The Autumn issue of Platform, 'Objects of Engagement' (Vol 3, No 2), is now online, as is the CFP for the Spring 2009 issue, 'Staging Gender(s)'.
The current issue is based on the theme of the conference and it includes papers by some of the conference's contributors in addition to various other articles exploring the issue of objects and objectification.
See http://www.rhul.ac.uk/drama/platform/issues/Vol.3No.2/Vol3No2.html
Presentations' Abstracts
Below are the abstracts of the presentations given at Objects of Engagement conference on 12 June 2008, in addition to some information on the contributers. If you are one of the contributors and would like to add/edit your details please email us.
PAPER PRESENTATIONS:
BERNADETTE CRONIN (University of Exeter)
The Cabinet of Curiosities
Abstract
The Cabinet of Curiosities is based on the model of a conversation between a sound/artist and two performers, who perform objects from behind a 10ft x 5ft wooden cabinet consisting of 12 individually lit ‘mini-stages’, complete with individual pairs of red velvet curtains. The ‘objects’ can include organic and inorganic objects, body parts, organs (from animals), words and text fragments. The sound/artist is positioned with his table of self-designed instruments so that he can dialogue in the moment with the visual images the performers offer him and the performers in turn can respond to the sound images. Some of the starting points for this ‘conversation’ were the body: the questioning of ideas of inside and outside, the body as an envelope, body parts as puppets; paintings by Francis Bacon, 19th century dissection practices. While the performers work with individual scores in performance, the emphases are on non-narrative-based performance of objects, liveness of the conversation in the moment and the freedom of the spectator to create her/his own ‘objects’ with what emerges in performance. My paper will focus on the journey of the object in the context of this performance both for the performers and the spectators.
JENNY LAWSON (University of Leeds)
Dinner Table Engagement
Abstract
The dinner table has been prescribed with a complex set of rules and practices that govern the ‘act of eating’. My solo performance Dinner with Jenny (2008) is concerned with the objects and materials associated with the dinner table and popular cultural food practices of eating and dining. The audience are introduced to a small quirky table on wheels, Fanny Cradock’s green mashed potato and a woman obsessively sharpening a knife. The performance investigates the physicality and visual images inherent in popular cultural representations of food, and how these can be articulated in live performance. Throughout this paper Dinner with Jenny and dinner table objects, are used to address the following areas of my research:
The role of the female food personality in contemporary culture.
The relationship between space, the body and the dinner table
The role that food plays in the construction of social space.
Research interest
My practice based doctoral research investigates how performance practice might articulate popular cultural performances of food. To inform my practice I am drawing upon the media performances of popular cultural female food personalities such as cookery writer and celebrity television cook Nigella Lawson, and live popular food events such as the annual BBC Good Food Show. My research develops from the work of female performance artists engaging with food and the body such as Bobby Baker, Alicia Rios and Karen Finnely. Dinner with Jenny informs a trilogy of works that will be made throughout my PhD engaging with food in the following ways: eating food, making food and watching food. My research is particularly concerned with the relationship between women and food in contemporary culture and my theoretical frameworks include; feminist writings on the body, food & culture, visual culture and autobiography in performance.
Related Activities
I have devised and performed in a number solo, durational and site-specific performance works, including performances in kitchens and city centers as well as studio-based practices. I am also co-artistic director of Manchester based performance company Escape Theatre.
Email: pcjl@leeds.ac.uk
BRYCE LEASE (University of Kent at Canterbury)
Self as Object or Grotowski’s Perversion
Abstract
This paper interrogates the psychoanalytic notion that the self is an object. Jerzy Grotowski sought to transmit the actor’s self (as object) to an audience qua the method he coined Via Negativa, the process of stripping away an actor’s psychological and physical boundaries. From a Lacanian perspective, this search to reduce a socialized being to its natural impulses is properly perverse insofar as Grotowski disavows the subject-in-language’s inability to directly access the real of his desire. In this impulse, I locate the ‘ethical grandeur’ implicit in Grotowski’s method. What Grotowski is doing precisely at the moment he appears to be breaking down resistance to natural impulses is in fact its opposite; what Lacan called ‘lying in the guise of the truth’. Grotowski is ‘turning on its head’ the very logic of resistance to temptation. What Grotowski is really resisting is the human temptation to give way to pity in the presence of human suffering; Grotowski’s very resistance to this temptation in the presence of Cieslak’s suffering is transformed into the proof of his ethical grandeur: ‘to do my duty, I am ready to assume the heavy burden of inflicting pain on others’. Secondly, I look at the voice qua object. Giving special attention to Ryszard Cieslak’s performance in The Constant Prince, I interrogate the use of screaming as a corroboration with community; in other words, the voice qua object in Grotowski’s work not only fails to release the subject from his symbolic universe (freely allowing him to encounter the Real) it forecloses the very possibility of such an encounter. I conclude that the psychoanalytic object is precisely the one which cannot be transmitted in performance.
SOZITA GOUDOUNA (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Objecthood: From Deepest Stasis to Duratio
Abstract
The mid-1960s was a period of significant activity, debate, and ultimately crisis in the art world, as critics tried to come to terms with recent developments in the visual arts. The aesthetic focus shifted from the relation between an object and its representation to the relation between an art object (a representation) and its beholder. Parallel to that, post-war European and American sculptors became interested both in theatre, as a durational encounter and in the extended experience of time, which seemed part of the conventions of the stage, theatricality was the term that was used to describe this phenomenon. Theatricality turned into a polemical term in the criticism of modern sculpture, as in the essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ by the formalist art theorist Michael Fried. Fried applied his ideas on theatricality through the attendant term, ‘objecthood,’ for him ‘Art’ and ‘Objecthood’ (everything material that was not art) represented two adversary terms. His polemic was directed not against the theatre per se, but against certain types of painting and sculpture, ‘the new art of minimalism’ which he labeled ‘theatrical’, as regards the terms of its appeal to the viewer. This paper examines the intersection of critical discourses in the theatre and the visual arts, more specifically the notion of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and the modernist anti-theatrical impulse in the visual arts, in an attempt to formulate a basic framework for thinking about the different types of engagement with a timeless visual art object and a temporal theatrical work.
Research interest
"Breath: The Intersection of Critical Discourses in the Visual Arts and the Theatre"
This thesis examines Beckett's Breath (1969) in the spectrum of contemporary art practice, modernist art criticism and theories on theatricality, so as to comprehend Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and a purely visual representation. Moreover, I look at the distinctive influence of Beckett's oeuvre on contemporary art practice, by means of an inquiry into works of diverse artistic mediums, such as painting, sculpture, dance, video, performance, installation, conceptual and land art, that have as their subject matter the corporeal function of breathing.
Related Activities
Associate Editor, Curator, Director
Email: mailto:ozoavisor@gmail.coml.com
Link: http://quotequotidian.blogspot.com/tidian.blogspot.com/
CLARE DUFFY (Glasgow University)
Local Reality Expo on Hope Street
Abstract
Local Reality Expo on Hope Street
“This book makes the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as “queer time” and “queer space.” Judith Halberstam, 2005
This paper describes mimetic processes developed by exploring objects found in a specific corner of the world. They are everyday items, such as drainpipes and manhole covers, but also the big objects of Time and Space.
The first of these processes are extended periods of writing, at different times of the day and night, on the same public bench. I explore mimesis through the bench, as it is transformed into a ‘civic couch’.
These local objects are then re-presented through performance and linguistic mimesis 5 minutes walk from where they are found. This paper will refer to DVD documentation of the performance of Local Reality Expo on Hope Street, to ask how and why the objects of Time and Space could or should be ‘queered’.
Research interest
Theatrical form, playwriting, mimesis, queer theory, feminism, Walter Benjamin, British theatre 1880 - present
Related Activities
Freelance Playwright and founding member of Unlimited Theatre
Email: clarelduffy@hotmail.com
RICHARD ALLEN (Aberystwyth University)
Towards a Theatre of Objects: Theatre-Machines and the Violence of Transformation
Abstract
Object Theatre is a term that has been ghettoised as a sub-category of puppetry, a term often used to describe a performance style that contains the animation of utilitarian, or pre-existing objects rather than those constructed for theatrical effect (such as the puppet). This definition is a misrepresentation of the potential of what thinking through a theatre of ‘objects’ could offer the contemporary theatre maker. Through a reading of the theoretical, historic and aesthetic contexts of the Theatre-Machine as an exemplar form of object performance, this paper will attempt to re-access this perceived definition. It will conclude by considering how an engagement with the theories of the Theatre-Machine have informed my own practice based PhD through the realisation of various string-machines as an attempt to construct a contemporary ‘Bio-Object’ and how Theatre-Machines reorganise questions of the subject/object dichotomy.
Research interest
The use of the object in performance
Postdramatic theatre
The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor
Related Activities
Richard Allen is Research Assistant to Professor Adrian Kear at the Department Of Theatre, Film and Television at Aberystwyth University where he is undertaking a PhD in Performance Practice entitled Performing the Object/Avoiding the Subject: The Object as Postdramatic Gesture. He has a MA (Distinction) in the Visual Language of Performance from Wimbledon College of Art and a BA (First Class) in Drama from the University of Exeter.
Email: rka@aber.ac.uk
Link: richvizlang.blogspot.com
PAUL PIRIS (Central School of Speech and Drama)
Subject-Object relationship
Abstract
This paper explores the subject-object relationship between actors and puppets by using Sartre and Girard theories. For Sartre, an opposition exists between the notion of subject and object. Moreover, there is also fluidity between subject and object through the gaze. The subject-object relationship developed by Sartre is binary. Yet, puppetry implies three elements: the puppeteer, the puppet and the audience. Irrespective of whether the manipulation can be seen or not, the relationship is nonetheless triangular. Girard develops a triangular concept of the subject-object relationship that completes Sartre’s theory.
This paper will focus on the role of the gaze in the subject-object relationship arguing that, if the moving body represents life, the gaze represents consciousness. Unlike living being, a puppet does not have eyes and therefore cannot activate gaze. Yet, puppets on stage seem to be able to have a gaze. The problematic of the gaze of the puppet brings us back to the phenomenon of suspension of disbelief needed by the audience, in order to believe in the presence of a conscience within the puppet. Then I will concentrate this paper on the apparent contradiction between the lack of eyes and presence of gaze of the puppet. Finally, I will give an analysis of the role of the gaze between actors and puppet in the subject-object relationship.
Research interest
My research is intimately informed by my practice as a director who works with puppets.Throughout the years, I have integrated into my pieces, characters performed by puppets along with others performed by actors. This paper will be illustrated from video extracts of my current work on the relatioship between Performers and Puppets: The Role of the Gaze.
NESREEN HUSSEIN (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Material Bodies… Bodied Material: A Case of Subversion
Abstract
In May 2007 I took part in a performance art installation by Jerusalem-born visual artist Yael Davids. The piece titled A Line, A Sentence, A Word, was part of the group exhibition Memorial to the Iraq War at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The exhibition interrogated the notion of “memorial” to a conflict that has not yet ended, inviting twenty six artists from Europe, the US and the Middle East to propose their responses to that untimely concept. Davids’ response was a performance installation piece that combined the notions of memorial and protest. It investigated the existential energy of expression and protest in a situation when one cannot protest and cannot express, representing it in an architectural construction extended in time and space. Touching on Lacan’s notion of the gaze and on Hegel's “negativity,” the paper proposed a reflection on Davids’ practice through my experience as a participant in one of her pieces, focusing on the representation of the human body as a site of ambiguity and paradoxes. The paper investigated how this representation influences the perception of the body as 'material,' challenging our understanding of it as a coherent entity. Davids' performance installations confront spectators with a destabilizing experience by deconstructing the familiar demarcation of body and object and by negotiating a presence/absence dialectic. Through this investigation, the paper tried to raise the following questions: what are the boundaries of body materiality? Can the object exchange power and status with the subject? What does the meeting of human bodies and inert object signify? And does this engagement entail a devaluation of the body, or transcendence?
This is paper has been reworked and developed, and is now published in Platform's special issue 'Objects of Engagement' (Vol 3, No 2, Autumn 2008) under the title 'Seeing through the Wall: Objectification between Resistance and Acceptance.'
It's available in http://www.rhul.ac.uk/drama/platform/issues/Vol.3No.2/Vol3No2.html
Research interest
My current research is informed by my former training in visual arts and scenography. It stems from my wider interest in materiality in relation to human consciousness in the performance field, and how this helps to articulate ways of seeing and understanding. My PhD thesis focuses on the process of interaction between the human body and physical material; how it affects our perception and understanding of the body and object as coherent and stable, and what meanings and values this interaction instigates. The thesis attempts to assess the status of the body and the subject within different modalities of presentation where their presence and position are displaced with that of the object. The research looks at 'objectification' as a corporeal process negotiated in performance to create meaning, language and to critically evaluate human subjective experience.
Related activities
In addition to conducting a PhD research project at Royal Holloway, I am also a theatre designer and a Visiting Tutor at the Department of Drama and Theatre at RHUL. I'm a Member-at-Large of ATHE's Performance Studies Focus Group (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) in 2008/09.
Link: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/drama/platform/issues/Vol.3No.2/Vol3No2.html
Email: n.hussein@rhul.ac.uk
PERFORMANCE DEMOSTRATIONS:
GRANT TYLER PETERSON (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Performing Cancer
Abstract
This is a solo performance piece which personally explores a recent two-year battle with a rare and aggressive stage IV cancer. Using a DVD player, a large screen and various physical artefacts, including distributing everyone’s own ‘cancer rock’, the interactive piece is a humorous and compelling 60 minute performance about the challenges—and hidden joys—of facing cancer in the 21st century. Grant Tyler is an award-winning actor and musical theatre performer from the United States whose performer training became instrumental in his survival against cancer. His journey is a dramatic one and the piece explores health care dilemmas, life-and-death decisions, and how the youtube generation is changing what it means to be a young cancer patient. Is this your living nightmare? Or a promising hope for future cancer patients?
Link: http://www.cancerous.biz/
STEPHANIA MYLONA (University of Surrey)
Contraction: breaking the object-inverting the concept
Abstract
This lecture demonstration examined the process of engaging in dance practice with an older codified dance movement – Martha Graham’s principle of contraction – for exploring its choreographic potential today. My dance practice simultaneously relates to and resists Graham’s principle of contraction. Graham’s contraction is violated by the process of engagement. Recontextualizing contraction movement in dance from modernity to postmodernity instigates its deconstruction through fragmentation. My practice fragments the body and creates multiple simultaneous contractions which further distort the shapes and rhythms of the dancing body.
Research interest
This practice-based research explores the potential of contraction in movement, choreography and dance aesthetics. Distortion and intensification which contraction movement instigates are examined in both theory and practice in order to unpack relations of content and context.
Email: s.mylona@surrey.ac.uk
DIEGO PELLECCHIA (Royal Holloway, University of London)
The Fan of Noh Theatre: Object of Encounter
Abstract
PAPER PRESENTATIONS:
BERNADETTE CRONIN (University of Exeter)
The Cabinet of Curiosities
Abstract
The Cabinet of Curiosities is based on the model of a conversation between a sound/artist and two performers, who perform objects from behind a 10ft x 5ft wooden cabinet consisting of 12 individually lit ‘mini-stages’, complete with individual pairs of red velvet curtains. The ‘objects’ can include organic and inorganic objects, body parts, organs (from animals), words and text fragments. The sound/artist is positioned with his table of self-designed instruments so that he can dialogue in the moment with the visual images the performers offer him and the performers in turn can respond to the sound images. Some of the starting points for this ‘conversation’ were the body: the questioning of ideas of inside and outside, the body as an envelope, body parts as puppets; paintings by Francis Bacon, 19th century dissection practices. While the performers work with individual scores in performance, the emphases are on non-narrative-based performance of objects, liveness of the conversation in the moment and the freedom of the spectator to create her/his own ‘objects’ with what emerges in performance. My paper will focus on the journey of the object in the context of this performance both for the performers and the spectators.
JENNY LAWSON (University of Leeds)
Dinner Table Engagement
Abstract
The dinner table has been prescribed with a complex set of rules and practices that govern the ‘act of eating’. My solo performance Dinner with Jenny (2008) is concerned with the objects and materials associated with the dinner table and popular cultural food practices of eating and dining. The audience are introduced to a small quirky table on wheels, Fanny Cradock’s green mashed potato and a woman obsessively sharpening a knife. The performance investigates the physicality and visual images inherent in popular cultural representations of food, and how these can be articulated in live performance. Throughout this paper Dinner with Jenny and dinner table objects, are used to address the following areas of my research:
The role of the female food personality in contemporary culture.
The relationship between space, the body and the dinner table
The role that food plays in the construction of social space.
Research interest
My practice based doctoral research investigates how performance practice might articulate popular cultural performances of food. To inform my practice I am drawing upon the media performances of popular cultural female food personalities such as cookery writer and celebrity television cook Nigella Lawson, and live popular food events such as the annual BBC Good Food Show. My research develops from the work of female performance artists engaging with food and the body such as Bobby Baker, Alicia Rios and Karen Finnely. Dinner with Jenny informs a trilogy of works that will be made throughout my PhD engaging with food in the following ways: eating food, making food and watching food. My research is particularly concerned with the relationship between women and food in contemporary culture and my theoretical frameworks include; feminist writings on the body, food & culture, visual culture and autobiography in performance.
Related Activities
I have devised and performed in a number solo, durational and site-specific performance works, including performances in kitchens and city centers as well as studio-based practices. I am also co-artistic director of Manchester based performance company Escape Theatre.
Email: pcjl@leeds.ac.uk
BRYCE LEASE (University of Kent at Canterbury)
Self as Object or Grotowski’s Perversion
Abstract
This paper interrogates the psychoanalytic notion that the self is an object. Jerzy Grotowski sought to transmit the actor’s self (as object) to an audience qua the method he coined Via Negativa, the process of stripping away an actor’s psychological and physical boundaries. From a Lacanian perspective, this search to reduce a socialized being to its natural impulses is properly perverse insofar as Grotowski disavows the subject-in-language’s inability to directly access the real of his desire. In this impulse, I locate the ‘ethical grandeur’ implicit in Grotowski’s method. What Grotowski is doing precisely at the moment he appears to be breaking down resistance to natural impulses is in fact its opposite; what Lacan called ‘lying in the guise of the truth’. Grotowski is ‘turning on its head’ the very logic of resistance to temptation. What Grotowski is really resisting is the human temptation to give way to pity in the presence of human suffering; Grotowski’s very resistance to this temptation in the presence of Cieslak’s suffering is transformed into the proof of his ethical grandeur: ‘to do my duty, I am ready to assume the heavy burden of inflicting pain on others’. Secondly, I look at the voice qua object. Giving special attention to Ryszard Cieslak’s performance in The Constant Prince, I interrogate the use of screaming as a corroboration with community; in other words, the voice qua object in Grotowski’s work not only fails to release the subject from his symbolic universe (freely allowing him to encounter the Real) it forecloses the very possibility of such an encounter. I conclude that the psychoanalytic object is precisely the one which cannot be transmitted in performance.
SOZITA GOUDOUNA (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Objecthood: From Deepest Stasis to Duratio
Abstract
The mid-1960s was a period of significant activity, debate, and ultimately crisis in the art world, as critics tried to come to terms with recent developments in the visual arts. The aesthetic focus shifted from the relation between an object and its representation to the relation between an art object (a representation) and its beholder. Parallel to that, post-war European and American sculptors became interested both in theatre, as a durational encounter and in the extended experience of time, which seemed part of the conventions of the stage, theatricality was the term that was used to describe this phenomenon. Theatricality turned into a polemical term in the criticism of modern sculpture, as in the essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ by the formalist art theorist Michael Fried. Fried applied his ideas on theatricality through the attendant term, ‘objecthood,’ for him ‘Art’ and ‘Objecthood’ (everything material that was not art) represented two adversary terms. His polemic was directed not against the theatre per se, but against certain types of painting and sculpture, ‘the new art of minimalism’ which he labeled ‘theatrical’, as regards the terms of its appeal to the viewer. This paper examines the intersection of critical discourses in the theatre and the visual arts, more specifically the notion of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and the modernist anti-theatrical impulse in the visual arts, in an attempt to formulate a basic framework for thinking about the different types of engagement with a timeless visual art object and a temporal theatrical work.
Research interest
"Breath: The Intersection of Critical Discourses in the Visual Arts and the Theatre"
This thesis examines Beckett's Breath (1969) in the spectrum of contemporary art practice, modernist art criticism and theories on theatricality, so as to comprehend Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and a purely visual representation. Moreover, I look at the distinctive influence of Beckett's oeuvre on contemporary art practice, by means of an inquiry into works of diverse artistic mediums, such as painting, sculpture, dance, video, performance, installation, conceptual and land art, that have as their subject matter the corporeal function of breathing.
Related Activities
Associate Editor, Curator, Director
Email: mailto:ozoavisor@gmail.coml.com
Link: http://quotequotidian.blogspot.com/tidian.blogspot.com/
CLARE DUFFY (Glasgow University)
Local Reality Expo on Hope Street
Abstract
Local Reality Expo on Hope Street
“This book makes the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as “queer time” and “queer space.” Judith Halberstam, 2005
This paper describes mimetic processes developed by exploring objects found in a specific corner of the world. They are everyday items, such as drainpipes and manhole covers, but also the big objects of Time and Space.
The first of these processes are extended periods of writing, at different times of the day and night, on the same public bench. I explore mimesis through the bench, as it is transformed into a ‘civic couch’.
These local objects are then re-presented through performance and linguistic mimesis 5 minutes walk from where they are found. This paper will refer to DVD documentation of the performance of Local Reality Expo on Hope Street, to ask how and why the objects of Time and Space could or should be ‘queered’.
Research interest
Theatrical form, playwriting, mimesis, queer theory, feminism, Walter Benjamin, British theatre 1880 - present
Related Activities
Freelance Playwright and founding member of Unlimited Theatre
Email: clarelduffy@hotmail.com
RICHARD ALLEN (Aberystwyth University)
Towards a Theatre of Objects: Theatre-Machines and the Violence of Transformation
Abstract
Object Theatre is a term that has been ghettoised as a sub-category of puppetry, a term often used to describe a performance style that contains the animation of utilitarian, or pre-existing objects rather than those constructed for theatrical effect (such as the puppet). This definition is a misrepresentation of the potential of what thinking through a theatre of ‘objects’ could offer the contemporary theatre maker. Through a reading of the theoretical, historic and aesthetic contexts of the Theatre-Machine as an exemplar form of object performance, this paper will attempt to re-access this perceived definition. It will conclude by considering how an engagement with the theories of the Theatre-Machine have informed my own practice based PhD through the realisation of various string-machines as an attempt to construct a contemporary ‘Bio-Object’ and how Theatre-Machines reorganise questions of the subject/object dichotomy.
Research interest
The use of the object in performance
Postdramatic theatre
The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor
Related Activities
Richard Allen is Research Assistant to Professor Adrian Kear at the Department Of Theatre, Film and Television at Aberystwyth University where he is undertaking a PhD in Performance Practice entitled Performing the Object/Avoiding the Subject: The Object as Postdramatic Gesture. He has a MA (Distinction) in the Visual Language of Performance from Wimbledon College of Art and a BA (First Class) in Drama from the University of Exeter.
Email: rka@aber.ac.uk
Link: richvizlang.blogspot.com
PAUL PIRIS (Central School of Speech and Drama)
Subject-Object relationship
Abstract
This paper explores the subject-object relationship between actors and puppets by using Sartre and Girard theories. For Sartre, an opposition exists between the notion of subject and object. Moreover, there is also fluidity between subject and object through the gaze. The subject-object relationship developed by Sartre is binary. Yet, puppetry implies three elements: the puppeteer, the puppet and the audience. Irrespective of whether the manipulation can be seen or not, the relationship is nonetheless triangular. Girard develops a triangular concept of the subject-object relationship that completes Sartre’s theory.
This paper will focus on the role of the gaze in the subject-object relationship arguing that, if the moving body represents life, the gaze represents consciousness. Unlike living being, a puppet does not have eyes and therefore cannot activate gaze. Yet, puppets on stage seem to be able to have a gaze. The problematic of the gaze of the puppet brings us back to the phenomenon of suspension of disbelief needed by the audience, in order to believe in the presence of a conscience within the puppet. Then I will concentrate this paper on the apparent contradiction between the lack of eyes and presence of gaze of the puppet. Finally, I will give an analysis of the role of the gaze between actors and puppet in the subject-object relationship.
Research interest
My research is intimately informed by my practice as a director who works with puppets.Throughout the years, I have integrated into my pieces, characters performed by puppets along with others performed by actors. This paper will be illustrated from video extracts of my current work on the relatioship between Performers and Puppets: The Role of the Gaze.
NESREEN HUSSEIN (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Material Bodies… Bodied Material: A Case of Subversion
Abstract
In May 2007 I took part in a performance art installation by Jerusalem-born visual artist Yael Davids. The piece titled A Line, A Sentence, A Word, was part of the group exhibition Memorial to the Iraq War at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The exhibition interrogated the notion of “memorial” to a conflict that has not yet ended, inviting twenty six artists from Europe, the US and the Middle East to propose their responses to that untimely concept. Davids’ response was a performance installation piece that combined the notions of memorial and protest. It investigated the existential energy of expression and protest in a situation when one cannot protest and cannot express, representing it in an architectural construction extended in time and space. Touching on Lacan’s notion of the gaze and on Hegel's “negativity,” the paper proposed a reflection on Davids’ practice through my experience as a participant in one of her pieces, focusing on the representation of the human body as a site of ambiguity and paradoxes. The paper investigated how this representation influences the perception of the body as 'material,' challenging our understanding of it as a coherent entity. Davids' performance installations confront spectators with a destabilizing experience by deconstructing the familiar demarcation of body and object and by negotiating a presence/absence dialectic. Through this investigation, the paper tried to raise the following questions: what are the boundaries of body materiality? Can the object exchange power and status with the subject? What does the meeting of human bodies and inert object signify? And does this engagement entail a devaluation of the body, or transcendence?
This is paper has been reworked and developed, and is now published in Platform's special issue 'Objects of Engagement' (Vol 3, No 2, Autumn 2008) under the title 'Seeing through the Wall: Objectification between Resistance and Acceptance.'
It's available in http://www.rhul.ac.uk/drama/platform/issues/Vol.3No.2/Vol3No2.html
Research interest
My current research is informed by my former training in visual arts and scenography. It stems from my wider interest in materiality in relation to human consciousness in the performance field, and how this helps to articulate ways of seeing and understanding. My PhD thesis focuses on the process of interaction between the human body and physical material; how it affects our perception and understanding of the body and object as coherent and stable, and what meanings and values this interaction instigates. The thesis attempts to assess the status of the body and the subject within different modalities of presentation where their presence and position are displaced with that of the object. The research looks at 'objectification' as a corporeal process negotiated in performance to create meaning, language and to critically evaluate human subjective experience.
Related activities
In addition to conducting a PhD research project at Royal Holloway, I am also a theatre designer and a Visiting Tutor at the Department of Drama and Theatre at RHUL. I'm a Member-at-Large of ATHE's Performance Studies Focus Group (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) in 2008/09.
Link: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/drama/platform/issues/Vol.3No.2/Vol3No2.html
Email: n.hussein@rhul.ac.uk
PERFORMANCE DEMOSTRATIONS:
GRANT TYLER PETERSON (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Performing Cancer
Abstract
This is a solo performance piece which personally explores a recent two-year battle with a rare and aggressive stage IV cancer. Using a DVD player, a large screen and various physical artefacts, including distributing everyone’s own ‘cancer rock’, the interactive piece is a humorous and compelling 60 minute performance about the challenges—and hidden joys—of facing cancer in the 21st century. Grant Tyler is an award-winning actor and musical theatre performer from the United States whose performer training became instrumental in his survival against cancer. His journey is a dramatic one and the piece explores health care dilemmas, life-and-death decisions, and how the youtube generation is changing what it means to be a young cancer patient. Is this your living nightmare? Or a promising hope for future cancer patients?
Link: http://www.cancerous.biz/
STEPHANIA MYLONA (University of Surrey)
Contraction: breaking the object-inverting the concept
Abstract
This lecture demonstration examined the process of engaging in dance practice with an older codified dance movement – Martha Graham’s principle of contraction – for exploring its choreographic potential today. My dance practice simultaneously relates to and resists Graham’s principle of contraction. Graham’s contraction is violated by the process of engagement. Recontextualizing contraction movement in dance from modernity to postmodernity instigates its deconstruction through fragmentation. My practice fragments the body and creates multiple simultaneous contractions which further distort the shapes and rhythms of the dancing body.
Research interest
This practice-based research explores the potential of contraction in movement, choreography and dance aesthetics. Distortion and intensification which contraction movement instigates are examined in both theory and practice in order to unpack relations of content and context.
Email: s.mylona@surrey.ac.uk
DIEGO PELLECCHIA (Royal Holloway, University of London)
The Fan of Noh Theatre: Object of Encounter
Abstract
Japanese Noh theatre is characterized by the minimalism of its scenography, since the pine tree and bamboo painted on the back and side walls are the only most prominent fixed set-design. The spare properties, usually reduced in size, have a synecdochal function more than a realistic one. The fan (ōgi) carried by the actors is the most important property: painted with motives that allude to the status of the character, the fan is a multipurpose object, focus of the dance and catalyst of the attention of the audience. Through the fan, the character expresses actions, thoughts, feelings with movements that have different degrees of realism; at the same time the fan is the medium through which the character conveys and materializes his inner feelings, or the magic stick that blurs the edges of the bodily presence of the actor and the extra-ordinary universe of the character. The actor manipulates the fan through patterns of set movements called kata, which are usually multipurpose: the same kata can achieve different meanings depending on the context in which it is used and on the gaze that the spectator casts on it. Not having a fixed vocabulary through which the audience can read and translate the actor’s symbolic system, the reading and interpretation of the kata is left to the audience. The paper has been published in the current issue of PLATFORM, the postgraduate eJournal of the Drama & Theatre Department of Royal Holloway University of London, and it is available here: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/drama/platform/issues/Vol.3No.2/Vol3No2.html
Research interests
Diego's research looks at the reception of Noh theatre in Europe and its impact on European theatre practitioners from the late 19th century until today particularly focusing onthe ethics of traditional Noh training methods.
Related activities
Besides being a young academic, Diego is one of the few non-Japanese extensively training in Noh dance and chant. In May 2007, he has performed on the Kongonogakudo stage in Kyoto, Japan both in solo pieces and in the chorus of a full Noh performance. Diego is member of the International Noh Institute, a branch of the Udaka-kai open to the foreigners who want to train in Noh according to the traditional methods of the Kongoh school.
Email: D.Pellecchia@rhul.ac.uk
WORKSHOPS:
PABLO PAKULA (ACCIDENTAL COLLECTIVE)
Object/Subject
Abstract
The workshop will investigate ways in which we ascribe meaning and importance to certain objects, and why they become repositories for our personal and collective memories/histories. How do we make these emotional connections? How can they be explored as the stimulus for performance? What happens when they are playfully subverted? What is the potential in exploiting the friction between reality/biography and lies/imagination? What are the implications for the audience?Please note that participants in this workshop are asked to bring two objects, one which has some degree of personal significance, and one which does not.
LOTOS COLLECTIVE – Live Art performance company
Assumed History, Invented Identities. Invented Histories, Assumed Identity
Abstract
The workshop will explore object-based dramaturgy, reimagining a collection of objects into a new mythos, unlocking untold narratives and functions and developing an improvised performance around an assumed/invented identity with an assumed/invented object. The workshop will take the form of a practical performance-based workshop in which three characters, Rag, Bone and the Archivist will facilitate and interact with the participants or Archive Assistants.
Link: http://www.lotoscollective.org.uk/
CHRIS CRICKMAY and ELLEN KILSGAARD
Improvisation, the Body and Objects in Performance
(session included a participatory workshop and live showing of an excerpt from, "Oh Monster", a solo performance piece devised by Ellen Kilsgaard and Chris Crickmay)
Abstract
The workshop specifically addressed one’s own flow of attention as source and guide to movement improvisation and work with a world of objects. The question is how to maintain a state of deep concentration in the body, whilst simultaneously connecting (in an imaginative and feeling way) with the objects, spaces, and other ingredients that constitute one’s surroundings; also how to approach working with chosen everyday objects ‘in their own right’, liberating them from their familiar use and identity and allowing a rich field of sensation and association to build up around them. The larger issue addressed is how to find some sort of personal reality and depth in one's own creative work. In my experience, this arrives, through 'embodiment' (realising one's own physicality), through a kind of conversation with one's materials and through listening imaginatively to what emerges.
Research interest
The above description of my workshop pretty much describes my research interest just now as applied to making performances, where the body (in movement), objects and spaces are the predominant ingredients. But a wider account of my interests may be found in my two books written with Miranda Tufnell - these are: Body Space Image: notes towards improvisation and performance, Dance books, 1990. and A Widening Field: journeys in body and imagination, Dance Books, 2004.
Related Activities
Installation work, teaching in colleges and in public workshops and writing
Email: kbs20@dial.pipex.com
Link: Miranda Tufnell's Website gives some current info. on our joint workshops: www.mirandatufnell.co.uk
Research interests
Diego's research looks at the reception of Noh theatre in Europe and its impact on European theatre practitioners from the late 19th century until today particularly focusing onthe ethics of traditional Noh training methods.
Related activities
Besides being a young academic, Diego is one of the few non-Japanese extensively training in Noh dance and chant. In May 2007, he has performed on the Kongonogakudo stage in Kyoto, Japan both in solo pieces and in the chorus of a full Noh performance. Diego is member of the International Noh Institute, a branch of the Udaka-kai open to the foreigners who want to train in Noh according to the traditional methods of the Kongoh school.
Email: D.Pellecchia@rhul.ac.uk
WORKSHOPS:
PABLO PAKULA (ACCIDENTAL COLLECTIVE)
Object/Subject
Abstract
The workshop will investigate ways in which we ascribe meaning and importance to certain objects, and why they become repositories for our personal and collective memories/histories. How do we make these emotional connections? How can they be explored as the stimulus for performance? What happens when they are playfully subverted? What is the potential in exploiting the friction between reality/biography and lies/imagination? What are the implications for the audience?Please note that participants in this workshop are asked to bring two objects, one which has some degree of personal significance, and one which does not.
LOTOS COLLECTIVE – Live Art performance company
Assumed History, Invented Identities. Invented Histories, Assumed Identity
Abstract
The workshop will explore object-based dramaturgy, reimagining a collection of objects into a new mythos, unlocking untold narratives and functions and developing an improvised performance around an assumed/invented identity with an assumed/invented object. The workshop will take the form of a practical performance-based workshop in which three characters, Rag, Bone and the Archivist will facilitate and interact with the participants or Archive Assistants.
Link: http://www.lotoscollective.org.uk/
CHRIS CRICKMAY and ELLEN KILSGAARD
Improvisation, the Body and Objects in Performance
(session included a participatory workshop and live showing of an excerpt from, "Oh Monster", a solo performance piece devised by Ellen Kilsgaard and Chris Crickmay)
Abstract
The workshop specifically addressed one’s own flow of attention as source and guide to movement improvisation and work with a world of objects. The question is how to maintain a state of deep concentration in the body, whilst simultaneously connecting (in an imaginative and feeling way) with the objects, spaces, and other ingredients that constitute one’s surroundings; also how to approach working with chosen everyday objects ‘in their own right’, liberating them from their familiar use and identity and allowing a rich field of sensation and association to build up around them. The larger issue addressed is how to find some sort of personal reality and depth in one's own creative work. In my experience, this arrives, through 'embodiment' (realising one's own physicality), through a kind of conversation with one's materials and through listening imaginatively to what emerges.
Research interest
The above description of my workshop pretty much describes my research interest just now as applied to making performances, where the body (in movement), objects and spaces are the predominant ingredients. But a wider account of my interests may be found in my two books written with Miranda Tufnell - these are: Body Space Image: notes towards improvisation and performance, Dance books, 1990. and A Widening Field: journeys in body and imagination, Dance Books, 2004.
Related Activities
Installation work, teaching in colleges and in public workshops and writing
Email: kbs20@dial.pipex.com
Link: Miranda Tufnell's Website gives some current info. on our joint workshops: www.mirandatufnell.co.uk
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