Brexit, Movement, Acceleration: Performance Studies Meets Politics

Tickets:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/brexit-movement-tickets-34461263567

Drawing together academics from across London, Brexit, Movement, Waste is a three-part event series that will employ an interdisciplinary lens, incorporating performance studies, ecocriticism, politics and visual culture to consider what Brexit has brought to the surface, confronting difficult questions of minoritarian politics, immigration, parliamentary sovereignty and transnationalism. As Britain withdraws from the EU, what necessary measures can we take to problematize the economic, political and social ruptures that have emerged during the referendum? Brexit has 'given voice' to a significant portion of the UK’s population that does not feel represented by the socio-political status quo. How, then, can we respond to such a significant breach in the nation’s sense of self?

The first event, Brexit & Movement aims to ask: how might performance’s ‘messy’ ontology disrupt the ‘smooth’ process of retreat? We live in a time that is rapidly upending the predictable futures we envisioned for ourselves and for our nation-states: when neoliberal institutions and 'Western' democracies are accelerating towards accentuation and/or collapse; when 'unthinkable' outcomes are increasingly proving not only possible but likely; and when the typically laborious gears of bureaucracy, hinged on a single day’s vote, urge us towards fragmentation of the European Union and signal an end to a global post-war system. How are the slowness and uncertainty surrounding the actual process of 'Brexiting' impacting our experiences of everyday life in Britain? What sense of time does a finite politics impose on where we go, how we plan, and what 'moves' we must anticipate - from the government and for our future - as citizens of an increasingly fractured Europe? How does Brexit reveal the performance of politics at speed, and what might we gain from thinking through politics as a series of movements or choreographies on the public stage?

Speakers:

P.A. Skantze, A Moveable Famine: Wasting Time Resisting

P.A. Skantze is a director, writer and scholar working in Italy and London where she is currently Reader in Performance Practices at Roehampton University. Her books Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (2003) Routledge and Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle (2013) Punctum think through early modern theatre as practice across the weighted worlds of the still and the moving and the craft of spectating as a practice of attention and wandering in Europe in the 21st century. Her articles range from considering the epistemology of practice as research to sonic gesture to writing theoretical texts in iambic pentameter. Co-founder of the performance group Four Second Decay, the team most recently staged ‘Orfeo and Eurydice: How to Save Someone You Can’t See’ at the No Future Biennale in Athens 2016

Jen Harvie, Slow Forward

Jen Harvie is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on cultural politics, with emphases on neoliberalism and feminism. Monographs include Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (2013) and Theatre & the City (2009). She recently co-edited The Only Way Home Is Through the Show: Performance Work of Lois Weaver (2015). She is currently co-editing a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on feminism and Palgrave Macmillan’s series Theatre &. Her podcast, Stage Left, features interviews with performance makers about their practices and shows.

Seb Franklin, On Brexit and the Regulation of Surplus

Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at King's College London. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015).

Chaired by: Kélina Gotman

Kélina Gotman teaches Theatre and Performance Studies in the English Department at King’s College London. She writes on cultural history and theory, disciplines, institutions, language and translation, as well as movement/mobility, theatre and dance, including in Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford University Press, Studies in Dance Theory, forthcoming 2017) and Essays on Theatre and Change (Routledge, forthcoming 2018). She has contributed articles and chapters to Performance Research, About Performance, Textual Practice, SubStance (forthcoming), and other journals and edited volumes. She is also co-editor of Theatre, Performance Foucault! (forthcoming, MUP) and a volume on comparativism, (un)translation and performance, as well as translator of Félix Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers (Semiotext(e)/MIT, 2006), and a number of play texts and articles, including most recently Marie NDiaye’s Les Serpents. She collaborates regularly across theatre, performance and dance, currently investigating fascial neuroanatomy in conversation with choreographer Russell Maliphant. She was born in Montreal and has lived in motion across borders; she hopes these will not close.

Organised by Bryony White, Carleigh Morgan and Lianna Mark. Hosted by King's College London English Department and the King's Performance Research Group.

With thanks to the King's College London Creative Committee.
With thanks to Daniella Shreir for Poster Design.
Free admission