Conference Abstracts and Biographies
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Conference Abstracts and Biographies Listed in alphabetical order by contributor’s surname TaPRA2009 Organizers at the University of Plymouth: Dr Lee Miller Dr Roberta Mock Dr Victor Ramirez Ladron de Guevara www.plymouth.ac.uk/arts/theatre Siân Adieshiah (Performance Identity Community Working Group) University of Lincoln “I just die for some authority! A little touch of leadership, a bit of bracing tyranny!”: Barriers to Utopia in Howard Brenton’s Greenland Written and performed just after Margaret Thatcher’s third election victory in Britain in 1987, Howard Brenton’s final play in his Utopian trilogy, Greenland is an isolated example during this period of a Left playwright’s attempt to construct a utopian future on stage. The second act of Greenland partially resembles classical utopian fiction and in doing so, has led some commentators to dismiss the play as tedious, static and lacking in dramatic interest. The act’s absence of conflict, lack of historicism, and the contentment of its inhabitants have been cited as reasons for its alleged dullness. This interpretation to some extent concurs with the character, Severan-Severan, whose view is that misery and suffering are essential to the human condition and that liberation is a living death. However, this approach neglects a more complex engagement with utopia that is present in the play. Audiences – along with the non-utopian character, Joan – respond to Greenland in a way that can be illuminated by Frederic Jameson’s idea of the ‘terror of obliteration,’ an idea that considers our hostility to utopia to be based upon the inconceivability of altogether different notions of subjectivity available in utopia. A second obstruction to engaging utopia is considered to be related to genre. In Greenland’s resemblance to the sanctioned temporary festivities of green world comedy, it undermines genre expectations by removing temporal and ideological delimitations. This paper will explore ways in which Greenland exposes psycho-political and genre- related barriers to utopia, barriers that frame the audience’s view of the play, and barriers that are additionally exposed and critiqued as part of the non-utopian condition. Siân Adiseshiah is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. Before this she was at the University of Birmingham where she completed a BA, MPhil, and PhD. Previous to this, she completed a Ruskin Diploma in Literature at Ruskin College, Oxford. Her research interests are in modern and contemporary drama, utopian studies and gender theory. She has published journal articles and book chapters on Caryl Churchill and is in the process of publishing a book with Cambridge Scholars Publications entitled Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill, which is due out at the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010. Aristita I. Albacan (New Technologies for Theatre & Performance Working Group) University of Hull Intermediality and Spectatorship in the Age of the Televisual & Digital: The case of Robert Lepage Theatre Work The paper aims to draw mainly on completed PhD research by following up Robert Lepage’s proposition – McLuhanian in its nature – that new media (film, TV, video, Internet, etc) and their respective technologies of reproduction, alter substantially the ways in which we see, experience and practice theatre . Throughout the directorial/auctorial practice and work developed in the past three decades and a half, Lepage proposed an integrative perspective upon the relationship between technology and performance, as opposed to the traditional and unfortunately still rather widely circulated approach that reads the ‘live’ and the ‘mediated’ as ontologically different and oppositional within performance. TaPRA 2009 1 The paper looks at five solo theatre performances developed by Quebecois director Robert Lepage in the past three decades – Vinci (1985), Needles and Opium (1991), Elsinore (1997), Dark Side of the Moon (2000) and Project Andersen (2005) – and interrogates the ways in which different media and their respective technologies impact both upon the processes of theatre making and theatre reception, using as key concepts the notions of intermediality (Balme, Boenisch), remediation (Bolter & Grusin) and distance in spectatorship (Daphna Ben Chaim). The performances in discussion were all developed as original material and works in progress and presented to audiences worldwide, throughout several years, with a highly positive impact. The media used within performances -varying widely from painting and photography, cinema, video or TV, to Internet and WWW, etc – were explored throughout the creative processes as themes, technologies and in terms of their aesthetic and/ or narrative conventions. The main hypothesis of the present paper is that intermediality, understood both as a strategy of mise-en-scene - imbedded in various ways within the process of creation - and as a visible as a perceptual outcome, in performance, is situated at the core of Robert Lepage’s theatre practice and the reason behind the (highly) positive response coming from different audiences, all over the world. The intermediality of Lepage’s theatrical proposition is, also, what makes his work highly relevant as a potential model of work in the new and rapidly changing theatrical landscape of the twenty- first century. By intermediality I understand an effect upon the spectator accomplished through the meeting and (most of often than not) challenging of the expectations of contemporary audience, through the use of twin logic of remediation (immediacy and hypermediacy) in performance. Aristita I. Albacan is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Hull. In the past 15 years Aristita worked as a theatre director and project manager on the independent/ alternative theatre scene in Romania, US and Germany. Between 2003 and 2005 Aristita taught a course in contemporary theatre-making at the University of Mainz, Germany. Ric Allsopp (Directors/Collectives Working Group) University of the Arts, Berlin/ ArtEZ, Arnhem Collaborative and Solo Dance Authorship This paper will explore tensions between solo and collaborative approaches to choreography and their implications for a poetics of contemporary choreographic and performance practice. Examining the compositional methods of some current European choreographers, the paper will draw on the recent choreographic practices of Martin Nachbar, Nik Haffner, William Forsythe and the Catalan company Mal Pelo. It will identify a number of theoretical tensions and questions from which distinctions between individual, solo and collaborative methods that underpin the choreographer's respective working strategies can be derived. Together the terms 'solo', 'dance' and 'authorship' might conventionally be understood as the individual authoring of solo dance, and stand apart from a collaborative or collective practice that would be generated by at least two or more people. In the context of contemporary and emergent practice, the three terms can equally be read or understood as a nexus of unstable and contested meanings. They suggest a mode of inquiry into embodied compositional practice that separates the individual terms - solo/ dance/ authorship - and their possible relationships, a territory signified by the slash that indicates both difference and interdependency. This sense of difference and interdependency is also a dynamic of collaborative and collective practice. Both the terms 'solo' and 'collaborative' can also TaPRA 2009 2 be equally read for what they might exclude or veil: collaboration, participation; independence, singularity. The complex poetics that emerges from such conflation (as evidenced in the work of Nachbar, Haffner, Forsythe and Mal Pelo) is further framed in relation to contemporary notions of 'insideness' derived from a poetics of language as formulated by Lyn Hejinian, Gerald L. Bruns and others associated with language poetry. Dr. Ric Allsopp is a co-founder and joint editor of Performance Research, a quarterly international journal of contemporary performance (pub. London & New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis). He is currently editing an issue of Performance Research on 'Transplantations' (2009) with the artist and film-maker Phillip Warnell and has recently edited 'On Choreography' (2008) with André Lepecki and, as a contribution to Documenta XII (2007), the Performance Research 'Lexicon'. He is currently a Visiting Professor at HZT/University of the Arts, Berlin (MA in Solo-Dance-Authorship) and at ArtEZ, Arnhem (MA in Choreography). Margaret Ames (Applied and Social Theatre Working Group) University of Aberystwyth Untrained Beauty How might the inscription of disability in bodies reveal radical beauty and redefine new performance in rural Wales? How might the disabled artist communicate specific artistic visions and proceed through the creative process? How might asking these questions through practice, contribute to the process of a minority culture defining itself within Britain? My questions are asked through the practice of a group called Cyrff Ystwyth who work in Aberystwyth University to create new performance. Cyrff Ystwyth members are local to Ceredigion in the west of Wales. Some performers are disabled and some are not, none are trained. This work asks how can we redefine perceptions of the beautiful in the dancing body, and how might we instate our cultural and personal experiences through the making of art that may present alternative values within dominant