Improvisation: Live versus Record

Description

Professor Simon Jones (University of Bristol)
Floris Schuiling (PhD candidate, University of Cambridge)
Chair: Dr Luke Skrebowski (Director of Studies and Fellow of Churchill College, Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Cambridge)

*CRASSH is not responsible for the content of external websites

Floris Schuiling is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Nicholas Cook. He studied musicology and philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His academic interests are performance, improvisation and textuality, philosophical pragmatism and new materialism. He will speak about the Amsterdam-based musical improvising collective, the Instant Composers Pool, founded in 1967 and still performing. With roots in jazz, political activism and performance art (especially Fluxus), not only do they define free improvisation as 'instant composition', but they use various forms of composition and notation to create different kinds of improvisatory opportunities, blurring the distinction between improvisation and composition. They suggest a view of ‘texts’ of all kinds in the arts and humanities, as not fixed authorities, but fluid, animated and animating objects.

—

Prof Simon Jones
Modelling Failure: Performance's Return to its Archives

Using the three-year AHRC-funded project Performing Documents, hosted by the University of Bristol, Prof Simon Jones will explore the relationship that performance- and theatre-makers have to their archives.  Figuring this relationship as essentially technological and predicated on failure and incompleteness, he will go on to discuss how performance’s relation to technology in general accounts for its persistence in this digital age. 

Simon Jones, Professor of Performance, University of Bristol, is a writer and scholar, founder and co-director of Bodies in Flight, which has to date produced 17 works and numerous documents of performance that have at their heart the encounter between flesh and text, where words move and flesh utters, most recently a chapter on their performance-walk Dream-work in Archaeologies of Presence (2012) and Performance and the Global City (2013).  He has been visiting scholar at Amsterdam University (2001), a visiting artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002) and Banff Arts Centre (2008).  He has published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Entropy Magazine, Liveartmagazine, Shattered Anatomies, The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Performance Research: on Beckett, co-edited Practice as Research in Performance and Screen (2009) and his work with Bodies in Flight features in Josephine Machon’s (Syn)aesthetics? Towards a Definition of Visceral Performance (2009).  He is currently leading two major projects into the accessibility, preservation and creative re-use of live art archives – Into the Future and Performing Documents.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/performing-documents/

 Recent publications include chapters in Hopkins and Solga (eds) Performance and the Global City (2013); Chatzichristodoulou and Zerihan (eds) Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance (2012) and Nick Kaye (ed) Archaeologies of Presence (2012). 
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/school-of-arts/people/simon-p-jones/index.html

—   

Luke Skrebowski is University Lecturer in the History of Art at Cambridge. He is is currently at work on a book entitled The Politics of Anti-Aesthetics: Contesting Conceptual Art and is co-editor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). His writing has appeared in journals including Art History, Grey Room, Manifesta Journal, Tate Papers, Third Text.  Luke teaches and researches on the history and theory of late modern and contemporary art in its British, European and American contexts, with research interests in conceptual art, critical theory, and photography.
http://www.hoart.cam.ac.uk/people/lacs2@cam.ac.uk

 

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