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Our culture enforces a forwards-looking view of life. We believe in progress. We believe in a temporal sequence of cause and effect. All our emotional and social lives, our notions of justice, morality and logic are founded on forwardness. We punish people by removing them from time and throwing them in a cell where nothing they do can have any consequences. Strangely, many people also choose voluntarily to escape from the tyranny of sequential time through meditation, chanting, dancing and drugs. No matter that forward time is an illusion, it is as hard to escape as those persistent optical illusions that insist that one line is shorter than another or that a distorted room is square even if it means our admitting the people in it are of massively different sizes.
By definition backwardsness confounds our expectations, while illuminating the illusions that sustain social and emotional form. The architecture of behaviour is revealed. The possibility that success is actually failure, and vice versa, is given obvious, practical clarity.
Unlike other media in which notions of reversed time have been explored, in film and literature in the main, backwardsness in performance gives a live audience the experience of a familiar yet disturbingly different world that they are obliged to engage with directly, unmediated by a technology that may be used to reverse its content without reversing the world of the viewer. A backwards world performed live is uniquely powerful.
This laboratory will oscillate between practice and analysis; participants will work alongside Julian Maynard Smith in exploring themes such as backwards action, backwards thinking, backwards emotion, backwards politics whilst developing strategies for more extended performance ideas.
Julian Maynard-Smith is the Artistic Director of Station House Opera (UK). He studied Fine Art at Middlesex Polytechnic, 1974 - 78, and was part of the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program in New York in 1979. He was the Kettleís Yard Fellow at Cambridge in 1993 - 94. In 1997, he received a major prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in New York.
Julian has worked as a sculptor and film-maker but primarily as a performance artist, first making solo pieces and then, from 1980 onwards, larger scale work with the group Station House Opera.
With past projects ranging from spectacular site-specific works created with 10,000 concrete blocks, to simultaneous performances across continents using live internet streaming, Station House Opera is an internationally renowned performance company with a unique physical and visual style. It has produced over 30 productions of widely varying scale and focus, but all rooted in an interest to make work that brings together theatre and the visual arts in a single unified vision. The company has created projects in a variety of locations all over the world, from New York's Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage to Dresden's historic Frauenkirche and Salisbury Cathedra, and has toured the world, from Azerbaijan to Kosovo, China to Brazil.
The Centre for Performance Research has invited some of the most exciting and diverse Wales based and international theatre directors to Aberystwyth for an intensive participatory project that offers a rare opportunity for both experienced and emerging directors to gather and share the methods, approaches and skills of professional directing practice via laboratories and presentations, demonstrations and dialogue.
Guest Directors Include:
Veenapani Chawla (Adishakti Centre, India), Das Beckwerk (Denmark), Jaroslaw Fret (Teatr ZAR, Poland), Richard Gregory (Quarantine, UK), Bill Hamblett (Small World Theatre, Wales), Natalie Hennedige (Cake Theatre, Singapore), Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens, UK),Ruth Kanner (Ruth Kanner Theatre Group, Israel), Julian Maynard Smith (Station House Opera, UK), John McGrath (National Theatre of Wales), Philip McKenzie (Sherman Theatre Cymru), Anders Paulin (Sweden), Mike Pearson (Pearson/Brookes, Wales), Ralf Richardt Strøbech (Hotel Pro Forma/ Loop Group, Denmark), Tore Vagn Lid (Transiteatret-Bergen, Norway).
For more information or to book a place at the Directors' Forum please contact CPR
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The Centre for Performance Research, Parry Williams Building , Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth, Wales , SY23 3AJEmail: [log in to unmask] Phone: +44 (0) 1970 622 133 Web: www.thecpr.org.uk
The Directors Forum has been made possible with the support of a project grant from the Arts Council of Wales. The Centre for Performance Research at Aberystwyth is a joint venture of The University of Wales Aberystwyth and Centre for Performance Research Ltd, working in close association with AU Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies. Centre for Performance Research Ltd is an Educational Charity (No. 701544) limited by guarantee (Reg. No. 231 5790).