27 Jan 2014 5:00pm - 6:30pm CRASSH Seminar room SG1, Ground floor

Description

Performing Cities: “Occupy” and Playgrounds

David Grundy (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge)
Mehrdad Seyf and 30 Bird
Helen Stratford (Artist and practice-led PhD candidate 'Performative Architectures')
Chair: Dr Michael Hrebeniak (University of Cambridge)
 

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David Grundy is a Ph.D student in English at the University of Cambridge, researching collectivity in African-American poetry of the 1960s and '70s. He co-edits the publication and reading series Materials. He will discuss occupation as political tactic, particular in relation to student protest movements of the past few years.
 

Merhdad Seyf, an Iranian-British artist, writer and site-specific performance-maker, will describe a current Arts Council-funded project which asks how a Cambridge primary school playground might be and become a performance space.  ‘MUD’ expands the boundaries of a city space by combining performance, architecture and education in a series of permanent structures which invite the participation of a wide variety of people from different backgrounds, both in the arts and beyond. 
http://www.30bird.org/

Helen Stratford is an interdisciplinary artist working between performance, architecture and writing. She explores the politics of everyday-life by searching for modalities that expand architectural conventions. Studio-artist at Wysing Arts Centre, her interventions, video-works, speculative writing and discursive platforms have been presented at ICA, Tate Modern, Akademie Solitude, Škuc Gallery and Barnard College, New York.  Her phD asks what alternate spatial knowledge can performative research bring to the understanding and production of architecture and urban politics in public space. www.helenstratford.co.uk 
She will introduce Paper Stages (http://paperstages.co.uk/)  and D-I-Y or instruction-based work in public spaces. 
She has just completed a piece for an exhibition in Slovenia which is an audio set of instructions entitled 'How to Sing in Public' evolving out of a residency in 2013.

Michael Hrebeniak is Director of Studies in English at Wolfson College and Lecturer in English at Magdalene College Cambridge. He co-leads the English Faculty’s Performance Research Rhizome and the Performance: Art-Critique-Experiment (P:ACE) collaboration between Cambridge and Central Saint Martins. He is currently working on a book and film installation about the medieval Stourbridge Fair as enactment of cultural memory, a traceless polis and the carnivalesque. He has an allotment.

 

Open to all.  No registration required
Cambridge Performance Network, main page

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