextual structure of their projects (2000-2009) is expressed through spatial urban networks forming various layers of narrative tissue and demanding engaged movement and sensorial shift from the recipient. Reading the hypertext suggests reexperiencing public space as the space of personal safety where our fragility can be openly exposed, the space of personal freedom where we determine the limits of (in)appropriate behaviour, the space of personal creativity where our momentary decision or need dictates its use. Invited to visit Shadow Casters’ private stories, we are offered the liberation and protection of their mobile transparent walls. However, as that newly produced private image occasionally cracks, leaking the more restricted, threatening or simply different atmosphere of the public space, the interplay of two images and the doubled experience of the public becomes the most valuable gain for the audience.

Vandy Wood

Panel Abstract: Through the exploration of four different performative gallery projects, this panel will interrogate the role of space and place in defining public(s), as well as how various publics shape the space(s) between artist and audience. Together, panelists will question how private and public space(s) intersect and diverge in the ‘Desire Project’ an Austin based museum installation/ performance. Next, they will explore the ways in which the TypeBound Project at the University of Central Florida’s Museum of Visual Art plays with space to engage audiences in the written word as performance and performance as literature. Finally, the panelists will address how Macabre Vignettes and No Strings Attached, shows situated in downtown Orlando galleries, disrupt traditional public(s)/spaces, presenting sculpture as performance and performance objects as sculpture. Converging at the intersections of visual art, literary art, and theatre/performance, each of these projects/events invites artists and audiences to re-imagine and transgress established boundaries of traditional performance/exhibit spaces to engage new and broader publics as collaborative contributors to and within performative spaces and places.

Valerie Lamontagne

Ecologies of Relational and Participatory Interactive Technologies

The insurgence of mobile / ubiquitous apparatuses are reformulating the everyday fabric of social and urban experiences, perceptions, constructions and exchanges. How is the concept of the public re-shaped within such locative-based assemblages of participation? How does public participation shape real-time generative works which make use of systems / networks to construct an event? As concerns for spatially and temporally becomes increasingly key to the formulations of such participatory-based works context (urban, social, architectural) also comes to plays a substantive role in the experience of such works. As a comparative framework, social/activist works from the 1960’s will be referenced to highlight the changing nature of the political engagement of collectives participating in these networked ecologies. Distributed / collaborative performances taking place in real-time urban / architectural installations as well as mobile-based participatory works will stand as examples for the investigation of public — dependent forms of works. The main question resides in how communities are presently built over interactive networks as opposed public gatherings in real time/space and what the social and political implications of this shift engenders. Looking at the writings of Debord, Latour, and Guattari a case study of these emergent practices will be presented.

Ulf Otto

Pervasive Performance, Embedded Actors and Distributed Publics: How Digital Technologies effect Public Performances

The decline of the public sphere is traditionally blamed on the media. But this critique has itself been attacked for bearing its own media preference and first of all producing a normative ideal of the public. Instead of conceiving of the public as a prerequisite for performance one might therefore think of (differing) publics as products of performances that are culturally coined and rendered possible by the underlying media technologies. Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time suspect that what you do could be universally broadcast, becomes the performative imperative of the information society where everybody on the street carries a camera and the next broadband connection is only metres away. In consequence the concepts and practices of performing publicity in the arts as well as in the everyday undergo gradual but profound change. Nurtured by tried convictions this change is commonly diagnosed as an escalating narcism or attributed to a propagation of the panopticon. But drawing on Richard Sennetts historical perspective on the division of public and private and the relation between public appearances on the stage and on the street, this paper tries to show, that such phenomena as camgirls, flashmobs and their artistic and commercial successors have to be understood as an attempt to figure out whether the idea of the public can still be assigned meaning in a society that is dominated by networked communciation.

Tracy McMullen

Event as Monument: When Performance Turns Solid

The reenactment of past events through living history museums, battle reenactments, and even performance art, has become an increasingly popular cultural practice. Perhaps the most popular form of live reenactment, however, is found in musical performance. Popular tribute bands that reenact complete live rock concerts of yore, flood local and even national venues, but musical reenactments have also been staged as performance art. The performance duo of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, for example, has reenacted Ziggy Stardust, The Who, and The Cramps to much acclaim in both Britain and the United States. I situate reenactment in relation to cultural desires for permanence, unified identity, and the real in an increasingly mediated and fragmented world. Reenactment can present past events as frozen hunks of time, where the ephemeral and bygone are re-vivified, reified, and commodified. Through specific examples of musical reenactments, I discuss how this practice performs a type of modern-day public ritual that addresses the dislocation, instability, and sense of loss and inadequacy experienced by the postmodern subject. These reenactments can perform a desired eternal return of archetypal events and identities retrieved and conjured from the past. They can also offer an enactment of stability and the known in a world that feels increasingly unstable and unreliable.

Tracy Davis

Performance in Historical Paradigms

Organizer: Tracy C. Davis, Northwestern University

Framing Questions:

How do performance historians incorporate private experience, insight, or activism into research that addresses the past? How do the personal and the professional, or the present and the past, inform or impinge on each other?

Shift: “Horseback Views: a Queer Hippological Performance” (75 minutes)

o Kim Marra, Professor of Theatre, Chair of American Studies (University of Iowa)

Kim Marra’s autobiographical performance connects her embodied experience as a lifelong equestrienne to her historical research into “show women” and show horses on various stages in New York City around 1900. Embodied practice opens up the past, revealing the interrelationship between archive and repertoire.

Panel: “Our Research, Our Selves” (approx. 100 minutes)

What drives a performance historian to spend ten years investigating a question about performances in the past? What stokes this promethean fire, both as an intellectual and creative endeavor? A panel of performance historians discusses connections, impetuses, inspirations, and insights that connect their research inquiries to their lifelong passions and personal demons.

Panelists:

– Susan Bennett, Professor of English (University of Calgary)

– Jennifer Brody, Professor of African American Studies (Duke University)

– Tracy C. Davis, Barber Professor of Performing Arts (Northwestern University)

– Lesley Ferris, Professor of Theatre (Ohio State University)

– Kim Marra, Professor of Theatre, Chair of American Studies (University of Iowa)

– Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre (Brown University)

– Suk-Young Kim, Associate Professor of Drama (UC Santa Barbara)

Moderator: Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theatre (Princeton University)

Tory Mountain

Parkour: Popular Counter-Public or Paradox of Power?

Panel Abstract: This panel seeks to explore the notion of ‘public space’ and its formation in and through complex economic, political and cultural processes. Viewing ‘publics’ essentially as a force field that can generate what Warner calls Poetic world making serving as an alternative politics of culture and teaming it with an understanding of ’space’ that extends from the physical to its more political, moral, even utopic dimensions, we strive to draw together various cultural practices and artifacts as performative models that problematise and challenge this force field and its subversive potential. Drawing from varied political practices, behaviors, discourses and images, each paper uses performance as an epistemological lens to explore creative and political interstices within the public arena and re-locate emerging critical modes of ‘countering’.

The panel comprises of 4 students from Portugal, Canada, Netherlands and India respectively holding different specialisms in performance studies and varied performance practices. In the process of writing our dissertations for the MA in International Performance Research, we’ve encountered a common concern with issues of public space. The PSI Conference 2010 would provide us a platform to discuss our research methods and findings and put them to debate with other scholars.

Mountain’s Abstract: This paper seeks to question the validity of the popular assumption that parkour is a counter-public. Elements of whiteness and heterosexual masculinity identifiable in the practise serve to problematize the notion of counter, and push further this examination of parkour as both a critique and reaffirmation of dominant public interests.

Tony Perucci

The Poetics of Ruptural Performance: The End(s) of Sense in Political Performance

This panel considers the ways in which performance can interrupt the experience of the quotidian experience of public and privatized spaces as a means of political, social and economic justice. Each paper considers the challenge of performance activism as more than a means of conveying information or a simple political message. Rather, performance not only constitutes its publics, but also the experience of publicity. For L.M. Bogad, publicity is enacted through his participation in the production of fake special editions of the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New York Post. While each paper had its own activist agenda, all contained headlines and articles that performed The World We Want to See as already existing. Benjamin Shepard describes how a burlesque of DIY activism has functioned as a means of inhabiting public space, enabling the interplay of movements for sexual freedom and the global justice movement. Finally, Tony Perucci articulates the ways in which rupture operates as a strategy of activist performance in Brazil, Russia, and the USA to constitute poetic publics and that challenge the conventional practices of political sense-making. In each paper, of central importance is the question of what particular ways performance can not only produce publics, but can also mobilize them in the pleasure of political action and of publicity itself.

Tony McCaffrey

Disability Performance : Art, Therapy or Exploitation?

This paper will concentrate on theatre performance involving people categorized as having intellectual impairments or disabilities and will make reference to specific video and audio examples: the work of the US director Robert Wilson with the autistic poet, Christopher Knowles, the work of Back to Back Theatre Company from Geelong, Australia and other contemporary examples of disability performance, including my own ongoing work as director of Different Light Theatre Company in Christchurch, New Zealand.

How do such performance practices seek to define themselves through their relationship with audience(s) and public(s)? What kind of public acts are these performances if we consider them as art, as therapy or as exploitation? If considered as art do they seek to confirm or question aesthetic and political assumptions about performance? If considered as therapy do they promise a form of healing practice for the performers and/or audience, or a kind of social therapy where normate society is reassured by being seen to include the marginalized and the other of disability? If considered as exploitation, who is being exploited? The performers by being exposed in a simulacrum of mainstream performance or the aesthetic of the freakshow, or the audience, encouraged to disable their critical faculties in favour of sentimental identification?

Are there other possibilities for disability performance which position such work more radically, transforming accepted notions of disability and performance for performers and audience alike? What might we gain from thinking of disability performance as a practice that creates its own counter-public?

Tim Edkins

Performing governance for the public

How are the public produced as observers of the unemployed? My paper investigates how New Labour has changed the way individuals are currently imagined to be helped back into work, and how unemployment is managed in Britain at present. I argue that they have done this by redesigning how individuals claim financial support from the state for unemployment. This now involves training that is ostensibly designed to speed up an individual’s reentry into work, but which also functions – regardless of when or whether they enter employment – to audit an individual’s narratives of work and its role within their life. I argue that going through processes such as mentoring requires that individuals convincingly perform a life narrative bound to work, for their mentor on a regular basis, in order to maintain financial support. I am interested in how this performance functions as a means of auditing that can be narrated to, and easily understood by, the public. I use Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s collaborative research, which draws together performance studies and critical management studies, to examine how requests like these – to give, and be ready at any moment to give, an account of oneself – function as part of a broader model of governance.

Tiina Rosenberg

Aesthetics of Activism and Activist Aesthetics: Contemporary Feminist Performance in Sweden

In the 2000s, Sweden has experienced a veritable explosion of feminist performing arts. Although feminist actions, theatre, shows and performance existed previously, feminist events with a distinct political and activist approach have emerged strongly in the current decade. Feminist culture festivals are held in rapid succession, and feminist performance, dance and theatre occasionally attract broader audiences. This popularization of feminist performing arts is related to the lively feminist activism in Sweden, but also to other social movements and community art projects openly criticising the right-wing political practices and promoting alternatives. In this paper, I will discuss a few examples of feminist activist performance in Sweden today.Current issues such as the decline of the Swedish welfare state, the aggressive neoliberal policies and its consequences, the US invasion of Iraq, globalisation, trafficking and so on, have led to a new collective political mobilisation and to new political coalitions where feminists and queer activists work together with the Swedish antiracist movement. To examine inequality in the vast field of race-related, class-based and sexuality-orientated gender and performance studies is linked to the intersectional perspective that has in recent years become a debated and, at least in theory, popular concept in Sweden. This paper connects this theoretical concept with politics and performance in contemporary Sweden.

Taqralik Partridge

Panel Abstract: This panel explores the urban storytelling and spoken word of Taqralik Partridge, Kinnie Starr and Ian Kamau. Their work, through a mix of language, vocal techniques, and movement, is culturally hybrid and politically charged.

As described by the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, cultures need to reach out to one another and to borrow from one another. Storytelling and spoken word create what the Chicana author and cultural theorist, Gloria Anzaldúa, called the third self which is greater than the sum of its distinct cultural parts. That hybrid self resists the unitary aspect of each new paradigm by straddling two or more cultures. Partridge, Starr and Kamau vocalize the rhythms of resistance and resolution that such straddling entails. By embodying the tensions between self and other, margin to centre, these artists cultivate a common ground of communication.

Hailing all publics presents storytelling and spoken word as expansive media of cultural exchange, turning personal and culturally-specific experience into the experience of those listening. As a result, the respective Inuit, First Nations, and African heritages of Partridge, Starr and Kamau influence diverse audiences. The acoustic spaces these artists construct are, in this sense, crucibles of new and renewed social relations which deny the primacy of Western commodity culture. At issue, however, is the power of performance practice. Can the word stop the Western clock of technological globalization? This panel questions the power of performance to intervene, reshape, and reinvigorate – transforming, as Michael Warner posits, the space of public life itself.

Tamara Roberts

I Need a Little Girl: Forging an Afro Asian Feminist Counterpublic

Panel Abstract: This panel interrogates Warnerian theorizations of counter-publics through various public sexualities, emphasizing the resistance and performative agency in diverse cultures and dissident sexualities. Roberts (UC-Berkeley) examines the ways that blues shouters forged a feminist counterpublic through coded lyrics and public-known private lifestyles, asking us what current intersections of black and Asian femininity and sexuality in contemporary blues performances tell us about what type of counter-public this merger may hail. Manuel-Garcia (U Chicago) examines tactile intimacy among heterosexual men at Parisian nightclubs to argue that appetites for male-female sex can sometimes be obliquely addressed through homosocial/erotic touch, and that music plays a role in lubricating the transfer of pleasure across modes and sexualities.

Snorton (Harvard) theorizes black down low sexual communities through the analytic of the glass closet: a public space characterized by both hypervisibility and opacity, allowing us to understand black sexuality as that which is already understood as deviant, while simultaneously read as mysterious and untenable in mediated space. Tyburczy (LA&M) locates sites wherein BDSM sexuality and slavery dangerously crisscross on the surface of objects. She posits sites that feature materials such as real Antebellum slave whips alongside objects of consensual pleasure/violence as proffering an aspirational counter-public perspective on the history of sexual equipment, the perversion and eroticization of power exchange, and the mutually constitutive relationship between histories of eroticism and histories of discipline. Finally, Mitchell (Northwestern) examines mixed-use sexual spaces in Brazil where public prostitution occurs amidst family activities, challenging the distinction between counter/publics by asking this analytic to account for the affective slipperiness of tolerance, acceptance, and secret pleasure of upper-class patrons.

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.

T.L. Cowan

Respondent

Panel Abstract: This panel brings an international perspective to contemporary performance poetry, considering poetry slams, poetry collectives, and internet-based performance poetry across a range of local and global sites. Through ethnographic work and discursive analysis, panelists will discuss how contemporary performance poetry represents itself and is represented, the extent to which it calls forth counter-publics, and the cultural significance of doing poetry publically among local collectives. Frost’s paper examines the discursive frames through which performance poetry is presented and represented online (in recordings and descriptive text), by individuals and institutions, in order to assess the role of the Internet in creating a global cultural commodity from an intimate local form. Helen Gregory explores the tendency of some U.S. slam participants to present slam as a counter-public or counter-hegemonic movement and questions the extent to which the form achieves this stated aim. In counterpoint, Susan Somers-Willett argues that the open, democratic counter-publics formed by slams have been co-opted by official public culture in racially-encoded ways. Lastly, Jenifer Vernon draws on ethnographic work conducted in San Diego to demonstrate how the specific cultural codes practiced by local poetry crews—such as naming conventions and performance rules—communicate a working-class ethos and generate an important cultural space in opposition to official public culture. Each panelist approaches these issues from the hybrid perspective of performer and critic, and the presentations will therefore combine those performative modes.

T.L. Cowan

Picking up at Take Back the Night: Feminist Anti-Violence Performance and the Erotics of Community Protest and Mourning

Panel Abstract: From torture chicks to female offenders to she-male monsters the displacement of women’s aggression onto deviant sexuality has obsessed contemporary culture and created a sexualized pathological public sphere. Mark Seltzer defined pathological public sphere (Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture) as the collective gathering around spectacularly wounded bodies that transform the very notion of sociality and public spectacle into wound culture. This panel discusses performative responses to this widespread obsession with the injured, disastrous collective body and how the gendered nature of this public sphere creates new contradictions and anxieties that generate a unique blend of terror and jouissance, fascination and horror (Braidotti). This panel consists of three papers:

– Dr Susanne Luhmann’s Performing Perpetrator Publics: Domesticating Female Nazi Perpetrators at Ravensbr‚ck,

– Dr Donia Mounsef’s Women, Torture, and the Banality of Jouissance,

– Dr T.L. Cowan’s Picking up at Take Back the Night: Feminist Anti-Violence Performance and the Erotics of Community Protest and Mourning.

T. Nikki Cesare

Barack Me Tonight: Re-Sounding Politics via the Interweb

Howard Dean’s barbaric yawp during the 2004 Democratic primaries made unquestionable the significance of the Internet to contemporary US politics. The first candidate to utilize fully the web for its support-raising capacity, Dean also recognized the Internet as a community that could shape public opinion. Yet the same apparatus that made him a viable candidate was at least partially responsible in derailing his campaign after his infamous Dean Scream reverberated from the Iowa caucuses to radio, television, and Internet sites across the country.

In the next US presidential election, the Internet became an indispensible resource, particularly via YouTube, which, after only coming into existence in 2005, co-sponsored Republican and Democratic debates. In addition to candidate-monitored sites and blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter updates, and Mike Gravel’s bizarre campaign videos, there simultaneously emerged, from the depths of Dean’s yell, musical responses to the candidates. This paper focuses on two of these responses: Will.I.Am’s collaged video of Obama’s Yes We Can speech and BarelyPolitical.com’s satirical commentary on the country’s infatuation-I Got a Crush on Obama performed by Obama Girl.

Remarkable about both videos is that they each emerged from the private sector but became ubiquitous, public components of the Obama campaign. Reading these videos against each other and through Jacques Attali, Theodor Adorno, and Susan McClary, and considering their relation to political outreach projects like Rock the Vote-as well as to surges of political potential in recent theatre, such as David Mamet’s Race and, somewhat less expectedly, Hollywood blockbusters, such as Avatar and District 9-I argue that these works represent a broader spectrum of community-raising and offer a specifically twenty-first-century genre of political activism in the virtual sphere.

Susanne Luhmann

Performing Perpetrator Publics: Domesticating Female Nazi Perpetrators at Ravensbrück

Panel Abstract: From torture chicks to female offenders to she-male monsters the displacement of women’s aggression onto deviant sexuality has obsessed contemporary culture and created a sexualized pathological public sphere. Mark Seltzer defined pathological public sphere (Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture) as the collective gathering around spectacularly wounded bodies that transform the very notion of sociality and public spectacle into wound culture. This panel discusses performative responses to this widespread obsession with the injured, disastrous collective body and how the gendered nature of this public sphere creates new contradictions and anxieties that generate a unique blend of terror and jouissance, fascination and horror (Braidotti). This panel consists of three papers:

– Dr Susanne Luhmann’s Performing Perpetrator Publics: Domesticating Female Nazi Perpetrators at Ravensbr‚ck,

– Dr Donia Mounsef’s Women, Torture, and the Banality of Jouissance,

– Dr T.L. Cowan’s Picking up at Take Back the Night: Feminist Anti-Violence Performance and the Erotics of Community Protest and Mourning.

Susanne Clausen

Ballet, 2009 – Performing normality in the face of crisis

This paper contextualises the research and production of Ballet, 2009, a filmed performance by Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen & Pavlo Kerestey). This project seeks to test the ideas of social choreography through the production of a filmed performance and an innovative engagement with the film archive at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, UK [MERL]. Social choreography describes a way of linking dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement to ideas about social order (Hewitt, 2005) providing a dynamic framework to explore the critical potentials and inter-relations between social and individual movement. Ballet engages with recent histories of rural filmmaking, linking everyday farming movements with the aesthetics of dance. Starting point is a series of archival films, made for British farmers as a means both for information and for propaganda, to provide warnings of contagion and nuclear catastrophe, describing procedure and instruction in the case of emergency. Performed by rural extras (local farmers and their families), asked to re-perform their own everyday lives in the rural landscape, these everyday performances of normality establish the scene for an imminent crisis.

Gestures and movements observed in these films were re-scripted into a new choreography of movement for camera. Filmed in a rural farming setting, a mixed group of dancers and non-dancers engages with specific filmic references, embedded in a visual narrative. The occurring movements increasingly reflect the dancers distance to the historical film material. This project also features a new collaboration with Canadian actor and director Michele Sereda.

Susan Somers-Willett

From Slam to Def Poetry Jam: The Racial Encoding of Poetry’s Publics

Panel Abstract: This panel brings an international perspective to contemporary performance poetry, considering poetry slams, poetry collectives, and internet-based performance poetry across a range of local and global sites. Through ethnographic work and discursive analysis, panelists will discuss how contemporary performance poetry represents itself and is represented, the extent to which it calls forth counter-publics, and the cultural significance of doing poetry publically among local collectives. Frost’s paper examines the discursive frames through which performance poetry is presented and represented online (in recordings and descriptive text), by individuals and institutions, in order to assess the role of the Internet in creating a global cultural commodity from an intimate local form. Helen Gregory explores the tendency of some U.S. slam participants to present slam as a counter-public or counter-hegemonic movement and questions the extent to which the form achieves this stated aim. In counterpoint, Susan Somers-Willett argues that the open, democratic counter-publics formed by slams have been co-opted by official public culture in racially-encoded ways. Lastly, Jenifer Vernon draws on ethnographic work conducted in San Diego to demonstrate how the specific cultural codes practiced by local poetry crews—such as naming conventions and performance rules—communicate a working-class ethos and generate an important cultural space in opposition to official public culture. Each panelist approaches these issues from the hybrid perspective of performer and critic, and the presentations will therefore combine those performative modes.

Susan Bennett