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.

www.reckless-sleepers.co.uk

http://makingthepilots.blogspot.com/

http://itwasnevercalledsnowman.wordpress.com/

 

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

 

A workshop-symposium on virtual performance aesthetics, telepresence design and transcultural communications

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.

Gary is a tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art

 

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

For documentation of the workshop, go here Ê

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.

Go to the installation

 

 

artist residency (in planning stage for 2010-2011)

John Jesurun (USA)

 

 

(c) 2010 The Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance, Johannes Birringer (acting director)