Amanda Stuart-Fisher: Applied Theatre as a Catalyst for Social Change: Participatory practices for young people and community theatre making (2024)
Applied theatre is an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of creative performance practices that are participatory in approach and which are used to engage young people and communities in an interrogation of pressing social, political and education issues. In this workshop we will explore some key applied theatre practices and examine what social change might mean when working creatively with communities and young people. This practical workshop will draw on participatory performance approaches developed by Little Fish Theatre, a London based theatre company, which works with young people from under-served communities. The workshop will develop a dialogue about applied theatre and social change, inviting you share your experiences of working creatively with different groups of young people and communities.
Performing Care and Carelessness: Hybrid Interdisciplinary Conference (2024)
Care is a topic of enormous complexity that is relevant to all of us. In a turbulent era, scholars from many different fields are returning again and again to consider care, or a lack of care, in political spheres, in relation to the environment, in a globalised world, in everyday life, amidst health crises, and in our mediatised and digital lives.
A lack of care - or a carelessness- can also become routinely embedded in many social institutions. As we acknowledge structures that represent barriers to care/ing, we can also acknowledge that caring despite these can stand as a form of resistance; an articulation of particular ethical commitments, an expression of collective identity, or an act of political imagination. As such, amidst shifting and challenging contemporary contexts, we consider how a call to care (for marginalised groups, for the natural world,for the people around us, and for distant others) can generatetensions and dilemmas. We focus on how both care and carelessness are performed, negotiated, and communicated, in both public and private settings, in response.
This will be a hybrid conference that allows people placed in Aotearoa New Zealand and nearby to attend in person, and for internationals - if they cannot travel - to attend online via Zoom.
Performing Global Crises Conference (2022)
Crisis has characterised contemporary lives in many ways – as we witness, experience, perform, and respond to entangled health, political, social, and environmental disasters. For example, in the past few years, the Covid-19 pandemic has affected virtually every area of our lives. Individual, local, national, and global responses have been played out. As all-encompassing as the pandemic has seemed at times, it has been eclipsed in some respects, more recently, by public attention to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is emerging as the most visible war in history. With visibility comes multiple modes of performance and performativity, including competing deep fakes, and another arena for the performance of global leaders, politicians, and the public. Meanwhile, the slow violence of Climate Change continues to devastate communities, nations, and species.
This conference will explore the way that these multi-layered global crises have been and continue to be performed, contested, and mediated across all strata of communication and society.
Performing Artefacts Conference (2019)
As our world becomes increasingly digitised, we ask 'what role do physical objects continue to play in our lived realities?' This conference considers how peoples' experiences and knowledges of 'the real' are communicated via performances involving artefacts – performances of the everyday, as well as activities explicitly labelled 'performances.' It looks at how 'performance' and 'the real' are understood with respect to artefacts, as well as at how and why peoples' realities are communicated performatively using artefacts.
Performing precarity: Refugee representation, determination and discourses (2016)
The current European refugee crisis continues to be a major focus of media attention as well as a point of political, cultural, ethical and social conflict. Images of migrants are constructed, mediated and circulated to create compelling representations of refugee-hood that serve a variety of agendas and conform to specific identities and expectations. They are, in this sense, performances.
This interdisciplinary conference aims to draw together scholars from a wide variety of fields to examine the ethics and politics surrounding refugee representation, determination, and discourses.
Lisa Fitzpatrick: Laughter, violence and affect (2017)
Laughter is often credited with creating a sense of community among spectators. This lecture examines some examples of comic violence on the stage, to consider how this strategy can work to promote an affective response in the audience. It asks if laughter can be used to engage the audience empathetically with the characters, to create a sense of identification or even a political will to action. The lecture will use production photographs and excerpts of dialogue to illustrate the scenes under discussion.
Stefan Aquilina: Blurring Boundaries: Recurring Principles between Theatre and Everyday Life (2018)
Using Michel de Certeau's idea of cross-cultural recurrence, and Richard Schechner's understanding that 'the tendency over the past century has been to dissolve the boundaries separating performing from not-performing, art from not-art', the lecture will seek to identify recurring principles between theatre and performance on one side and everyday life on the other. The recurring principles discussed are: (i) theatrical transformation; (ii) preparation/rehearsal; and (iii) repetition and uniqueness.
Jonathan W. Marshall: The neurological theatre of hysterioepilepsy (2017)
This presentation surveys some of the work from Marshall’s recent monograph Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot (Palgrave: 2016) which examines the work of influential French neurolopathologisy Charcot (1825-93). Charcot and his colleagues faced a challenge when they examined a disease they called “hysterioepilepsy.” In the paper, he will lay out the nature of this illness as described by Charcot, and propose hysteria might be considered as a kind of traumatic non-emergence.
Performing Community Ecologies - Public Panel (2018)
A public conference on performing community ecologies, hosted by the Performance of the Real from three eminent diverse scholars. The panelists will discuss community interventions and creative practices that draw attention to sustainability, ecology, and human engagement.
The performance and performativity of violence (2017)
This interdisciplinary conference aims to draw together scholars from a wide variety of fields to examine the ethics, politics and nature of representations/orchestrations of violence, as well as what makes the performance and performativity of violence particularly compelling, pervasive and or problematic in the current age.
Mediating the Real 2: Mediations in a 'post-truth' era (2017)
'Post-truth' has become a buzzword in the last year generating think-pieces and SNS chatter lamenting 'truth' as a lost object that has enabled and / or smuggled in events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. With this discussion, comes a broader demonstration of anxiety that a true 'real' (world, political sphere, social …) has been either lost or obscured. The responsibility for this loss or obscurance has fallen firmly at the feet of 'the media' (as well as the so-called postmodernists). This conference asks and unpacks the interactions of (post) truth, the 'real' and contemporary media.
Performing Ecologies Conference (2018)
By drawing together scholars and creative practitioners from a variety of fields to focus on the subject of ‘performing ecologies’, this interdisciplinary conference thus aims to provoke consideration of the role that performance and creative practice can and does play in our ‘learning to live with/in’ this “ecological crisis”.
Kim Toffoletti: Sexy surfers, selfies, and social media – Encounters with Jean Baudrillard, Postfeminism and Post-truth (2017)
In keeping with a Baudrillardian mode of theorising, in this talk Kim Toffoletti will ‘explore’ (rather than ‘explain’) feminist representational politics in what has been described as postfeminist (or some say post-postfeminist) times.
Laurie J. Ouellette: Fake President: Telemorphosis and the performance of grotesque sovereignty (2017)
This presentation situates the rise and fall of the Trump presidency within the polymorphous technologies of truth and fakery associated with reality TV and social media: experimentation, verification, spectacularization, affect and performativity.
A Forum Discussion on Manifesto 2083 and Dark Matter (2016)
Theme members Dr Suzanne Little, Dr Rosemary Overell, and Dr Sarah Thomasson host a forum and panel discussion with artists from The Rebel Alliance and Martyn Roberts about their Fringe Festival shows Manifesto 2083 and Dark Matter. Both shows aim to bring new light to recent issues or to challenge our perceptions.
Performance of the Real Research Theme: Ritual and Cultural Performance Hui and Symposium (2016)
This event investigates the performativity of ritual and cultural enactments, which are integral to many aspects of our lives.
Performance of the Real: Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Symposium (2016)
The event asks what it is about representations, mediations and performances of the 'real' that makes them so compelling in the contemporary moment.
It's a social experiment: Pranks, political activism, and performing marginality for a politically correct mainstream audience (2016)
This keynote address from the Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Symposium investigates the phenomenon of so-called 'social experiments', where pranksters perform stigmatised identities in public spaces and places.
Mediating the Real (2016)
This conference addresses what the 'Real' might mean in contemporary media studies. Moving beyond common-sense understandings of 'realness' as an objective 'Truth', Mediating the Real specifically applies psychoanalytic and Lacanian understandings of the Real to mediated cultures.
Performing Precarity: Refugee representation, determination and discourses (2016)
This interdisciplinary conference aims to draw together scholars from a wide variety of fields to examine the ethics and politics surrounding refugee representation, determination, and discourses.