Join us for our upcoming research events on Networked Performance with Ramona Mosse (5 Oct), Liam Jarvis (2 Nov), and Elly Clarke (7 Dec), @15.00, Borough Road Gallery (TBC). Organised by Dan Barnard and Elena Marchevska. All welcome.
Ramona Mosse – 5 October at 15.00
From Marionettes to Avatars: The Hybrid Futures of German Post/pandemic Theatre
Dr Ramona Mosse has taught at Columbia University, at Barnard College, and at the Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, she was a Fellow at the International Research Center for Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin and, more recently, a Principles of Cultural Dynamics Fellow at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University.Her work has been published in Anglia, Theater Journal, THEWIS, Performance Philosophy Journal and The Baffler, among others. Ramona is also a Core Convenor of the Performance Philosophy Network. Her research interests include: modernity and tragedy, cultural politics of the Cold War, the posthuman and non-human in performance, aurality in theatre/sound studies, the environmental humanities. She is currently writing a monograph on theatrical performance in the Anthropocene and is editing, with Anna Street, a volume on genre in performance and philosophy. Ramona also works as a dramaturg and translator.
Liam Jarvis – 2 November at 15.00
Networked Performance Reimagined: Postdigital Performances of Care Mid-pandemic
Dr Liam Jarvis is a researcher-practitioner, teacher, writer and theatre director. At present, he is Co-director of the Centre for Theatre Research (CTR) and a Senior Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. His research and teaching interests include Postdigital and Intermedial Performance, Embodiment and Immersion in Contemporary Performance, Science-art Interdisciplinarity and Object-led Theatre. In 2021, he was awarded a Times Higher Education’s ‘Most Innovative Teacher of the Year’ Award (sponsored by Advance HE).
Liam’s research journey emerged through his practice; in particular, his work with theatre company Analogue and interdisciplinary collaborations with partners in adjacent fields such as psychology, histopathology and neuroscience. His creative investigations with my company formed a significant part of his AHRC funded PhD research entitled Feeling with Someone Else’s Body: Self-deception and the Paradox of Immersive Performance; a qualitative project that examined the intersections between technologized immersive performance practices and recent neuroscientific studies in embodiment and body-ownership. This work drew him to both artistic and scientific experimentation with body illusions that displace sensations and elicit eccentric forms of perception in participants as an expression of an ontological reach towards different kinds of otherness beyond the body one owns; for example, the empathy activism of temporarily inhabiting the first-person virtual bodies of refugees, traumatic brain injury patients or non-human others using VR. These are all areas of investigation that are featured in his book Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalization (2019).
Reading:
Chapter 2: From practitioner to researcher & Chapter 3: Conceptual Frameworks for PaR and Related Pedagogy: From ‘Hard Facts’ to ‘Liquid Knowing’ – both from Robin Nelson’s Practice-as-Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Elly Clarke – 7 December at 15.00
(Net)Working Together to Perform: The Drag of Physicality in the Digital Age
Using drag as a queer and analytic tool, Elly Clarke’s practice-led research examines the performance – or drag – of being and having a human body in a digitally-mediated world. Defining the ‘physical body’ as the singular, flesh-and-blood body that we are (still) dependent on to exist, and the ‘digital body’ as the data that is ‘out there’ about us online, she is interested in the ways in which the digital and physical bodies clash, collaborate and collude in the shaping of identities, and where value is located.
Over the past 15 years she has produced projects that have demanded close interaction with very different groups of people: from her East London Council Estate neighbours (The Broadway House Photo Project) to passengers on the Trans Siberian Train (Moscow to Beijing); from small businesses and community centres in Birmingham (FRAME_) to owners of portraits by a Victorian portrait artist (The George Richmond Portrait Project). She works with photography (analogue & digital, mobile phones and screen-grabs), video, performance, drawing, slide shows, songs, text, participatory, web-based, selling and curatorial intervention – including some in the public domain.
More recently her work with #Sergina, which is a drag identity that is played (out) not only by me but also other bodies in different physical places, allows her to explore this further – through online/offline interaction, Instagram and songs she writes about mobile phones, loneliness and the dichotomous draw/distraction of personal technologies.
Reading:
Clarke, Elly, and Clareese Hill. ‘Re:Searching Together (in Two Acts)’. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About 11, no. 1 (October, 2022). https://aprja.net//article/view/134310.
Asenbaum, Hans. ‘Making a Difference: Toward a Feminist Democratic Theory in the Digital Age’. Politics & Gender 16, no. 1 (March 2020): 230–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X18001010.
All speakers are delivering a PhD methodology workshop earlier in the day. For more information please contact us.
Images (from top to bottom): Ellie Clarke (I Want Your Data), Ramona Mosse, Liam Jarvis, and Elly Clarke