Prelude Panel
The Prelude Panel of PSi #17 invites you to rethink with us aspects of performance and performativity, together with: Hosts: Maaike Bleeker & Iris van der Tuin. Speakers: Brian Rotman (respondent: Nicolas Salazar-Sutil); Alva Noë (respondent: Bojana Cvejic); Michal Kobialka (respondent: Iris van der Tuin); Jon McKenzie (respondent: Rosi Braidotti). The Prelude Panel will take place on Wednesday, May 25, from 12.00–17.00 (before the Festive opening) in the Blauwe Zaal, Stadsschouwburg Utrecht.
Background of performance studies
Emerging as an interdisciplinary field of study from the 1950s and becoming institutionalised from the 1980s, performance studies by now has a history that is constitutive of its current identity. This history was the subject of the prelude panel at PS1#15 in Zagreb, where prominent European and US theatre and performance scholars reflected on the transformation of performance studies since its emergence as a US based development, and often (but not always) conceived of in opposition to theatre studies.
Movements of thought: PSi #17
The expansion of performance studies into continental Europe has considerably changed the outlook of performance studies, including its relationship to theatre studies. This question of the relationship between performance studies and the specificities of the culture from which it is performed will be taken up and further explored during the Roundtable organised by the International Committee during PSi#17 in Utrecht as well as by PSi#18 next year in Leeds. This year’s prelude panel will continue the discussion started in Zagreb from a different angle, taking as its starting point the ways in which performance and performativity have become key terms in a wide variety of fields, and how this has informed new movements of thought.
More than being an analytical and/or artistic approach to phenomena of various kinds, performance and performativity are performative themselves. They have become our system and style, the emergent forms through which things are said and seen. They not only constitute new objects of analysis, like, for example, behaviour and acts rather than material objects and texts. Much more, performance and performativity produce new subjects of knowledge, new conceptions of what constitutes knowledge, how things can be known, and what it means to know. How may similar movements of thought emerging from within very different fields invite new modes of interdisciplinary interaction? How might this transform what is considered to be the subject of performance studies as well as our understanding of how performance studies is performed?
Prelude Panel Programme
12.00-12.10
Opening by Maaike Bleeker & Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University)
12.10-12.50
Brian Rotman: Embodied Performance and Mathematics
In his lecture, Brian Rotman shall link the domains of mathematics and performance through two concepts: gesture, a ‘disciplined mobility of the body’, and diagram, the trace or projection of an embodied thought. The connection of performance to mathematics will be two-fold. In a literal and practical manner, the link will go by way of introducing a performance project Rotman has developed for materializing mathematical abstractions, consisting of a movement scheme allowing concepts enshrined in an important class of mathematical diagrams to be choreographed And, on a theoretical plane, this will be preceded by a framework of motivation and justification for such a project drawn from the work of the mathematician Gilles Chatelet. It will be Chatelet’s understanding of diagrams, as they are related to gesture on the one hand and to symbols on the other, that not only explains their importance (and ubiquity) in mathematics, but offers a certain naturalness to the project of physicalizing mathematical ideas.
Brian Rotman has a doctorate in mathematics from London University and is currently Humanities Distinguished Professor in the department of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University. His writing has appeared in a range of scholarly journals and in the Guardian Newspaper, London Review of Books, Times Literary and Educational Supplements. His books include Signifying Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero (Stanford 1991), Ad Infinitum … the Ghost in Turing’s Machine (Stanford 1993), Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford 2000), and Becoming Beside Ourselves: the Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Duke 2008). He is also the author of several stage plays and a radio drama.
12.50-13.00
Response by Nicolas Salazar (Goldsmiths, London)
13.00-13.40
Alva Noë (University of California, Berkeley)
“Perception is not something that happens to us. It is something we do” argues Alva Noë in Action in Perception (2004). Perception is a skillful activity that depends upon our capacities for action and thought. This brings him (among many other things) to the proposal to understand consciousness in terms of dance and the dancer. We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is basically matter of just a calculating machine. There are different reasons to reject this. But one is, simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do. A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us.
Alva Noë is a writer and philosopher at UC Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. For the last decade or so his philosophical practice has concerned perception and consciousness. His current research focus is art and human nature. He is the author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang/Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2009) and Action in Perception (The MIT Press, 2004).
13.40-13.50
Response by Bojana Cvejic (Theatre Studies, Utrecht University)
13.50-14.30
Break
14.30-15.10
Michal Kobialka: Performance Studies: Materialism of the Encounter
Confronted by what happened on November 9, 2009 during the official celebrations as well as during those minor performative events commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall—from the official moments staged by the heads of States to recreating the “knocking over” of the Wall, now made out from the 1000 individually painted Styrofoam dominoes, and to French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s facebook page featuring him “whacking” the wall a few times with an axe on November 9, 1989, even though he did not arrive in Berlin until November 16, 1989—Michal Kobialka is invoking materiality and the situatedness of thought. This materiality and the situatedness of thought confronts the inadequation between objects and those aspects of objects which reality glosses over in order to assign present intelligibility to them. This materialism of the encounter questions performance research caught in the activity of abstracting thought and practice under duress of reconciling Performance Studies with the sciences; and promoting confusion between representation and the reality where the radical transformation did not take place.
Michal Kobialka is a Professor of Theatre in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Minnesota. He has published over 75 articles, essays and review on medieval, eighteenth-century and contemporary European theatre, as well as theatre historiography. His most recent book is Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
15.10-15.20
Response by Iris van der Tuin (Gender Studies, Utrecht University)
15.20-16.00
Jon McKenzie: Performance Consultants
For decades, Performance Studies scholars have drawn on various methods and perspectives from the sciences—including anthropology, cognitive science, ethology, psychology, and sociology—using them to analyze and critique performances. What if, in addition to casting ourselves as cultural critics, we also transformed ourselves into cultural performance consultants, miming the discourse of management science in order to counter the values associated with neoliberal institutions by working from both outside and within?
Jon McKenzie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches courses in performance theory, new media, and civil disobedience. In addition, he coordinates a major initiative there in digital humanities involving new media studies, studio-based practices, digital learning, and quantitative humanities research. McKenzie is author of Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (Routledge, 2001), and such articles as “Democracy’s Performance,” “Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love,” “High Performance Schooling,” “StudioLab UMBRELLA,” and “Abu Ghraib and the Society of the Spectacle of the Scaffold.” He is also co-editor of Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), which focuses on performance research around the world.
16.00-16.20
Response by Prof. Rosi Braidotti (University Professor, Utrecht University)
16.20-17.00
Discussion with all speakers
The PSi # 17 Prelude Panel is organized in collaboration with the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University and Motion Bank / The Forsythe Company, and with support of the Utrecht Research Focus Area Cultures & Identities.
