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The Center for Contemporary & Digital Performance at Brunel University is pleased to announce the following

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH SEMINAR

to start up our autumn 2014 series:
ALL WELCOME

Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Gaskell Bldg 048-Drama Studio, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Cleveland Rd, UB8 3PH

16:oo- 17:30

Theron Schmidt
(King’s College)

‘Theatre at work: The life and times of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’
The theatre is a strange place to seek an escape from alienated labor, given its long association with dynamics of abstraction, representation, and reproduction.  One possible approach was tendered in the task-based procedures of performance in the 1960s, which sought to avoid artifice and restore a sense of reality and authenticity to performed actions as “real work.” But, as the lines between work and non-work become increasingly blurred in the 21st century, a more recent tendency has amplified the theatrical rather than the performative, producing not an escape from commodification but rather what Nicholas Ridout has called the “commodification-squared temporality of the theatrical” (Passionate Amateurs, p. 132).  In this paper, I will consider the ongoing project Life & Times by Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which, rather than trying to create moments of “real life” that would redeem theatre’s falseness, instead ambitiously (and impossibly) sets out to create a theatre that swallows up an entire life – including the life of its audience members – within its capacious artifice.

Theron Schmidt is Lecturer in Theatre and Liberal Arts in the Department of English at King’s College London.  His research and teaching interests include contemporary theatre, Live Art, participatory art practices, and politically engaged performance.  His writing on contemporary theatre and performance has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Law Text Culture, and Performance Research.  He is an Assistant Editor for Contemporary Theatre Review and an editorial board member for Performance Research and the International Journal of Screendance.  He is also a co-convener of the London Theatre Seminar and the international Performance Philosophy network.  His current book project is Being Seen, Being Heard: Politics, Theatricality, and Engagement in 21st-Century Performance.

Entry: Open to All

Performance   Research Seminar Coordinator: Johannes Birringer

All Research Seminars are co-produced with dance-tech live TV and streamed online as well as archived.:  DAPLab.TV:  http://dance-tech.tv/videos/daplabtv/

check our whole series at:  http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/boiler15.html


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