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Conference 2O18 Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Drama (May 31 - June 3 2018)

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Conference 2O18 Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Drama (May 31 - June 3 2018) German Society for Contemporary Drama in English Conference 2o18 Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Drama (May 31 - June 3 2018) University of Hildesheim Preface Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary English Drama In an increasingly news-saturated world – or even, a news-controlled one – contemporary Western social and cultural discourse is preoccupied with narratives of fear and anxiety. Especially afer the events of 11 September 2001, there has been a signifcant increase in plays and productions representing events, contexts, people, and situations that relate to these themes. Meanwhile, we are encouraged to be afeared of: the anonymous or digital other, the unknown or unexplainable (such as disappearing planes), the collapse of capital- ism (and the bankers who caused it), fake news and ‘post-truths’, and the rise of the politi- cal right (or lef). The critic Sara Ahmed points to the political functions of emotions when she argues that “emotionality as a claim about a subject or a collective is clearly dependent on relations of power, which endow ‘others’ with meaning and value” (The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Routledge 2004, p. 4). In addition, Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry Smith con- tend that “[e]motions yield a type of cognition that is unavailable by any means other than emotional experience itself” and that “mental phenomena such as emotions and beliefs are ‘about’ something; they are ‘directed towards’ some object or other, whether a real object, an imaginary object, or a state of afairs.” (In: Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, Open Court 2004, p. 10) By asking how we defne or understand fear and anxiety and how theatre and performance attend to them, we hope to help shedding light on the contemporary structure of feeling. This conference aims at tracing the directions of emotions as well as cognitive and physi- cal aspects of emotions in drama and theatre and invites scholars and practitioners to approach and re-assess their feld from a thoroughly contemporary viewpoint. How do playwrights today represent and create afects, especially fear and anxiety? How can and does the theatre attend to the emotions raised in local and global conficts or the (post) apocalyptic narratives of the present? Which forms does it fnd for critically refecting on the politics of fear and anxiety? And does excitement of fear in the audience for ‘therapeu- tic’ reasons (Aristotle) still play a role in contemporary dramaturgy? We have invited pro- posals that investigate the role of afects, emotions, and feelings in contemporary theatre and performance in general and fear and anxiety in particular. A variety of presentations analyse representations of fear and anxiety on page and stage or to illustrate the signif- cance, functions, and responsibilities of the arts in today’s society. Hildesheim, May 2018 Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, Susanne Bayerlipp, Lisa Kalkowski, James McKenzie, Daniel Schäbler 3 NotesNotesNotes 4 ProgrammeProgram Thursday, 31st May 2018 10.00-15.00 CDE Postgraduate Forum (LN004 / L131 - Aula) 15.00-17.00 CDE Steering Committee Meeting (L131 - Aula) 15.00-17.30 Arrival, Registration, and Cofee (LN304) 17.30-18.00 Conference Welcome (L131 - Aula) Prof. Dr. Wolfgang-Uwe Friedrich, President of Hildesheim University Prof. Dr. Jens Roselt, Dean of the Faculty of Arts Prof. Dr. Ute Berns, President of CDE Prof. Dr. Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier 18.00-19.00 Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier in conversation with Laura Wade (L131 - Aula) 19.00 Supper (LN304) Friday, 1st June 2018 09.30-10.30 Keynote I (L131 - Aula) GRAHAM SAUNDERS: Masters (and Mistresses) of Menace (Introduction: Dr. Susanne Bayerlipp) 10.30-11.00 Cofee Break (LN304) 11.00-12.00 Panel 1: States of Disorder (L131 - Aula) (Chair: Dr. James McKenzie) YELIZ BIBER VANGÖLÜ: Confronting Fear and Anxiety through Theatre: Idiot Child's What if the Plane Falls out of the Sky? ONDŘEJ PILNÝ: Anxieties in Contemporary Irish Drama 12.00-13.00 Lunch (LN304) 13.00-14.30 Panel 2: Anxieties Across (Genre) Borders (L131 - Aula) (Chair: Prof. Dr. Anette Pankratz) EDA DEDEBAS DUNDAR: From Involuntary Bystanders to TRC Hearing Au- dience: The Dilemma of the The Spectator in Yael Farber's Molora MARLENA TRONICKE: Terror by Candlelight: Tanika Gupta's Lions and Tigers IVAN LACKO: FeArt and Dance-xiety in Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Pursuit of Happiness 14.30-15.00 Cofee Break (LN304) 15.00-17.00 CDE Annual General Meeting (L131 - Aula) 17.00-18.00 Supper (LN304) 19.00 Performance of 1616 by Transatlantyk2 (in the Audimax) 5 ProgrammeProgram Saturday, 2nd June 2018 09.30-11.00 Panel 3: Afecting the Audience (L131 - Aula) (Chair: Prof. Dr. Anja Müller-Wood) SARAH J. ABLETT: 'You'd be ugly if you had a life like mine': The Repulsive Other in Tim Crouch's I, Caliban and I, Malvolio DAVIDE GIOVANZANA: 'How can we make sense of violence? Oscillations of Experience: Distance and (Un)Tolerability DOROTHEE BIRKE: Houses of Horror: Adressing the Anxieties of the Hous- ing Crisis 11.00-11.30 Cofee Break (LN304) 11.30-12.30 Keynote II (L131 - Aula) PATRICK DUGGAN: Dynamics of 'Dis-Ease': Contemporary Performance and the Politics of Fear (Introduction: Dr. James McKenzie) 12.30-13.30 Lunch (LN304) 13.30-15.00 Panel 4: The Fearsome Other (L131 - Aula) (Chair: Prof. Dr. Eckart Voigts) ABIR AL-LAHAM: 'And your are Fear and Darkness': Strategies of Fear and Anxiety in Identity Politics NINA H.J. SKOGLI: Experiences of Uncertainty and Ambivalence in Soft Eyes by Artilleriet Produksjoner MERVE KANSIZ: Post 9/11 Language of Fear in Ayad Akhtar's Discgraced 15.00-15.30 Cofee Break (LN304) 15.30-16.30 Keynote III (L131 - Aula) SAMUEL WEST: On Acting and Directing Contemporary British Drama (Introduction: Prof. Dr. Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier) 16.30-17.30 Supper (LN304) 19.30 Theatre in Braunschweig 6 ProgrammeProgram Sunday, 3rd June 2018 09.30-11.00 Workshop with Anna Harpin (L131 - Aula) What if how I feel about the world at 4am is the truth? Fear, anxiety, and protest. (Introduction: Lisa Kalkowski, M.A.) 11.00-11.30 Cofee Break (LN304) 11.30-12.30 Keynote IV (L131 - Aula) TRISH REID: The Dystopian Near-Future in Contemporary Drama (Introduction: Dr. Daniel Schäbler) 12.30-14.00 Panel 5: Uncannily Familiar Disasters (L131 - Aula) (Chair: Dr. Susanne Bayerlipp) BANU ÖĞÜNÇ: Anxiety in Racial Politics in Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Seize the Day JAN SUK: Fear, Anxiety, and the Uncanny in Contemporary US #19 PSi Performance WILLIAM C. BOLES: Disasters (Natural and Familial) in Steve Waters' The Contingency Plan and Mike Bartlett's Earthquakes in London 14.00-15.00 Lunch (LN304) 15.00 End of Conference 7 KeynotesKeynotes PATRICK DUGGAN | Dynamics of 'Dis-Ease': Contemporary Performances and the Politcs of Fear Patrick Duggan is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Perfor- mance and Director of the Institute of Performance and Urban Living, at the University of Surrey. His research is interested in exploring why we (still) make theatre and performance: what is it for, what does it do culturally, politically, socially, aesthetically? Within this overarching frame, his focus has been on critical approaches to con- temporary performance and the relationship between performance and the wider socio-cultural and political contexts in which it is made. His work is engaged with poststructuralist and political philosophy, is interdisciplinary in nature and particularly focused on questions of spectatorship, witnessing, trauma and ethics and is concerned with exploring the socio-political efcacy of theatre, performance and other cultural practices. As well as having written numerous book chapters and journal articles, he is author of Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester UP, 2012), and co-editor of Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre: Politics, Aesthetics and Forms (Intellect, 2013) and Performing (for) Survival: Theatre, Crisis, Extremity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is currently working on a new monograph entitled Performance and the Politics of Fear (Palgrave Macmillan), a special issue of Performance Research entitled ‘Staging the Wreckage’ (vol. 24, iss. 5, 2019), and a collaborative, interdisciplinary project Performing City Resilience: The art and culture of city resiliance with Stuart Andrews. ANNA HARPIN | What if how I feel about the world at 4am is the truth? Fear, anxiety and protest Anna Harpin is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her primary research area is the cultural his- tory of madness and trauma. Recent publications include her monograph Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness with Routledge, Performance, Madness, Psychiatry: Isolated Acts with Juliet Foster (Cambridge), Performance and Par- ticipation: Practices, Audiences, Politics with Helen Nicholson (RHUL), and a chapter on Broadmoor Hospital in the Ed- inburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Along- side her academic work Anna is a theatre maker with her company, Idiot Child. The company recently toured their new work about fear and anxiety entitled, What if the plane falls out of the sky? in May-August 2017. 8 & Artists& Artists TRISH REID |The Dystopian Near-Future in Contemporary Drama Trish Reid is Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching in the Fac- ulty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. She has published widely in the feld of contemporary Scottish theatre and performance and is the author of The Theatre of Anthony Neil- son (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Theatre & Scotland (Palgrave 2013). She has contributed to a number of anthologies. Her article ‘Teenage Dreams: Power and Imagination in David Greig’s Yellow Moon and The Monster in the Hall’ appeared in Contemporary Theatre Review, 26:1 (2016), and an essay titled ‘killing joy as a world making project’: Anger in the work of debbie tucker green’ will be published in the same journal in the summer of 2018. Trish is from Glasgow. GRAHAM SAUNDERS | Masters (and Mistresses) of Menace Graham Saunders is the Allardyce Nicoll Professor of Drama in the Department of The- atre and Drama Arts at the University of Birmingham.
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