Blog & Events

The Research Centre for Visual Poetics is honored to invite professor Peter Boenisch to give a lecture about his current research. 

29 October, 15h - 16h30, City Campus, University of Antwerp, S.R.001

When Attitudes Become Performed: Institutional Poetics in Contemporary Theatre

Whereas art studies and museology have developed, over several decades, elaborate methodologies to analyse and reflect on the institutional conditions that impact on the making of, and exhibition of, artworks in the visual art context, the field of theatre and performance studies has not yet developed a comparable approach towards ‘reading the material theatre’ (Knowles 2004). In this presentation, I outline for debate the perspective of ‘Institutional Dramaturgy’, which we are developing in our research project Reconfiguring Dramaturgy for a Global Culture: Changing Practices in 21^st century European Theatre at Aarhus University. Discussing exemplarily the work of Zinnema in Brussels, and at Schauspiel Dortmund under its new artistic director Julia Wissert, I will reflect on methodological paths towards analysing institutional poetics as they catalyse the meaning of contemporary theatre and performance works in crucial ways.

Bio

Peter M. Boenisch is Professor of Dramaturgy at Aarhus University. His research areas are theatre direction, dramaturgy, and the intersections of theatre and politics, as they become manifest in aspects such as spectatorship, the institutional conditions of theatre production, and transcultural performance in a globalised Europe. At AU, he leads the research group “Paradigms of Dramaturgy: Arts, Institutions and the Social”. His books include Directing Scenes and Senses: The Thinking of Regie (2015), The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier (co-authored with the German director, 2016), and, as editor, the volume Littlewood – Strehler – Planchon in the series The Great European Stage Directors (with Clare Finburgh Delijani, 2018), the 30^th anniversary edition of David Bradby and David Williams’s Directors’ Theatre (2019), and The Schaubühne Berlin under Thomas Ostermeier: Reinventing Realism (2020).

World Ends DayAn Online One-Day Conference on Ends9 July 2021World Ends Day is a one-day online conference on constellations of durational ends—biological as much as political, embodied and yet intangible, capitalist and also planetary. We have to conceptualize the state of living in a continuous or consecutive aftermath. Ending, however, is also our hope as it seems to guide us to a radical potentiality of the not-yet: a telos that liberates us from being in a state of perpetual parenthesis; an ever flowing means without ends and endless ends.

On 9 July, Ends (Felipe Cervera, Kyoko Iwaki, Eero Laine, and Kristof van Baarle) will host a double bill of roundtables on the topic of ends by bringing together thinkers, artists, and practitioners from multiple cultural provenances reflecting on various threads of ends. Each session will invite three key speakers, who will first provide a short 15 to 20 minutes provocation on ends based on their recent works and research. The various topics will cover the global pandemic, environmental catastrophe, disaster and racial capitalism, vegetal and animal cosmopolitics, ghostly necropolitics, disaster patriarchy, climate of fear, posthuman cybernetics, and speculative futurities. After each provocation by the speakers from their own scholarships and perspectives, we will open the roundtable to a larger conversation with online participants.

Registration is required and happens via facebook or the PSi Constellate Webpage. To register, you have to become a PSi member, which this year only costs 5 euro - a kind support for the organization in dire times.

The detailed schedule is as follows:

World Ends Day Part Ⅰ

Time: 5am (California) / 8am (New York ) / 1pm (UK) / 2pm (EU) / 5:30pm (India) / 8pm (Singapore)

Steve Dixon (LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore)
Amanda Piña (Artist and Cultural Worker, Mexico-Chile-Austria, Amsterdam University of the Arts)
Eva Horn (University of Vienna, Austria)

World Ends Day Part Ⅱ

Time: 8 am (California) / 11am (New York) / 4pm (UK) / 5pm (EU) / 8:30pm (India) / 11pm(Singapore)

Rustom Bharucha (Writer and Dramaturg, India)
Zarina Muhammad (LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore)
Shankar Venkateswaran (Theatre director, India)

The event is supported by the University of Antwerp's Research Centre for Visual Poetics and LASALLE College for the Arts, in collaboration with Performance Studies international as part of PSi Constellate.

Bios:

Steve Dixon is President of LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, one of Asia's leading arts institutions. His latest book, Cybernetic Existentialism Freedom, Systems and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance (Routledge 2020), reanimates and fuses the ideas of existentialist philosophy with the systems sciences of cybernetics to present an illuminating methodology to critique contemporary arts. He is also the author of Digital Performance (MIT Press 2007), co-founder and Advisory Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Routledge).

Eva Horn, professor of Modern German Literature and Cultural Theory, Dept. of German, University of Vienna. She is the author of The Future as Catastrophe. Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age (Columbia UP 2018), and, with H. Bergthaller, The Anthropocene. Key Issues for the Humanities (Routledge 2019). She is the founder and director of the Vienna Anthropocene Network 
https://anthropocene.univie.ac.at 

Amanda Piña is a Mexican-Chilean-Austrian artist and cultural worker living between Vienna and Mexico City. Her work is concerned with the decolonisation of art, focusing on the political and social power of movement. Her works are contemporary rituals for temporary dismantling the ideological separations between modern and traditional, the human, the animal and the vegetal, nature and culture. She currently works on the realisation of the long-term project Endangered Human Movements dedicated to movements and cultural practices that have already vanished or are threatened with extinction. Amanda is a research fellow at Amsterdam University of the Arts. 

Rustom Bharucha is the author of several books, including Theatre and the World, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Terror and Performance, and the recently published Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, co-edited with Paula Richman. Last year, during the first phase of the pandemic, he produced a 9-episode video-lecture on Theatre and the Coronavirus, which is available on https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-http://berlin.de/.../interweav.../online-projects/index.html

Sankar Venkateswaran, is a theatre director from India. He lives and works from Sahyande Theatre, a theatre-dwelling he built in the mountain valley of Attappadi, Kerala. His works include Criminal Tribes Act, Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, Shogo Ohta’s Water Station, and INDIKA for Munich Volkstheater. He served as the artistic director for International Theatre Festival of Kerala in 2016 and 2017. He is a recipient of Ibsen Scholarship, Norway in 2013.

Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound and moving image, she is interested in the broader contexts of myth-making, haunted historiographies and role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends polyphonic voices to data-driven systems and shapeshifting worlds. Her work has been presented at Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), NTU Centreof Contemporary Art (Singapore), Indonesia Contemporary Art Network (Indonesia), and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (Taiwan,) among other notable venues in Asia Pacific and Europe.

Visual Poetics member Gertjan Willems published a new book ‘European Film Remakes’ with Edinburgh University Press. Co-edited with Eduard Cuelenaere and Stijn Joye (Ghent University), this book is the first to discuss film remakes in a European context. Offering a variety of historical, contemporary, theoretical and empirical approaches to remakes, the book is illustrated by a wide range of case studies from across Europe, including films like A Bigger Splash, Open Your Eyes and Perfect Strangers. Although commonly understood as a typical Hollywood practice, this book demonstrates how film remakes are, and always have been, a significant part of the European film culture and industry. You can read the introduction to the book here.

In recent decades a non-human turn has emerged within the humanities (Grusin, ed. 2015). Attention for the nonhuman world and nonhuman (f)actors is growing in various disciplines and research domains. This growing intellectual attention for the non-human is on the one hand a reaction to current ecological and technological developments, and on the other hand it stems from a dissatisfaction with humanist thinking and the representative or linguistic turn that dominated the human sciences at the end of the 20th century (Grusin, 2015: x). The various currents and theories that are part of the non-human turn (e.g. New Materialism [Barad 2007, Bennett 2010, Coole and Frost, eds. 2010, Dolphijn en van der Tuin 2012], speculative realism [Graham 2002 and 2010, Bogost 2012, Morton 2013]), animal studies [Haraway 2003, Despret 2012], or post-humanism [Haraway 1991, Hayles 1999, Wolfe 2010]) oppose the dominance of humanist or anthropocentric ideas in the humanities and science, and instead focus on the theorization of non-human entities, processes and capacity for action and performativity.

The most recent developments within the non-human turn also focus, among other things, on the end of human life on earth as a result of the ecological catastrophe that is unfolding. In the geological era of the anthropocene, the earth system and the ecological reality, but also on the entanglement of that system and that reality with technological and political issues. Extinction (Grusin 2018, Ten Bos 2019), spectrality and absence (Tsing 2017), the end of worlds (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2016) and death (Despret 2015) are key concepts of a performativity that no longer produces anything or may lead to a relationship with a void and finitude.

The shifts referred to as the non-human turn, however, do not only take place within the academic world, but also in (interaction with) the current artistic world. Within the performing arts, cinema, the visual arts and literature, there is just as much increased attention for the presence and the agency of non-human (f)actors - both during the creation process and in the subjects that are dealt with in these art works.

This lecture cycle, examines the theoretical, artistic and methodological questions, approaches and consequences of the nonhuman turn. It will do so from various angles, as the nonhuman turn requires an interdisciplinary approach in the fields of visual arts, performance, theatre, choreography, literature, media and philosophy. Specialists are invited to offer a seminar and give a lecture about their perspective on the nonhuman turn. Ecology, dramaturgy, atmosphere, animism, contemporary dance, performance of technology... will all come the fore during this year-long cycle.

For inquiries, contact Kristof van Baarle: kristof.vanbaarle@uantwerpen.be. 

This lecture cycle is connected to a monthly Ph D Seminar by the guest speakers. More information here. 

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Film still from a video tour through São Paolo by Juliana Moraes (State University of Campinas)

With classes going online again, lecturers and researchers Felipe Cervera (LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore), Kyoko Iwaki and Kristof van Baarle (both Antwerp University) seek to make to most of it and think not only in terms of limitations, but of opportunities. Working online affords easier international collaboration and exchange and that is why they chose to create a COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) module within a Performance Analysis course taught in both Antwerp University's Theatre- Film and Literature studies programme and LASALLE College of the Arts' Acting and Musical Theatre programmes.

Space and time constitute the basis of any given theatre performance: being ‘here-and-now’ together in the same place with others for a limited duration of time has long been considered as the prerequisite of performances. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, theatre-goers were introduced to novel forms of performances in which spaces were dismantled, time was disintegrated, and various modes of consciousness were flattened to a single unit of quarantine space-and-time. Taking this first-hand experience as the base of reflection, students of LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore) and Antwerp University (Belgium) will take part in a five-week COIL (Collaborate Online International Learning) exercise, which will focus on understanding the emerging dramaturgies of space in performances that are appearing in relation to digital arenas and outdoor spaces. 

During the COIL period, an introductory session and three lectures that deal with various theoretical and artistic aspects of these conditions will be taught by lecturers from Antwerp and Singapore. These sessions provide context and a step-up for the group assignment connected to this COIL exercise, in which acting students from LASALLE College of the Arts and theatre-and film studies students from Antwerp University will be working closely together. They will do so in the development of a site-specific performance around spatial objects (whether hospitals, parking lots, cemeteries, derelict factories, or historic buildings) in a city they don't know: São Paolo, Brazil. São Paolo, one of the worst-hit places by the virus, is chosen precisely because students from Antwerp and Singapore are equally distanced from the city. The very act of distancing enables the students to be critical to their own COVID-19 experience: be vigilant of cultural appropriations, be wary of universal narratives, and be attentive to political issues tied to the local histories. A video tour through São Paolo especially made for this occasion by Juliana Moraes, professor at the State University of Campinas (BR), offered a first insight and impression of the city.

Conceptually inspired by Australian theatre director Samara Harsh’s Body of Knowledge, through which around a dozen teenagers from Australia make multiple international phone calls to audiences sitting at their homes across the world to ask philosophical, political, and ecological questions, seeking to build an intercultural body of knowledge, students from these two different cities will collaborate to build a shared knowledge on how to reconfigure various on- and offline performative spaces in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. In short, students - and for that matter, lectureres alike - will be acknowledged to approach public, digital, and atmospheric spaces as “performative objects” and interrogate how the understanding of these objects has transformed in the past few months. 

We consider this collaboration a first step in what promises to be an exciting long term exchange!