The workshops will take place in Room D 665, just off the Cujas Courtyard, on the ground floor.

To see the list of French-language workshops, click here.

Philosophy Through Performance: the example of Bad.co

Workshop by Mirjana Batinic (University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia)

Through an interdisciplinary approach, Philosophy Through Performance: the example of Bad.co will attempt to open theoretical discourse about teaching philosophy through performance within the example of a collaborative performance collective from Zagreb (Croatia), named BADco. In their own words, they are “reconfiguring established relations between performance and audience, challenging perspectival givens and architectonics of performance, problematizing of communicational structures – all of that makes BADco. an internationally significant artistic phenomenon and one of the most differentiated performance experiences.”

One of the significances of this collective is that its members / performers have different profiles and educational backgrounds, however, all of them are highly-educated top experts in their domains. BADco consists of four choreographers / dancers, two dramaturges, one philosopher and the company production manager. These urban activists promote human rights, free culture, free software and are active on cultural and political scene in their country and abroad. Their work could be described as a combination of performance and contemporary political philosophy. Since their beginning in 2000, their performances have been presented in many known venues, such as: 54th Venice Biennale; Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen, PS122 New York; Julidans Amsterdam; Dance Zone, 4+4 Days in Motion Prague; Rozdroze Festival Warsaw; Chelsea Theater London, BYCEM Athens, Metropolis Biennalen Copenhagen and many more. In this seminar we will systematically analyze the relationship of philosophy and performance by investigating how BADco relates to philosophy and which mechanisms it uses in order to present a certain philosophical thought within its performances.

Mirjana Batinić is a PhD candidate at the department of Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture at University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia and the department of Philosophy at University of Malta. She is also new media artist working mainly in the medium of interactive installations, sound and video art.

Duration: 20 min

Praxis, Praxis!

Performative Lecture and Workshop by Dimanche Rouge (Paris, France)

Exhibiting live and experimental performance presents several challenges interesting to both philosophers and practitioners.  Outlining those challenges from the practitioners’ viewpoint, namely that of organizers and curators from Dimanche Rouge, Praxis, Praxis! advocates for a close dialog between theory and practice.

Live and experimental performances include a wide and diverse range of disciplines–performance art, dance, multimedia, theater, sound art, audiovisual performances and other experimental acts that escape classification.  Pluridisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and the fluid nature of experimental performance pose specific challenges to organizers and curators including: communicating to the public about complex and innovative work that rejects definitions; selecting a venue or site that responds to the technical and aesthetic purposes of a work reluctant to be delimited; elaborating a sustainable model for both artists and organizers while remaining experimental; documenting a work that persists in being ephemeral.

This workshop starts with a survey of those challenges, followed up by the presentation of a concrete scenario consisting in organizing an event exhibiting performance.  Workshop participants will be divided into four groups and asked to perform playing the roles of the four main parties involved; i.e. artists, public, venue, and organizers. Participants gain knowledge about exhibiting performance from real-life situations. Through role-play, participants deepen their understanding of those situations from the different parties’ perspectives having to negotiate solutions.

While based in France, Dimanche Rouge is a project mostly run by foreigners with a significant Anglo-American representation.  This project has exhibited the work of over 800 experimental performers from 65 countries in France and abroad at a range of sites and venues–from squats to national art museums.  Building on that experience, Dimanche Rouge organizers lead this workshop surveying the main challenges of exhibiting experimental performance with the aim of stimulating dialog between theory and practice to elaborate renewed approaches.

Dimanche Rouge is a Paris-based project that promotes live and experimental artwork at a range of venues in Paris and abroad for a diverse public through festivals, talks, presentations, exhibits, workshops and an online magazine, Dimanche Rouge. Since its inception, in 2011, Dimanche Rouge has presented the work of over 800 artists from 65 countries. For further information, please visit:  www.dimancherouge.org

Duration: 40 min

The Cube Project: Research in Object-Oriented Performance

Workshop by Patrick Finn (University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada)

The Cube Project uses performance to study the interaction of human beings and information through the language of philosophy. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour, N. Katherine Hayles, Judith Butler, Graham Harman, Michelle Kasprzak and Ian Bogost, these experiments create objects of performance that materialize elements not commonly attended to theatrically. Their presentations leave traces that are real rather than implied.

As a theatre practitioner, my work poses the question: – what does theatre look like if we work from the position presented in Latour’s flat ontology? A study of the research of theatre makers such as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Marie Chouinard, Julie Taymore and Ann Bogart reveals relevant discussions about objects, affect and time. This theatre-of-information offers one answer to the common question: how do we make theatre in the post-human age?

To this point, the project has staged three productions, has one underway, and several more in development. The first brought a graphic memoir to life for a series of performances studying issues of power related to mental illness and the health care system. The second spent a year manifesting Plato’s Republic in a set of varying performances and displays, and the third brought eighteen of Aesop’s Fables to life in a study of morality in a post-human society.

The next project in the series is a study of identity and incarceration. By performing elements of Michel Foucault’s classic Discipline and Punish integrated with a play based on a true story about a riot in a Canadian prison, this show embodies questions about the violent reaction we have to questions about identity.

Flat ontology as realized in Object-Oriented Performance has implications for every aspect of theatre making. Social, political, aesthetic and environmental issues are among the most ready to hand, but they are only the beginning. At each stage, my work includes performance as well as critical writing and discussion – extending the nature of performance as a primary means of research dissemination.

Patrick Finn, MFA, PhD is Associate Professor in the School for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. He is an artist-scholar whose interest is in the intersection of human performance and technology. He has published and lectured widely as well as maintaining an active artistic profile.

Duration: 40 min

Philosophies of Spectatorship after 1945

Workshop by Martin Harries (University of California, Irvine, USA)

If there is a divide between philosophical approaches to theater in Anglo-American and continental thought, how does this divide mark contrasting theories of spectatorship?  So large a question might organize a history of philosophical thinking about the theater since Plato.  Philosophies of Spectatorship after 1945 will, then, concentrate on postwar conceptions of spectatorship, considering both explicit and implicit theorizations of the spectator.

Jacques Rancière’s essay, “The Emancipated Spectator,” is, despite its opposition to critical norms in discussions of spectatorship, typical: his intervention assumes a debate in which the crucial opposing figures are Brecht and Artaud.  Why does this contrast, which Denis Hollier had declared a “worn-out topos” in 1997, continue to structure discussions of spectatorship?  What claims for theater does it allow?  What philosophical and historical problems does it evade?  The goal of this seminar is to examine other figures and forces that shape Anglo-American discussions of spectatorship.  An opposition no less reductive but nevertheless useful as a heuristic pointer might describe this difference: Stein with Hollywood.  This workshop will test the hypothesis that assumptions formed in reaction to mass culture shape philosophical accounts of spectatorship, and it will test the theoretical place of the concept of “presence” in Anglo-American accounts of spectatorship.

This workshop will be structured as a seminar, with selected readings made available in advance.  These readings may include Stein’s essay, “Plays,” Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” and Stanley Cavell’s essays on Beckett’s Endgame and Shakespeare’s King Lear.  The convener will make a short presentation at the start of the workshop, the remainder of which will be devoted to discussion.

Martin Harries works on twentieth-century theater, modernism, and theory.  He is the author of numerous articles and reviews, and of two books, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (Fordham, 2007) and Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford, 2000).  He is working on a third book, “Theater after Film: Mass Culture and the Forms of Drama.”  He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Chair of English, at the University of California, Irvine.  He taught at New York University from 2000 to 2012 and at Princeton from 1994 to 2000.  He received his Ph.D. from Yale in Comparative Literature in 1995.

Bibliography for Workshop “Philosophies of Spectatorship after 1945”

• Cavell, Stanley.  “Ending the Waiting Game.”  In Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. (pdf)
• Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” In Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. (pdf)
• Stein, Gertrude.  “Plays.”  In Last Operas and Plays.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. (pdf)

Duration: 40 min

From Representation to Event: Identity and Difference in Edward Bond’s Tune

Workshop by Kate Katafiasz (Newman University, Birmingham, UK)

Theatre in Education Company Big Brum regularly wrestle in rehearsal with complex interactions between coded and uncoded states in the plays that Bond writes for them. In Tune (2011) Robert, angered by his mother’s boyfriend Vernon, transforms into a ‘boy-wall’, before Vernon deliberately wounds him to corroborate a lie. From Representation to Event: Identity and Difference in Edward Bond’s Tune will explore three scenes from Tune to investigate these shifts from representation to event; from the mimetic, iconic, or figurative ‘dominant performative discourse’ (Butler, 1993), where physicality is obliged to endorse the signifier, to what Elizabeth Wright (1998: 31) terms ‘a reality outside representation’.

The workshop will draw upon my most recent research (Katafiasz 2014), which reads Heidegger with Lacan. Their papers on ‘Identity and Difference’ and ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’ respectively, both appeared in 1957. The two works resonate strongly, in that each posits a non-binary affiliation between Being and beings (in Heidegger’s case), and between metaphor and metonymy (for Lacan). Each describes a fluid rapport – ‘perdurance’, ‘souffrance’ – between these coded and uncoded positionalities; the latter anti-representationalist position having been very influential, arguably forming the basis of Deluzian, Foucaultian and Lyotardian moves.  Though he does not do so explicitly, Lacan claims to ‘translate Heidegger’ (2006: 528); if we follow this through as I propose, we arrive at an extraordinarily useful topological nexus, relating philosophy and psychoanalysis to notions of performance and event.

Works cited:

• Bond, E. ‘Tune’ in Plays: 9, (2011), London: Methuen.
• Butler, J. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, (1993),  London: Routledge.
• Heidegger, M. Identity and Difference (trans. Joan Stamburgh), (1969),  London: Harper Row.
• Katafiasz, K. ‘Dramatic Jouissance’, (2014) in Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone Numéro 12.1, special issue ‘Reading English-language Arts and Literature with the Later Lacan’, forthcoming Autumn 2014, online.
• Lacan, J.  ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’, in Ecrits, (2006), London: Norton.
• Wright, E. Psychoanalytic Criticism: a Reappraisal, (1998), Cambridge: Polity.

Dr. Kate Katafiasz is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Newman University in Birmingham, UK. Her doctoral research followed Edward Bond’s ongoing seventeen year collaboration with Big Brum Theatre. She is also an associate postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Fine Art Research at Birmingham City University. Her recent peer-reviewed publications include: ‘Quarrelling with Brecht: understanding Bond’s post-structuralist political aesthetic’, pp. 237-251 in Studies in Theatre and Performance, Volume 28: 3 (2008), Bristol: Intellect; ‘Staging Reality (beyond representation): a perplexing Bondian body’, in JCDE, Journal for the Study of Contemporary Drama in English: Volume 1, (2013),  Berlin: de Gruyter; ‘Dramatic Leadership: Dorothy Heathcote’s Autopoietic, or Embodied Leadership Model’, in The Embodiment of Leadership, a volume in the International Leadership Association’s ‘Building Leadership Bridges’ series, (2013), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley; ‘Failed embodiment, silent speech, and ontological intermediality in Edward Bond’s production of The Under Room’, in  Body, Space & Technology Vol. 11 No 2 (2013), [online]

Duration: 40 min

Kx4l3ndj34r Katastronauci: How to Do Things with Worlds

Workshop by Bartek Frackowiak (Poland), Ralo Mayer (Austria), Jon McKenzie (USA)

Kx4l3ndj34r Katastronauci: How to Do Things with Worlds approaches the 1986 Challenger disaster through a specific constellation of historical, fictional, and philosophical materials in order to reflect on contemporary creativity and world- building across the domains of performance theory, conceptual art, and experimental theater.

• Jon McKenzie (United States): Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r and/as Post-conceptual, Post-dramatic Personae

What figures of thought emerge between and beyond theater and philosophy, in the post-media timespace of global performance? Are such figures human or post-human? And/or animal, vegetable, and mineral? The posting of conceptual thought initiated by Nietzsche recurs in Hans-Thies Lehman’s recent Postdramatic Theatre and is perhaps most memorably enacted in scenes of challenging staged by Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, and the US space agency NASA. This multimedia presentation draws out moments when challengers are suddenly and precipitously challenged back and forth.

Jon McKenzie is Professor of English the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches courses in performance theory, experience design, and digital studies.  He is Director of DesignLab, a media consultancy for students whose mission is to democratize digitality. McKenzie is author of Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001) and such articles as “Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love,” “etoy, eToys, TOYWAR: Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design,” and “Abu Ghraib and the Society of the Spectacle of the Scaffold.” He is also co-editor with Heike Roms and C.J.W.-L. Wee of Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (2010). McKenzie has produced a number of experimental video essays, including The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r (2012) and This Vile Display (2006). He gives workshops on performative scholarship, smart media, and experimental theory and also consults with educators about integrating media and design into higher education.

• Ralo Mayer (Austria): Performative Research: « Obviously a Major Malfunction »

What if we not only break the term « research » clear from a blueprint of traditional thinking about investigations, but put the act of researching into the focus of artistic practice? (« Along his lecturing activities at this university of salmagundi, Tobler prepares an application for public funding: an interdisciplinary comparison of the poly-furcating smoke trails of the Challenger space shuttle at its explosion after launch, specifically of the crew compartment, and the continental debris distribution patterns of the Columbia disintegrating at re-entry. Beyond any doubt, these two iconic events (1986, 2003) do frame the socio-economic transformations of the second millenium. »- from « How to Do Things with Worlds »)

Ralo Mayer is a conceptual artist who lives and works in Vienna. His exhibitions include Secession Vienna, argos / Brussels, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, and Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel.  In his ongoing research series HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORLDS, Mayer investigates subjects such as post-Fordist Science Fiction, Space Shuttles, and the Biosphere 2 experiment. His practice of performative research most often breeds unruly monsters across different media: film, performance, installation and text. Mayer is also author of the miniature book HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORLDS 1: Being All Over the Place (2006) and the science fiction novel The Ninth Biospherian (2007). His grants and awards include an Austrian Grant for Visual Arts (2011) and the Otto-Mauer-Award (2012).

• Bartek Frackowiak (Poland): Katastronauci and the Dance of Disaster and Chance

Employing disaster and chance/alea as « travelling concepts » alongside the concept of ‘theoretical object,’ this presentation focuses on HOBO Foundations’ production of Katastronauci, in particular the dance sections, « Earth and Prof. Challenger » and « H.M.S. ‘destratification of memory’ dance cruise. » I will argue for the necessity of disruption, error, and passivity in creating politically significant gestures in the performing arts while suggesting a reconceptualization of the Body without Organs. This reconceptualization unfolds via a close reading of elements of Katastronauci that reveal important intersections between theory/practice and philosophy/performance.

Bartek Frackowiak is a director, dramaturg, curator, and performance/visual culture scholar. He is currently a PhD student and lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Drama and Performance at Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Warsaw. Frackowiak has directed Komornicka: An Apparent Biography (2012), a non-linear surreal documentary of Polish transgender modernist writer Maria Komornicka, and In Desert and Wilderness. After Sienkiewicz and Others (2011), based on an archive of Polish colonial fantasies, images, and projections. He served as dramaturg for Katastronauci (2013, directed by I. Ganczarczyk), an experimental theater work remixing Jon McKenzie’s Perform or Else and recontextualizing composer Witold Lutoslawski’s controlled aleatorism. Frackowiak is Program Director of HOBO Art Foundation, which seeks to develop performing and visual arts and bring down borders between art, technology, humanities and science.

Duration: 40 min

NEW YORK WITH AN ACCENT (Writing/Performing the Immigrant Experience)

Autobiographical Performative Lecture by Saviana Stanescu (Condeescu) (Ithaca College, New York)

Award-winning playwright Saviana Stanescu, author of the acclaimed plays « Aliens With Extraordinary Skills » (produced off-Broadway at Women’s Project, New York; in regional US theatres; in Mexico – in the Spanish version: “Inmigrantes con Habilidades Extraordinarias”, in Turkey, Romania, etc), « Lenin’s Shoe », « Ants », « For a Barbarian Woman », « Waxing West » (winner of 2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Script), will talk about writing/performing her immigrant experience after 25 years since the Fall of the Iron Curtain.

Saviana grew up during the totalitarian regime of Ceausescu and, as a college student, protested in the streets of Bucharest during the 1989 revolution. She worked as a journalist for the newly emerged free press and published books of poetry and drama in Romania, USA, Mexico, etc. Saviana arrived in New York City two weeks before 9/11 to study at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts, as a Fulbright fellow in Performance Studies. Since then, her artistic work has been inspired and informed by the vibrant everyday life in the Big Apple’s melting pot. She is committed to explore hyphenated identities and that alien in-between space where global foreigners and migrants dwell.

NEW YORK WITH AN ACCENT (Writing/Performing the Immigrant Experience) will include monologues, production pictures and Saviana’s photos of the American Flag displayed in NYC in the aftermath of 9/11, investigating the power of symbols/objects to perform identity, patriotism, and post-traumatic community engagement. An imaginary dinner with Marx might conclude this political yet humorous autobiographical performative lecture.

Saviana Stanescu (www.saviana.com) is a Romanian-born award-winning playwright. Her work has been widely presented internationally and in the US. Recent productions include “Ants” at New Jersey Rep, “For a Barbarian Woman” (a co-production Fordham/EST), “Aliens with extraordinary skills” at Women’s Project (published by Samuel French), “Polanski Polanski” at HERE Arts Center, “Bechnya” at Hudson Theatre in LA, « Waxing West » (2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-length Script) at La MaMa Theatre, « Suspendida » and “Vicious Dogs on Premises” (with Witness Relocation) at Ontological Theatre, “The E-Dating Project” at Strasberg Institute for Theatre&Film, and the site-specific « I want what you have » at the World Financial Center. Ms Stanescu has published books of poetry and drama including “The New York Plays”,  “Aliens With Extraordinary Skills”, “Waxing West”, « Google me! », « Black Milk », and « The Inflatable Apocalypse” (Best Play of the Year UNITER Award in 2000). She co-edited the anthology of plays “Global Foreigners” (with NYU professor Carol Martin) and “roMANIA after 2000” (with CUNY professor Daniel Gerould). Saviana holds an MA in Performance Studies (Fulbright fellow) and an MFA in Dramatic Writing (John Golden Award for excellence in playwriting) from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, where she was on faculty in the Drama Department (2003-2012). She has taught at Strasberg Theatre&Film Institute, ESPA – Primary Stages, Lark Transylvania Playwriting Camp, Centro Cultural Helénico, Mexico City, etc. Currently Saviana teaches Playwriting and Theatre Studies at Ithaca College. She has a PhD in Theatre from the National University of Theatre&Film, Bucharest, Romania. Ms Stanescu is the Director of Eastern European Exchange for The Lark Play Development Center, the curator of playgroundzero and New York with an Accent, and the founder of Immigrant Artists and Scholars in New York (IASNY).

Duration: 40 min

The Chelsea Manning Project

Workshop by Minou Arjomand (Boston University, USA)

From the Dreyfus Affair to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many of the most important ideological and political debates of the past 150 years played out in public trials and hearings. Courtrooms became a heavily contested site of public performance, ranging from the minutely staged socialist realism of the Moscow Show Trials to the carnivalesque outbursts of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. With the War on Terror, indefinite detention, and the radical secrecy of the Obama Administration we are seeing a change in the character of political trials in the United States; they have ceased to be public events, even their transcripts are classified. This workshop will ask how performance philosophy might address the absences—the lack of public performance—occasioned by the War on Terror.

The Chelsea Manning Project will be divided into two parts: starting with a performance workshop and ending with a seminar-style discussion. During the first half of the workshop, we will divide into smaller groups (depending on the number of participants) and each group will create a staged reading of short segments of the unofficial transcripts leaked from the trial of Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley Manning). For the second half of the workshop, we will reconvene for a group discussion. The central questions of this discussion may include:

• What sort of staging might we envision for these transcripts? Mimetic? Theatrical? Anti-Theatrical? Live or mediatized?
• How might Chelsea Manning’s public declaration of gender identity the day after her sentencing become part of a performance of these transcripts?
• Is the performance of hidden trials in itself an ethical move or imperative? Or do the specific techniques of staging give the performance its ethical value? Or are there other forms of philosophical inquiry and/or political mobilization better suited to engage these trials than theatrical performance?

Participants in the workshop are asked to select and bring a printed copy of one page of material from the trial (ex: excerpts from the transcripts of court sessions, exhibits presented by the prosecution or defense, etc.). Unofficial transcripts of the Manning trial, transcribed by journalist Alexa O’Brien are available here. Official records released as of March 24, 2014 as a result of litigation by the Center for Constitutional Rights and O’Brien’s Freedom of Information Act requests are available— and fully searchable by keyword.

Minou Arjomand is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, having completed her PhD at Columbia University. She is currently working on a book, Theatre on Trial: Staging Justice in the Postwar Period, about theatrical adaptations of postwar trials in East and West Germany and the United States. She is translator and co-editor with Ramona Mosse for The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies by Erika Fischer-Lichte (2013).

Duration: 40 min

The Scene of Performance?

Workshop by Esa Kirkkopelto (University of The Arts, Helsinki, Finland)

A Lecture-Workshop by Esa Kirkkopelto, University of the Arts Helsinki

This lecture workshop studies what a ‘performative element’ is like and how each one of us can become such an element.

The event consists of three parts: an argument, a practical workshop and a discussion.

In my argument (10 min), I will return to the debate between Performance Studies and Theatre Studies and ask its philosophical bearing. In which sense can ‘performance’ be conceived as a philosophical concept today? I will first suggest a short deconstructive reading of Patrice Pavis´s recent book Mise en scène contemporaine (2012) and indicate in which way a performance may still constitute a blind spot in the semiology-based Theatre Studies. In order to shed more light on that spot, I will shortly refer to the debate William B. Worthen launched in 1995 with Performance Studies (epitomized here by Richard Schechner, Joseph Roach, Jill Dolan and Phillip Zarrilli). It concerns the disciplinary affinity and rivalry between PS and TS. At closer look, that debate can be read as strictly philosophical one, regarding the meaning, function and scope of textuality (Barthes, Derrida), that both disciplinary fields lean on in different ways. If this reading is just, i.e. if we can presume that all performativity carries an unavoidable textual and thereby theatricalreminder (Weber), then it makes sense to ask the point of intersection of the two disciplinary fields by removing it on the fieldof textuality. This is a tempting possibility, but it presumes that 1) that our whole understanding of textuality is not restricted to merely theoretical / discursive / literary /academic practices, but that it also reaches the level of material conditions and constituents parts of performing; 2) that our experience, both as performers and spectators / participants, is able to reach that level as well!

In the mini-workshop which follows (20 min), we try to reach that level together, or raise ourselves onto it, through series of simple collective exercises, a set of practical suggestions, which focus on corporality and language. What happens when our bodies turn into performative elements? What can these elements do? What can we do with them? How does the observation of these elements change our given understanding of language and corporality? Some of the exercises are accomplished together, some of them I will demonstrate on my own. All participation is voluntary. No previous skills are required.

The event ends up with a discussion (10 min).

Esa Kirkkopelto (born in 1965) is philosopher, artist-researcher, performer, former theatre director and playwright, convener of Other Spaces live art collective. Since 2007, he has been working at the Theatre Academy (University of Arts Helsinki) as Professor of artistic research. His research focuses on the deconstruction of the performing body both in theory and in practice. Since 2008, he has conducted a collective research project “Actor´s Art in Modern Times” on the psychophysical actor training. He is the responsible leader of the “Doctoral Programme of Artistic Research” (Theatre Academy, Academy of Fine Arts, Sibelius Academy & Aalto University), as well as “Asian Art and Performance Consortium” (Theatre Academy Helsinki & Academy of Fine Arts). He has made his PhD on philosophy in 2002 at the University of Strasbourg. Author of Le théâtre de l´expérience. Contributions à la théorie de la scène (Presses de l´Université Paris-Sorbonne 2008). He is a core-convener of Performance Philosophy Association, a member of the editorial board of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training and the convener of the “International Platform for Performer Training” which gathered for the first time in Helsinki in January 2014. During the spring 2014, he worked as a Fulbright senior scholar at the Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University.

Duration: 40 min

From the U.S. With Love

Workshop by Madison Performance Philosophy Collective

Format:  Multimedia, multi-sensory, site-specific, participatory performance

Length: Durational throughout the conference, culminating in a final live 60-minute participatory performance

In this site-specific, multi-sensory, participatory performance From the U.S. With Love we will create a space for meditation on questions concerning love, desire, communication, intimacy, knowledge, subjectivity, surveillance, security, and privacy. Participants will sign up in advance, provide their phone numbers, and receive a series of text messages starting at the beginning of the conference.  This communication will culminate in a final, 60-minute live performance on the final day of the conference.  The performance starts in the assigned conference room, followed by a short guided walk toward Medici Fountain, during which the participants will listen to an audio track (via smartphone or other audio device with headphones) made available in advance. Once by the Medici Fountain, the participants will be arranged in smaller groups on picnic blankets and provided with cheese and wine. There, a dialogue initiated by the performers and activated by reproduced and found love letters distributed to the participants will be accompanied by a soundtrack of classic love songs in English played on cassette tapes.  The found love letters will be excerpts from love letters of famous philosophers, as well as online blogs, journals, and other sources presented anonymously. Participants will be invited to read aloud an excerpt of the provided letters in a language of their choice, and to compose a love letter and send a part of it to a person of their own desire via their smartphone. While on the way back to the conference space, the participants will listen to a final audio track.

In order to participate, participants must have a smartphone or audio device with headphones, onto which they will download two audio tracks in advance of the live performance.  Participants must also register in advance, providing their phone numbers and email addresses by sending a participation request to madison.performance.philosophy[@]gmail.com.

This performance workshop is presented by Madison Performance Philosophy Collective members Thomas Armbrecht, Erin Briddick, James Burling, Tomislav Longinovic, Dijana Mitrovic, Andrew Salyer, and Katrina Schaag.

Madison Performance Philosophy Collective is a new, interdisciplinary assemblage of artist-scholars in the Madison, WI area. We are a regional branch of the international research network Performance Philosophy. Our current members are Tom Armbrecht, Erin Briddick, James Burling, Kat Lieder, Tomislav Longinović, Megan Marsh-McGlone, Jon McKenzie, Dijana Mitrović, Frédéric Neyrat, Michael Peterson, Andrew Salyer, and Katie Schaag. We received a grant from Performance Philosophy for our April 2014 interim event, “Mad Theory.” Our interests and experiences range from theatre and drama to relational aesthetics to new media to political philosophy, and we are each, to varying degrees, both artists and scholars.

Duration: 60 min