The
Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance
2006. 2007. 2008 . 2009.
2009-10 .
2010-11 .2011-12.
2012-13 .
2013-14 .
2014-15
School of Arts –
Brunel University – West London
The public is invited
to participate in this series of encounters, lectures, screenings, physical
and new media workshops and discussions, focussed on new thinking in performance
practices,new medi arts, technologies, physical and digital/scientific
creativity, and cultural production.
For more information contact
01895 267 343 .........Admission
free.......... Location: Cleveland
Rd, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH
Louie
Jenkins performing "Moth" in the Drama Studio (c) Brunel University
Wednesday,
Wednesday October 7, 2009
Performance Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo Research Update and Appetizers
17:00
pm
Louie
Jenkins
"Immortal Stages:
Liminality, death and performance"
Louie
Jenkins is
a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester in the Performing Arts
Department and the co-ordinator of the new Drama degree. Her specialisms
are in Performance Writing, Solo Performance, Devising and Applied and
Interventionist Theatre. She has completed the first year of a practice-based
PhD at Brunel University, where her research focus is on biopolitics,
death and performance. Her Masters degree is in Writing for Performance.
She has worked as a professional actress, writer and director in England
and USA., and is a founding member of Factory Floor, a network for female
solo performers.
Wednesday,
October 21, 2009
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Reckless
Sleepers
Mole
Wetherell
"Sharing
the Same Space"
Reckless
Sleepers creates original theatre pieces, installation projects and interventions for theatres, galleries, museums, and site- and seasonally-specific projects that both entertain and challenge its audiences, viewers and participants.
Wednesday,
November 4, 2009
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Maira
Spanghero
"Dancing
Numbers, Figures and Patterns"
Maira
is conducting post doctorate research entitled "DANCE & MATHEMATICS: Anne
Teresa de Keersmaeker's use of the secret number and William Forsythe's
use of algorithmic structures in choreography." The intent is to understand
how an abstract mathematical concept can be transformed and used to develop
new choreographic form and structure. She is a professor, researcher and
dance critic who teaches at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC/SP).
Wednesday,
November 18, 2009
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Joanne
'Bob' Whalley and Lee Miller
"Not
Going Out: Dissent & Cupcakes "
Over
the past ten years Whalley & Miller have developed an increasingly conjoined
performance and research practice. Their work has been performed across
a range of contexts, from local platform events to international performance
festivals. Increasingly, they have struggled with how best to articulate
this practice, a practice that is supported (and to some degree given
licence) by their work in the Academy. This paper will consider Whalley
& Miller's tense relationship with professionalism and practice led research.
Wednesday, November 25,
2009
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Jennifer
Parker-Starbuck
(Roehampton
University)
"Reflective
Viewing: Orlan's Hybridized Harlequin, Banksy, Bacon, and the Animal-Human
Divide"
This paper explores ideas of hybridization emerging from Orlan s recent work, The Harlequin Coat, the recent art exhibit of Francis Bacon at the Tate Britain, and the artist Banksy's "Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill" in New York. In very different ways, these bodies of work expand possibilities while reflecting a cultural shift in animal-human relationships. Each exhibit seems to challenge traditional modes of viewing so that audiences might better reflect upon questions of the animal in contemporary society.
Jennifer teaches at Roehampton University in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Her work has focused upon the historical and theoretical implications of new media/multimedia and its relationship to the live body in performance. This work with multimedia has expanded to include work on cyborg performance, trauma and memory in performance, dis/ability in performance, feminism, animality and the non-human, and live art practices.
http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/staff/JenniferParker-Starbuck/
This fall series has been coordinated by Dr Gretchen Schiller
Brunel Performance Research Seminar now online
Following
upon an invitation by producer Marlon Barrios Solano and dance-tech TV,
the Centre shall from now on broadcast selected Performance Research Seminars
live from our Drama Studio - making them available to anyone in the world
interested in the subject. Johannes Birringer joined the dance tech TV
as associate producer.
The
one hour talks and discussions are webcast live on dance
tech net TV (then archived):
This is the beginning of a partnership between the Centre and
dance-techTV, and experiments in collaborative video broadcasting (the
channel is dedicated to interdisciplinary explorations of the performance
of movement. The channel allows worldwide 24/7 linear broadcasting of
selected programs, LIVE streaming and Video On-demand.
December
3-13, 2009
Networked Virtual Performance
Envirorments Japan UKIYO LAB
Anne
Laure Misme, photomontage by Paul Verity Smith (c) 2009 Paul V Smith /
DAP
coordinated
by Johannes Birringer and Yukihiko Yoshida
(Brunel
University)(Keio University)
In
the second phase of the project collaboration, the DAP-Lab team from London
will reside in Tokyo and be guests in residence at Mixed Reality Lab,
Hiyoshi Campus, Keio University, directed by Professor Adrian Cheok. There
the researchers from Japan and Europe will spend several days investigating
new approaches to 3d virtual reality and virtual movement design, and
exchanging knowledge and methodologies. In the second half of the UKIYO
research encounter, Johannes Birringer and his DAP team will meet some
of the leading japanese choreographers and digital artists who are interested
in mixed reality performance choreography, and they will work together
from 8th to 12th December 2009. An international symposium will be hosted
by Keio University on December 8, 2009, from 11:oo to 18:oo, with an
evening program of presentations and films
UKIYO is supported by the DAP-Lab at Brunel University's Center for Contemporary
and Digital Performance , a PMi2/connect British Council research cooperation
Award; The Japan Foundation, and Bliss Trust/PRS Foundation.
2010
Wednesday
January 27, 2010
Performance
Research Seminar
Artaud
Centre 16:oo-17:30 pm
Geoffrey
Colman
Central
School of Speech, London
Actors,
Angels and Avatars Contemporary Acting in a flat landscape.
Geoffrey
Colman examines the context of training actors, notions of 'good' and
'bad' acting in relation to 'camera true' and asks if the conservatoire
must strain for a new form of authenticity. However much British actor
training continues to aspire to a notion of a tradition and craft being
passed down through the hearts and minds of successive generations, another
perhaps more uncomfortable narrative must also be considered. Actor training
is now actually founded on a vocational rhetoric that is nothing more
complex than the trainee's need for employment within a camera-real economy.
For the contemporary actor's art to be manifest in such a context, it
will be necessarily measured against a set of assumptions that are, in
essence, about the successful realisation of a widely held generalist
performance grammar - a camera-real acting style that somehow equates
to a notion of good acting, and a non-camera-real or abstract acting style
equating to that of bad acting. In order for this to work, the camera-real
fictional nurses or policeman that nightly haunt our television screens
must appear to be performed in the same way, irrespective of style or
period, and similar to other film or theatre worlds created elsewhere.
All has become neutered by the lens. This is the reality of training actors
today.
Wednesday
February 10, 2010
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Gordana
Novakovic
Surfing Disciplines: From Antonin Artaud to neuroplastic arts?
The
digital revolution is changing the nature of our perceptual processes,
and this in turn is changing our conscious experience of the physical
world, inducing changes in cognition on a scale that is still unknown.
As inhabitants of the modern city we are in constant interaction, both
active and passive, with digital technology. These facts concern all of
us in different ways, but from my own perspective I want to ask: how does
all this affect the artist? By looking at the evolution of ideas and research
elements in my artistic practice, that now almost reads as a brief history
of practices under the broad, quite unfortunate title of ÔNew MediaÕ (mixed
media, multimedia, computer art, computer animation, net.art, interactive
art etc) I will talk about my quest to understanding the phenomena arising
from the interaction with digital technologies. I will also tackle the
theatrical and ritualistic elements of interactive art against the background
of ArtaudÕs concept for the Theatre of Cruelty.
Gordana
Novakovic belongs to the generation of artists who pioneered electronic
art. Originally a painter, with 12 solo exhibitions to her credit, she
now has more than 20 years of experience of developing and exhibiting
large-scale time-based media projects. A constant characteristic of her
work with new technologies has been her distinctive method of creating
an effective cross-disciplinary framework for the emergence of synergy
through collaboration. She has presented her work at major international
festivals and venues, including ISEA, Ars Electronica, ICC (Inter Communication
Center - Tokyo), and Tate Modern. Her most recent conference appearances
were at Subtle Technologies Õ09, and as a keynote speaker at EVA London
2009. Her latest piece, Fugue (http://www.fugueart.com), has been widely
presented and exhibited, most recently at the ÔInfectiousÕ group show
in the Science Gallery, Dublin, after which it was featured in the October
issue of Nature Immunology. Since 2004, Gordana has been artist-in-residence
at the Computer Science department, University College London, where in
2005 she founded the Tesla Art and Science Group with colleagues in the
department. Tesla is an informal art and science discussion forum dealing
with visionary ideas beyond the existing remits of art and science; it
aims to form and nurture cross-disciplinary teams, projects, and networks.
GordanaÕs current work on neuroplastic art explores the possibilities
lying at the intersection of art and brain science.
Wednesday February
17, 2010
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Matthew
Causey
The
Rise of the Bio-Virtual: Non-place, Disappearance, Indistinction (Life
in the Digital Kamp).
Within
the super-saturation of virtuality and technological reproductions in
contemporary digital culture are established zones and terrains of indistinction
and disappearance (digital kamps). These electronic environments I would
nominate as examples of the bio-virtual (perhaps a post-virtual) and model
the fields as a space of bio-politics par excellence. For the virtual
is not simply virtual anymore as its affect within us is haptic and somatic
and leads us to identify the phenomena as a taking place (within the non-place)
of the (bio)virtual. The (bio)virtual or post-virtual is no longer a problem
of the desert of the real, of representational illusions, but an entrance
of a new biopolitics of techno-performativity of doubles and debris veiled
through indistinction, confusion, excess. The subject's role in these
digital kamps is one of disappearance: a public denial and a private deferment.
My research considers the aftermath of the digital revolution and the
resulting bio-political zones of indistinction constructed of bio-virtual
doubles, avatars and digital debris.
Dr. Causey is Director of Trinity College Dublin's Arts Technology Research
Laboratory (ATRL). ATRL is an interdisciplinary, postgraduate research
centre designed to explore emergent art forms of that are networked, interactive,
multimedia, hybrid, virtual, immersive and ubiquitous. He is the author
of Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: from simulation to embeddedness
(Routledge, 2006, 2009). Dr. Causey is currently in production on AbstractMachines:
Staging the Televisual Beckett, which translates Beckett's late television
plays to technologized performance works.http://www.tcd.ie/drama-film-music/
http://www.tcd.ie/drama-film-music/atrl
Wednesday
February
24, 2010:
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Sarah
Gorman
Concert
Hall/Sports Facility: The Anthropological Space of Richard Maxwell's theatre.
Sarah
Gorman's current research focuses on contemporary European and North American
experimental theatre, in particular measuring the influence of a performance
discourse upon theatre practice. She has published material about Richard
Maxwell and the New York City Players in Making Contemporary Theatre:
International Rehearsal Processes (Harvie & Lavender eds.) and Contemporary
Theatre Review. She has also published on: Bobby Baker in Bobby Baker:
Redeeming Features of Daily Life (Barrett and Baker eds.); Forced Entertainment
and Janet Cardiff in Performance Research and New Media in A Concise Companion
to British and Irish Drama (Holdsworth and Luckhurst, eds). She is currently
completing a book: The Theatre of Richard Maxwell and the New York City
Players for Routledge Research, New York.
Wednesday
March 10, 2010
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Gary
Stevens
Thinking
Objects
Gary
Stevens has worked predominantly with live performance since 1984. In
a recent piece, Ape (2007) the three performers imitate one another in
process of assimilation that is bound to fail. They copy one another with
no secure original, which produces a viral, volatile and unstable mental
world, where no one has an idea of who or what they are. This work builds
on previous ensemble pieces such as Flock (2005), where a large group
of people create a mass that holds together, drifting and careering around
a town with a rudimentary interactive intelligence based on a copying
principle that no one controls. Solo pieces with text, such as Not Tony
(2004) reverse the idea of a single entity made of many parts by constructing
an elaborate multiplicity from a single body.
Another
strand to the work is video installation. Slow Life (2003) has five video
projections running concurrently, showing different domestic interiors
where the occupants perform simple and ordinary actions very slowly. It
relates to still as well as moving imagery. In Wake Up and Hide (2007),
the two-screen video installation reacts to and is disturbed by noise
in the gallery. Both pieces were first shown at MattÕs Gallery in London.
Gary is influenced by early film comedy where the representation of people
has an animal and mechanical aspect. Interaction, artificial intelligence
and object recognition are treated and explored in a low-tech way. The
work is funny and curiously disturbing.
Wednesday
March 24, 2010
Performance
Research Seminar
GB048
Drama Studio 16:oo-17:30 pm
Details
to be announced later in January.
PhD Conference
Researching the Arts -
School of Arts Postgraduate Conference Wednesday
May 19, 2010
(proposals due March 1,
2010)
Researching the Arts
is the 2nd annual School Wide Research Student Event, to be held this
year on Wednesday May 19th 2010. Deadline for proposals March 1st. This
is an opportunity to present your research in the form of a paper presentation,
performance, screening and or reading. This is a great opportunity to
attend an interdisciplinary conference and get feedback concerning your
research. This year we are excited to announce that there will be two
prizes for the best paper presentation and the best performance. We are
also organizing a research skills day prior to the conference to assist
you to prepare for this event.
Proposals: Performances,
Installations, Screenings, Readings and Recording (20 min) Please submit
a maximum of 150 word description of the work you would like to present.
Please include your technical requirements and the running time and explain
the way it pertains to your thesis research. Paper presentations (15 min)
If you are interested in presenting a paper at this conference please
submit a maximum of 150 word abstract elaborating upon the topic you would
like to present and explain the way it pertains to your thesis research.
Please contact Gretchen.Schiller@brunel.ac.uk
if you are interested in presenting during this event.
UKIYO (Moveable World)
a mixed reality choreographic
project created in a research collaboration between DAP-Lab and Japanese
artists and researchers (Keio University)
Ê UKIYO Lab3: June 1-
6, 2010 Antonin Artaud Building, Brunel University, Studio 101
After the first two labs
at Brunel University (May 2009) and Keio University (December 2009), the
forthcoming workshop is the third cross-cultural UKIYO workshop in performance,
design and network technologies features artists and researchers from
the DAP-Lab and Japanese partners from Keio University and Maison d'Artaud
(Tokyo). The project involves collaborative research experimentation conjoining
artistic, technological and scientific disciplines. Based on a design
libretto for the composition of a mixed reality installation - Ukiyo --Moveable
World - the workshop develops performance concepts for linking physical
performance spaces with virtual spaces/Second Life and a diverse range
of innovative wearable design and programming.
coordinated by Johannes
Birringer & Yukihiko Yoshida
The workshop takes place
every day from 11 - 13 & 14:oo to 21:3o in the Artaud Studios. Interested
observers are welcome. On Wednesday June 2 , 16:oo the team conducts an
open rehearsal and research lecture demonstration presenting key principles
and organizational methods of the workshop.
The UKIYO project will
be concluded in June 2010 with the ensemble touring Slovenia, with public
exhibitions of UKIYO 2 and a workshop held at KIBLA in Maribor.
artist residency (in planning
stage for 2010-2011)
John Jesurun (USA)
(c) 2010 The
Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance, Johannes Birringer (acting
director)