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‘Sordid Ironies and the Short-Fingered Vulgarian: Alison Jackson’s Mental Images of Donald Trump’ – 22 June 2017

Birkbeck Theatre Conversation
Tony Perucci (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

‘Sordid Ironies and the Short-Fingered Vulgarian: Alison Jackson’s Mental Images of Donald Trump’


Thursday 22 June, 2-4pm
Room G03, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD (nearest tube: Euston & Euston Square)

From the beginning of his 2016 campaign for the US presidency, Donald Trump has employed the strategy of ‘gaslighting’ the American public – willfully challenging their sense of what is ‘fact’ and what is ‘fiction’. As part of her Mental Images series, British photographer Alison Jackson staged scenes with a Trump lookalike of then-candidate Trump in numerous compromising situations. Depicting images of behaviour that would be disqualifying of any other politician, Jackson utilizes the ‘seeming to be real’ to challenge the viewer’s voyeuristic desire to ‘expose’ Trump’s misogyny and racism. As the strategy of exposure continues to be politically ineffective, Jackson’s photographs of the ‘in fact a fiction’ creates an affective charge that performatively constructs a politics of ressentiment focused not merely towards Trump but towards the systemic problems of neoliberal capitalism.

Tony Perucci is a scholar-artist based in the US, where he is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  His publications include the books Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex (Michigan, 2012) and On the Horizontal: Mary Overlie and the Viewpoints (Michigan, forthcoming).

This Theatre Conversation is co-hosted by Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality).

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/bcct
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/bigs
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/

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CFP: Theatres of Contagion: Infectious Performance Deadline – 20 January 2017

Call for proposals

Theatres of Contagion: Infectious Performance

Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, 11-12 May 2017

At least since Thebes was beset by plague, western theatre has incubated a fascination with its own contagious power. This has extended beyond investigating medical and psychological conditions on stage, to both exploring and protecting against performance’s capacity to transmit ideas, illnesses, feelings and behaviours. This two-day Wellcome funded symposium puts the relationship between theatre and contagion under the microscope, to assess it from a range of humanities, medical, psychological and scientific perspectives, and by looking to diverse forms including drama, theatre, live art, dance, musical and cultural performance.

Our central questions include:

  1. How have theatre and performance represented, examined or been implicated in the transmission and circulation of medical and psychological conditions?
  2. How has our understanding of these relationships and phenomena changed over time, across cultures, including via developments in interdisciplinary practice and inquiry?

Keynote speakers:

  • Bridget Escolme (Queen Mary University of London)
  • Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University of Oxford)

With performances by Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre Fellows:

  • Dickie Beau
  • David Slater and Entelechy Arts

20 minute academic papers or performative presentations might address:

  • How theatre has represented contagious medical conditions: plague and its metaphors in Sophocles and Shakespeare; venereal disease in Ibsen; measles in Shaw; infections and neurological conditions in Beckett; HIV/AIDS in Kushner
  • How theatre has represented contagious psychological conditions: versions of melancholia or depression in Chekhov; hysteria in Miller; madness in Churchill; paranoia and anxiety in Letts
  • The ways in which theatre has been affected by public health epidemics (e.g. plague, sweating sickness, cholera, influenza, HIV/AIDS, ebola), and reacted (e.g. through banning assemblies, withdrawing funding) or been strategically deployed (e.g. to inform and educate)
  • Contagious group emotion and behaviour: yawning, coughing, crying, laughing, violence
  • Scientific, medical, historical and theoretical accounts of how ideas, illnesses, feelings and behaviours spread in theatre and performance
  • The relationship between contagion and affect theory
  • How performance site, architecture, technology and design are implicated in questions and processes of transmission
  • The relationship between immersive practices and histories and theories of contagious performance
  • Performance in digital cultural, and analogies of viral dramaturgies or effects
  • Health, safety and law

Abstracts of 300 words and a short bio (less than 100 words) should be sent to birkbeckcct@gmail.com by Friday 20 January 2017.

The symposium can also offer 4 x £50 bursaries to graduate students to help with attending from outside London. Please outline your situation briefly (less than 100 words) if applying one of these. The conference is free, although booking and registration will be required to attend once the schedule has been formalised and announced.

Funded by Wellcome (ISSF) with support from BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality) and Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

Enquires to Fintan Walsh f.walsh@bbk.ac.uk

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LOVE IS STILL POSSIBLE IN THIS JUNKIE WORLD – 27th November 2015

Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, with support from BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality), presents:

Room G10, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD, Friday 27th November 5-6.30 pm.

LOVE IS STILL POSSIBLE IN THIS JUNKIE WORLD

A conversation between Sheree Rose and Martin O’Brien on sexuality, love death, pain and art.

Sheree Rose was born in Los Angeles, CA. She obtained her Master’s degree in psychology in the late 70s, and was extremely involved in political activism and The Women’s Movement. She received a second Masters Degree in Studio Art from UCI. Rose and Bob Flanagan met at a Halloween party in 1980 and began collaborating in life and on artwork. Together they explored issues of pain/pleasure, illness and death though profound works involving sadomasochism. They performed and exhibited throughout the world over a 16-year period and became one of the most significant performance art collaborations in history. Flanagan died of cystic fibrosis in 1996. Since Flanagan’s death, she has exhibited new work ‘Bobaloon’ in Tokyo, Japan, as well as other works at The Tate in London. She created a performance piece entitled ‘Nailed Again’ at Arizona State University and Galapagos in New York. Rose continues to explore and collaborate with performance artists, particularly with the UK based artist Martin O’Brien with whom she has made several pieces of work in London and LA.

Martin O’Brien has been commissioned and funded by the Live Art Development Agency, Arts Council England, Arts Catalyst, Midlands Art Centre, and the British Council. He has presented work throughout the UK, Europe and the USA. He has often collaborated with the legendary performance artist Sheree Rose. He was artist in residence at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, LA, in 2015. He curated the groundbreaking symposium ‘Illness and the Enduring Body’ in 2012. Martin received a PhD from the University of Reading and his work has received critical attention in publications such as Contemporary Theatre Review and the book ‘Access All Areas: Live Art and Disability’. He co-edited, with Gianna  Bouchard, a new edition of the journal Performance Research ‘On Medicine’ and is a lecturer at Queen Mary’s University of London.

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