Performing Greece 2016 – Saturday 3 December 2016

We are pleased to announce Performing Greece 2016: 2nd Annual International Conference on Contemporary Greek Theatre, which will take place at Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London on Saturday 3 December 2016, and is organised by Dr. Christos Callow Jr (Associate Lecturer, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London) and Andriana Domouzi (PhD Candidate, Royal Holloway, University of London).

Following the successful Performing Greece 2015, the 1st Annual International Conference on Contemporary Greek Theatre in the UK, the conference returns to Birkbeck, University of London in 2016. This year has seen a rise of theatrical interest in contemporary Greece, judging from the National Theatre production of the Greek-British Alexi Kaye Campbell’s play, Sunset at the Villa Thalia, which explored the tense relations of UK and US with Greece at the time of the Junta, but also highlighting issues of immigration and cultural appropriation; and also with the Royal Court’s staging of The Things you Take with You by Greek playwright Andreas Flourakis, a play that responds to the refugee crisis and Greece’s involvement. In addition, we see an increasing number of Greek artists based in the UK who explore, through their art, contemporary issues that reflect on Greek and European identity, Brexit, immigration, and respond to the socio-political issues of our times. This conference is therefore an invitation for people, both academics and theatremakers to come together and reflect on the rise and significance of contemporary Greek theatre and its relation to European and global culture.

10:00-10:30: Registration & Coffee

10:30-11:30  Keynote

Evi Stamatiou (Lecturer in Musical Theatre, University of Portsmouth): “An Artist’s Belonging and otherness in Post-Brexit Britain”

11:30-12:45  Performance, Philosophy and Identity in the 21st Century

  • Dr. Stella Keramida (University of Reading): ‘‘Performance narratives and Representations of the Greek identity: An examination of the genre of Performance in Greece’’
  • Lizeta Makka (PhD Candidate, Brunel University): ‘‘The necessity of a figure: the philosopher as performer’’
  • Presentation of Purged by playwright Chris Vlachopoulos

12:45-13:45: Lunch break

13:45-15:00  Contemporary Reception of Ancient Greek Myth and Drama

  • Dr. Ioannis Souris (University of Exeter): ‘‘The river Lethe: an English and Greek interpretation of the myth’’
  • Andriana Domouzi (Royal Holloway, University of London): ‘‘The Metahuman in Greek Theatre: science fiction motifs in Medea by Vasilis Ziogas’’
  • Performance with actress Lia Kostinou (Drama Centre London)

15:00-15:15: Coffee Break

15:15-16:30  Future Theatre: Metaphysics, Ideology, and Science Fiction

  • Dr. Evangelos Konstantelos (SOAS, University of London): ‘‘Transmutation of Metaphysics into Ideology: Challenges to Theatre’’
  • Dr. Christos Callow Jr (Birkbeck, University of London): ‘‘Longing for the future in times of crisis: the rise of science fiction theatre in contemporary Greece’’
  • Presentation of Superhero by playwright Andreas Flourakis

This event is free and open to the public but places are limited. Please register to attend on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/performing-greece-2-conference-on-contemporary-greek-theatre-tickets-29412261867?aff=es2

For any enquiries, please feel free to contact the organisers at performinggreece@gmail.com.

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Conventions of Proximity in Art, Theatre and Performance. 5 & 6 May 2016

Thursday 5 May 1-6pm & Friday 6 May, 10am-6pm
School of Arts, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
Booking: http://bit.ly/1YiQzYJ

Immersive and curatorial strategies are highly current in contemporary theatre, visual art and exhibition culture – bringing audiences into close and often interactive relationships with artistic work. But how else do art, theatre and performance engage ideas of proximity, and how have they done so in the past?

 

Conventions of Proximity in Art, Theatre and Performance investigates forms of nearness and distance from numerous perspectives: dramaturgical, curatorial, affective, social, conceptual, virtual, geographical. Over a day and a half, artists and writers will share their work on proximity as an idea and as a practice. From the early modern to the contemporary, in examples drawn from southeast Asia to the global north, the symposium explores proximity in relation to a diverse range of topics, including digital networks, architectural design, home, public space, cinema, loneliness, friendship, listening, darkness, museum display, and music.

Conventions of Proximity combines papers, workshops from guest artists in the School of Arts’ studio space, film screenings in Birkbeck Cinema, performance installation, and an exhibition of contemporary art in the Peltz Gallery.

On Thursday 5 May, researchers and practitioners will share their work in parallel panel presentations, from which attenders can make a selection.

On Friday 6 May, film screenings, panel presentations, workshops and a performance installation will run in parallel, from which attenders can make a selection.

Contributors include:
Silke Arnold-de Simine (Birkbeck, University of London)
Maaike Bleeker (University of Utrecht)
Fiona Candlin (Birkbeck, University of London)
Fourthland
Sheila Ghelani
Alison Green (Central Saint Martins)
Peader Kirk & Teoma Jackson Naccarato
Nicholas Ridout (Queen Mary, University of London)
Victoria Walsh (Royal College of Art)

Conventions of Proximity takes place on Thursday 5 May, 1-6pm and Friday 6 May, 10am-6pm. It is free of charge to attend but places are very limited, and booking is essential. The schedule can be seen here.

Booking: http://bit.ly/1YiQzYJ

Co-hosted by Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture, and supported by Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image.

Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/bcct/events

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Call for Papers: Performance and Performativity – Actualities and Futures, deadline 15 April 2016

Performance and Performativity: Actualities and Futures

Call for Papers (Deadline: 15th April, 2016)
Conference to be held on Wednesday 15th June, 2016
Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds
Confirmed Keynote: Professor Vikki Bell, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths

In 2011, Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler held a series of exchanges via email that led to the book project Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (London: Polity, 2013). As the authors contest… Acts of resistance will take established orders of subjection as their resource, but they are not condemned to hopelessly reproducing or enhancing these orders. “Self-presence” is an attachment to an injurious interpellation, which becomes the condition of possibility for non-normative resignifications of what matters as presence.

Over 2015/16, the Performa research group (LHRI, University of Leeds) has explored the relation of performance, performativity and the performative in the political through a concerted programme of reading, taking on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Peggy Phelan and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick among others committed to renewed possibilities for the Left. This programme will culminate on 15th June 2016 with a one-day conference, Performance and Performativity: Actualities and Futures. Performativity is a transdisciplinary concern that informs research in disparate fields; we aim to bring scholars into conversation who might not otherwise have a chance to meet. We are thrilled to welcome as the keynote speaker Professor Vikki Bell, author of Culture and Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory (2007). Bell’s work on theories and critiques of performativity has particularly engaged with the implications of the performative for ethics and politics.

The organisers welcome contributions that address questions of performance and performativity through the following fields of inquiry:

  • Performance art/theatre
  • Queer theory
  • Questions of gender
  • Feminisms
  • Race and Identity
  • Mourning
  • Government and Society
  • Law
  • Protest
  • Global development/Migration
  • Violence
  • History/Memory
  • Trauma studies
  • Performing the text
  • Image/visibility
  • Technology and the post-human
  • Modes of Seeing
  • Sounds and the senses

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short bio of max 100 words to Tom Hastings and Beatrice Ivey at leedsperforma@gmail.com by 15th April at the latest. Please visit www.leedsperforma.wordpress.com for more information.

Papers will be 20 minutes in length.

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Verdant Intersections: An Event on Landscape, Ecology, Poetry and Performance

Verdant Intersections

An Event on Landscape, Ecology, Poetry and Performance

Hosted by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck College, University of London.

When: 4 March, 7-9pm
Who: Linda Russo, Dan Eltringham and Laura Burns
Where: Birkbeck College, University of London – Room 102, 30 Russell Square

Linda Russo, Dan Eltringham and Laura Burns will be presenting a combination of critical and creative work for around twenty minutes each in response to one of the following themes: human/non-human ecologies, geopoetics, ecopoetics, landscape and/or site-specific work.

After the readings/presentations Richard Hamblyn and Stephen Willey will co-chair a short discussion between the participants.

 

About the speakers
Linda Russo is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman, 2015). Participant, winner of the Bessmilr Brigham Poets Prize, and a collection of literary-geographical essays, To Think of her Writing Awash in Light, winner of Subito Press lyric essay prize, are forthcoming. Her recent reports on Bioregional/Body-Regional poetics is “Emplaced, and local to.” She lives in the Cascadian region of the northwestern US, tends garden plots, and teaches at Washington State University.

 

Dan Eltringham is working towards an AHRC-supported PhD at Birkbeck College, entitled ‘William Wordsworth and J. H. Prynne: pastoral, enclosure and the commons’. In autumn 2015 he participated in the interdisciplinary network ‘Land, People, Poetry’ at Colorado State University as a visiting scholar. His poetry and translations have appeared in E-Ratio, Blackbox Manifold, The Goose, Intercapillary Space, Emotions in Dialogue, and Scabs are Rats Zine 4, and in two pamphlets, Mystics and Ithaca. His first full-length poetry collection is in process and he co-edits Girasol Press.

 

Laura Burns is a performer and writer working at the intersection of poetry, dance, live art and installation. Her work seeks to call into question the agency of the nonhuman world, reconsidering how language and consciousness stems from the biological unfoldings of the thinking worlds around us. Her practice explores how embodiment, orality and a practice of belief in unknowing, give rise to new perceptions, an ecology of knowledges and choreographies of being-with.

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