DISCO! An Interdisciplinary Conference
21-23 June 2018
Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts University of Sussex WELCOME TO DISCO!
This programme provides a full schedule for the conference. For further information about the presentations and the contributors, please refer to the abstracts section on the conference website: https://discosussex2018.wordpress.com
If you would like to use wifi, the venue password is: upliftingly scoff their raven
If you would like to tweet our conference, please do! @disco_conf
We would love to hear from you about your experience at Disco! There is a comments book at the registration desk and a feedback section on the conference website.
Recommendations of local eats and drinks in Brighton can also be found on the website.
If you have an emergency and need to speak to a conference organiser, please call Arabella (07747 797 254), Michael (07973 317876) or Mimi (07492 771318) or email [email protected]
The conference organisers would like to thank the Drama Public Programme, the School of English, the School of Media, Film and Music, everyone at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, and especially, Greg Mickelborough, Laura McDermott, Matt Knight, Nicola Jeffs, Melissa Cox, and Jodie Grey, and our colleagues Patrick Reed, Sarah Maddox, Danielle Salvage, Lizzie Thynne, Jason Price, Carol Watts, Wayne Spicer, and Alison O’Gorman.
A special thanks to our student stewards: Zoë Bothwell, Tom Chown, Neve Mclennon, and Jemima Harney.
Catering: spacewithus
A big thank you to everyone who is sharing their work at Disco!
Enjoy the conference!
The DISCO! Team
Mimi Haddon Michael Lawrence Arabella Stanger
Thursday 21 June
1.30 – 2.00 Gardner Tower Registration and Refreshments
2.00 – 2.15 ACCA Auditorium Welcome!
2.15 – 3.30 ACCA Auditorium Keynote Presentation Melissa Blanco Borelli (Royal Holloway, University of London) "Put Your Body In It": Disco, Divas, and Dance Studies
Stephanie Mills’ disco classic, “Put Your Body In It” invites us to get up, free ourselves and just dance. Using these instructions as a point of departure, this presentation will examine how disco ushered in new ways to consider dancing bodies in all of their racialized, gendered, and sexualized complexities. Dance Studies offers the analytical lens to examine the ways in which the practice, performance and pleasure of disco foreground the significance of intersectional alliances on and off the dance floor.
3.30 – 4.00 Gardner Tower Refreshments
4.00 – 6.00 ACCA Auditorium Sylvester and Disco Culture: The Artist, Icon, Diva in His Time and Ours
Host: Joshua Gamson (University of San Francisco)
Bringing together scholars, performers, DJs, and artists, this session considers the disco star Sylvester as diva, icon, artist, and person. Sylvester’s life, music and legacy offer an opportunity to think and feel the ways in which disco combined art, fashion, identity, industry, and community; brought forward the tension between realness and artifice; celebrated and troubled blackness, queerness, and gender nonconformity; transformed stigmatized statuses into community on and off the dance floor; and helped to create and sustain a distinct dance music sound.
Malik Gaines (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) You Are My Friend: Intimacy and Sylvester’s Disco
Jason King (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) You Are My Friend: Sylvester’s 1979 Living Proof Album as a Document of Social Compassion
Adrian Loving (Georgetown Day School) Glam Rock Fantasy to Black Futurism: A Portrait of Sylvester in Album Cover Art
Louis Niebur (University of Nevada, Reno) Menergy: Sylvester and the Creation of the San Francisco Disco Sound
David McAlmont The Sound of Sylvester
6.00 – 7.15 ACCA Bar Wine Reception
7.30 – late Join us for drinks and Taiwanese street food at: The Pond, 49 Gloucester Road, Brighton, BN1 4AQ
Friday 22 June
9.00 – 9.30 Gardner Tower Registration and Refreshments
9.30 – 10.45 ACCA Auditorium Keynote Presentation Tim Lawrence (University of East London) Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and … Disco
Challenging the conventional reading of disco as a genre that defined the 1970s, riled punks and rappers in equal measure, and owed its downfall to corporate exploitation and homophobic opposition, Tim Lawrence argues for it to be understood as a convergent cultural practice rooted in countercultural politics and the melting pot demographics of NYC. Developing an argument sketched out in Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79, he maintains that disco embodied the emergence of a new form of postindustrial creativity that carried the promise of a flexible, cooperative, participatory social democratic settlement. This form of disco suffered its first near-death experience not in 1979, when the national backlash against disco reached its peak, but in 1984, with the setback traceable back to 1975. How come?
10.45 – 11.15 Gardner Tower Refreshments
11.15 – 1.00 Parallel Sessions 1 & 2
Session 1: Jane Attenborough Studio
Marko Zubak (Croatian Institute of History) Disco in Eastern Europe: Mainstreaming Socialist Decadence
Flora Pitrolo (University of Kent) I Wanna Be Fantastic World: The Mass Fantasy of Italo Disco
Greg Booth (University of Aukland) Disco, Dancing, Globalisation: Indigeneity and Class in 1980s Hindi Cinema
Chair: Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex)
Session 2: Workshop Studio
Caroline Kennedy (Melbourne Polytechnic) [appearing via Skype] Rain, Glitter: The Disco Song as a Conceptual Space in Song-Based Music Composition
John Richardson (Loughborough University) & Stephen Woodward (Independent Scholar) Life in the City Can Be So Hard: Disco and Anomie delivered by John Richardson
Jaap Kooijman (University of Amsterdam) Hotter Than Hell: Heaven as Metaphor in Pre- and Post-AIDS Disco
Chair: Laura Nash (Fairfield University)
1.00 – 2.00 Gardner Tower Lunch
1.15 Lunchtime screening Jane Attenborough Studio (Tell Me Why) THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DISCO (John Di Stefano, US, 1991: 24 minutes) is an often humorous, at times poignant look at the role that disco music has played in the formation of contemporary post-Stonewall gay male identity. The video challenges the notion of disco as merely a ‘leisure activity’ by positing disco as an historically significant cultural and political space. It celebrates gay desire and uses it as a thread to draw the historical lineage between gay movement politics of the late 60’s/early 70’s and more recent gay movement politics around AIDS, mourning the generation of gay men who were on the frontline of first wave of the epidemic.
2.00 – 4.00 Parallel Sessions 3 & 4
Session 3: Jane Attenborough Studio
Laura Nash (Fairfield University) & Andrew Virdin (Independent Scholar) No Sneakers: Disco’s Influence on Early Hip-Hop
Lesley Model (University of the Arts, London/London Metropolitan University) Countering Copyright: The Disco Edit
Chair: Mimi Haddon (University of Sussex)
Session 4: Workshop Studio
Çağrı Yilmaz (Anadolu University) [appearing via Skype] Not Gay in the Disco: Amusing Themselves to Death
Louis Niebur (University of Nevada, Reno) The National Tea Dance: The Forging of a Unified Gay Identity
Leon Clowes (University of Huddersfield) Got Any Gay Music? London's 'Anti-Gay' Queer Clubs 1995-2000
Chair: Jaap Kooijman (University of Amsterdam)
4.00 – 4.30 Gardner Tower Refreshment Break
4.30 – 6.15 Parallel Sessions 5 & 6
Session 5: Jane Attenborough Studio
Craig Jennex (University of Regina/McMaster University) [appearing via Skype] Cruising the Historical Dance Floor: Temporal Drag and the Promise of Queer Collectivity
Jack Parlett (University of Cambridge) The First Days of Disco: Queer Nostalgia in Andrew Holleran’s Fire Island
Alexin Tenefrancia (MA, New York University) Queer Nightlife as Art, Community and Practice
Chair: Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex)
Session 6: Workshop Studio
Daniel Kane (University of Sussex) 'Let's Go Down Where the Love Is': Arthur Russell, Allen Ginsberg and the Making of Hippie Disco
Inger Damsholt (University of Copenhagen) Let the Music Take Control: Disco, Choreomusicology and the Anxiety of Mickey Mousing
Tamara Tomić-Vajagić (University of Roehampton) Disco-or-Not-Disco
Chair: Arabella Stanger (University of Sussex)
6.15 – 6.30 Comfort Break
6.30 – 7.00 Performance Workshop Studio Scott Caruth Refractions In Biography takes the disco ball as a living, breathing, rotating character that has borne witness to every dance floor and scene across all contexts and points in time. S/he bore witness to the advent of disco, its early utopian promises and later on s/he dangled above the empty dance floors of Paradise Garage when casualties in the community began to escalate. S/he hangs above the dance floors of the world today, looking down upon phone screens floating in the dark. S/he is tired, full of secrets, and it would be worth your while to see what she has to say.
7.00 – 11.00 ACCA Bar Dinner and … Disco!!
Saturday 23 June
10.00 – 10.30: Gardner Tower Registration and Refreshments
10.30 – 12.30 Parallel Sessions 7 & 8
Session 7: Jane Attenborough Studio
Mimi Haddon (University of Sussex) Death Disco not Death to Disco: Mainstream Music and the Racialised Body in Post-Punk’s Borrowing from Disco
Chelsea Adewunmi (Princeton University) Make It Last Forever: Boogie and the Afterglow of Disco
Jared Gampel (University of California, Santa Cruz) Modern Funk as Postmodern Disco
Adrian Loving (Georgetown Day School) Making of a DJ: Memoirs by Ron Trent of Chicago’s Early Club Scene
Chair: Keith Gildart (University of Wolverhampton)
Session 8: Workshop Studio
Alex Jeffery (PhD, City, University of London) Once Upon A Time in Discoland: Donna Summer’s Transnational Fairy Tale Concept Album- Dancefloor
Marie Josephine Bennett (University of Winchester) I Bet He Looks Good on the Dancefloor: Queering/ Unqueering John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever
Claudia Lisa Moeller (Università Vita Salute San Raffaele) Rafaella Carra: The Sexual Disco Revolution for the Whole Family
Chair: John Richardson (Loughborough University)
12.30 – 1.30 Gardner Tower Lunch
12.45 Lunchtime screening Jane Attenborough Studio (Tell Me Why) The Epistemology of Disco John Di Stefano, US, 1991: 24 minutes
1.30 – 3.30 Parallel Sessions 9 & 10
Session 9: Jane Attenborough Studio
Keith Gildart (University of Wolverhampton) & Rosalind Watkiss-Singleton (University of Wolverhampton) The English Civil (Disco) War 1976-1981: Northern Soul, Subculture and Saturday Night Fever
Mark E. Perry (Oklahoma State University) Disco Sucks: The Decline and Fall of Disco Music
Jakub Machek (Metropolitan University Prague) From Disco-Games to Disco-Story: The Role of Disco in the Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
Qian Wang (Sichuan University) Dancing the Desire, Dancing the Revolution: Sexuality and Politics of Disco in 1980s and 2010s China
Chair: Tamara Tomić-Vajagić (University of Roehampton)
Session 10: Workshop Studio
Ivan L. Munuera (Princeton University) Discotecture: The Bodily Regime of Archi-Social Exploration
Michael Castelle (University of Warwick) If Love is the Message, What is the Transaction: On the Downtown Duality of Disco and Finance
Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex) Burn, Baby, Burn: Disco Dancing and Aerobic Exercise - Working It and Working Out
Chair: Alex Jeffery, (City, University of London)
3.30 – 4.00 Gardner Tower Refreshment Break
4.00 – 5.30 ACCA Auditorium Roundtable Disco: Women and Girls Fantasise
This roundtable discussion explores disco as both catalyst and host for women’s and girls’ practices of fantasy. Taking the categories of ‘disco’ and ‘women and girls’ to be elastic, we think together about the ways in which women and girls have claimed disco cultures (and have been claimed by those cultures in turn) as sites for the production of otherworlds: of dystopias and daydreams. We explore the material spaces, places, sounds, moves, and climates of disco that have played host to feminine, feminist, and womanist practices of the imagination. We wonder whether disco is women’s fantasy or if women are disco’s fantasy and in so doing foreground the ways that fantastical disco women and girls embody, resist or negotiate both the assembled social pressures and the emergent sensory pleasures that play through and around their bodies.
Chelsea Adewunmi (Princeton University), Sara Jane Bailes (University of Sussex), Lesley Model (University of the Arts, London/London Metropolitan University), Flora Pitrolo (University of Kent) and Anika Vajagić
Chair: Arabella Stanger (University of Sussex)
5.30 – 6.00 ACCA Auditorium Closing Discussion and Farewells