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Dear Colleagues,
I would like to invite you to the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance Research Seminar Series at the School of Arts, Brunel University, West London.
The seminars will take place from 4-5:30 and refreshments will be served.
Wednesday January 27th: Actors, Angels and Avatars
Contemporary Acting in a flat landscape.
Guest speaker: Geoffrey Colman
Wednesday February 10th: Surfing Disciplines: From Antonin Artaud to neuroplastic arts?
Guest speaker: Gordana Novakovic
Wednesday February 17th: The Rise of the Bio-Virtual: Non-place,
Disappearance, Indistinction (Life in the Digital Kamp).
Guest Speaker: Matthew Causey
Wednesday February 24th: Concert Hall/Sports Facility: The Anthropological Space of Richard Maxwell's theatre.
Guest Speaker: Sarah Gorman
Wednesday March 10th: Thinking Objects
Guest Speaker: Gary Stevens
Wednesday March 24th: Details to be announced later in January.
Please see the detailed description of each seminar and specific venue location below.
For directions go to http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/where.
Do not hesitate to contact [log in to unmask] regarding any inquiries.
Best wishes,
Gretchen Schiller
School of Arts, Brunel University
Wednesday January 27th
Speaker: Geoffrey Colman, The Central School of Speech and Drama London
Title: Actors Angels and Avatars
Contemporary Acting in a flat landscape
Venue: Antonin Artaud 101, School of Arts, Brunel University
Geoffrey Colman examines the context of training actors, notions of 'good' and 'bad' acting in relation to 'camera true' and asks if the conservatoire must strain for a new form of authenticity.
However much British actor training continues to aspire to a notion of a tradition and craft being passed down through the hearts and minds of successive generations, another perhaps more uncomfortable narrative must also be considered. Actor training is now actually founded on a vocational rhetoric that is nothing more complex than the trainee's need for employment within a camera-real economy. For the contemporary actor's art to be manifest in such a context, it will be necessarily measured against a set of assumptions that are, in essence, about the successful realisation of a widely held generalist performance grammar - a camera-real acting style that somehow equates to a notion of good acting, and a non-camera-real or abstract acting style equating to that of bad acting. In order for this to work, the camera-real fictional nurses or policeman that nightly haunt our television screens must appear to be performed in the same way, irrespective of style or period, and similar to other film or theatre worlds created elsewhere. All has become neutered by the lens. This is the reality of training actors today.
Geoffrey Colman's extensive freelance directing career has combined work in opera and theatre. Recently appointed Artistic Director of Festival 10 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Geoffrey is also regularly invited to give acting masterclasses and workshops both here (Old Vic Theatre, Young Vic Theatre, Soho Theatre, Globe Theatre etc) and abroad (Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Spain etc). Currently Head of Acting at Central School of Speech & Drama, London University, Geoffrey is very much in demand as an acting coach - West End coaching includes Wicked, Billy Elliot, 39 Steps etc, film and TV includes Miramax Films, Britain's Next Top Model, Skillicious (ITV), Lenny Henry etc.
Wednesday February 10th
Speaker: Gordana Novakovic
Title: Surfing Disciplines: From Antonin Artaud to neuroplastic arts?
Venue: GB048 Gaskell, School of Arts, Brunel University
Originally a painter, with 12 solo exhibitions to her credit, Gordana has more than twenty years' experience of developing and exhibiting large-scale time-based media projects. Her artistic practise and theoretical work that intersects art, science and advanced digital technologies has formed five Cycles: Parallel Worlds, The Shirt of a Happy Man, Infonoise and the ongoing Fugue. A constant mark of her work throughout her experiments with new technologies has been her distinctive method of creating an effective cross-disciplinary framework for the emergence of synergy through collaboration. Gordana exhibited and lectured at leading interdisciplinary festivals and symposia, and artistic and scientific conferences. Alongside her artistic practice, in the last five years Gordana has been artist-in-residence at Computer Science Department, University College London, where she has founded and convenes the Tesla Art and Science Group. She has received a number of international and British academic awards. www.gordananovakovic.net
Wednesday February 17th
Speaker: Matthew Causey, Trinity College Dublin
Title: The Rise of the Bio-Virtual: Non-place, Disappearance, Indistinction
(Life in the Digital Kamp)
Venue: GB048 Gaskell, School of Arts, Brunel University
Within the super-saturation of virtuality and technological reproductions in contemporary digital culture are established zones and terrains of indistinction and disappearance (digital kamps). These electronic environments I would nominate as examples of the bio-virtual (perhaps a post-virtual) and model the fields as a space of bio-politics par excellence. For the virtual is not simply virtual anymore as its affect within us is haptic and somatic and leads us to identify the phenomena as a taking place (within the non-place) of the (bio)virtual. The (bio)virtual or post-virtual is no longer a problem of the desert of the real, of representational illusions, but an entrance of a new biopolitics of techno-performativity of doubles and debris veiled through indistinction, confusion, excess. The subject's role in these digital kamps is one of disappearance: a public denial and a private deferment. My research considers the aftermath of the digital revolution and the resulting bio-political zones of indistinction constructed of bio-virtual doubles, avatars and digital debris.
Dr. Causey is Director of Trinity College Dublin's Arts Technology Research Laboratory (ATRL). ATRL is an interdisciplinary, postgraduate research centre designed to explore emergent art forms of that are networked, interactive, multimedia, hybrid, virtual, immersive and ubiquitous. He is the author of Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: from simulation to embeddedness (Routledge, 2006, 2009). Dr. Causey is currently in production on Abstract Machines: Staging the Televisual Beckett, which translates Beckett's late television plays to technologized performance works.http://www.tcd.ie/drama-film-music/ http://www.tcd.ie/drama-film-music/atrl
Wednesday February 24th
Speaker: Sarah Gorman Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, Roehampton University.
Title: Concert Hall/Sports Facility: The Anthropological Space of Richard Maxwell's theatre.
Venue: GB048 Gaskell, School of Arts, Brunel University
Sarah Gorman is Principal Lecturer in Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at Roehampton University, London.
Her current research focuses on contemporary European and North American experimental theatre, in particular measuring the influence of a performance discourse upon theatre practice.
She has published material about Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players in Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (Harvie & Lavender eds.) and Contemporary Theatre Review. She has also published on: Bobby Baker in Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life (Barrett and Baker eds.); Forced Entertainment and Janet Cardiff in Performance Research and New Media in A Concise Companion to British and Irish Drama (Holdsworth and Luckhurst, eds). She is currently completing a book: The Theatre of Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players for Routledge Research, New York.
Wednesday March 10th
Speaker: Gary Stevens
Title: Thinking Objects
Venue: GB048 Gaskell, School of Arts, Brunel University
Gary Stevens has worked predominantly with live performance since 1984. In a recent piece, Ape (2007) the three performers imitate one another in process of assimilation that is bound to fail. They copy one another with no secure original, which produces a viral, volatile and unstable mental world, where no one has an idea of who or what they are. This work builds on previous ensemble pieces such as Flock (2005), where a large group of people create a mass that holds together, drifting and careering around a town with a rudimentary interactive intelligence based on a copying principle that no one controls. Solo pieces with text, such as Not Tony (2004) reverse the idea of a single entity made of many parts by constructing an elaborate multiplicity from a single body.
Another strand to the work is video installation. Slow Life (2003) has five video projections running concurrently, showing different domestic interiors where the occupants perform simple and ordinary actions very slowly. It relates to still as well as moving imagery. In Wake Up and Hide (2007), the two-screen video installation reacts to and is disturbed by noise in the gallery. Both pieces were first shown at Matt’s Gallery in London.
Gary is influenced by early film comedy where the representation of people has an animal and mechanical aspect. Interaction, artificial intelligence and object recognition are treated and explored in a low-tech way. The work is funny and curiously disturbing. Gary is a tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art.
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/artist.php?id=39
Wednesday March 24th
Speaker: Details to be announced later in January
Venue: GB048 Gaskell, School of Arts, Brunel University
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