Performance and its Objects: From Collective to Collection

Description

Professor Alan Read and Dr Georgina Guy  (King’s College London)

Chair: Ellie Lavan (Univerity Cambridge)
 

Abstract and Biographies

Alan Read’s work concerns radical inclusion and the expansion of the collective. Performance in this operation becomes a means through which the collective can remain open to claims from those (things) it commonly excludes. Georgina Guy’s research centres on the exhibition as a dynamic context in which established traditions of display and performance interact. The frame of exhibition provides a strong basis for reflecting on performance in terms of duration and in relation to the object. In this presentation, Read and Guy will work through a number of specific examples in order to articulate points of interconnection between their research interests in terms of a move from the collective to the collection. This exchange is offered by way of response to the third question asked by the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network: How do we understand objects (fixed, a record) when they cannot exist separate from their experience on the part of somebody or other (time-bound, embodied)?

Alan Read is a professor of theatre (Roehampton, currently King’s College London), a theatre and performance maker (Het Werkteater, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Goat Island, Forced Entertainment, The Royal Court, The Young Vic, The National Theatre and Liverpool Everyman) a past Director of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and is responsible (founding the Performance Foundation) for the architectural development of the Anatomy Theatre and Museum on the Strand and the Inigo Rooms in the East Wing of Somerset House. He is the author of Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (Routledge: 1993/1995) and Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Palgrave: 2008/2009), and the editor of The Fact of Blackness with art-work by Steve McQueen (Bay Press: 1996) and Architecturally Speaking (Routledge: 2000), twenty essays on the urban realm compiled during the Space Out series of talks he curated at the ICA between 1994 and 1997. As a founding Consultant Editor 
of Performance Research Alan Read has edited two issues of the journal “On Animals” (2000) and “On Civility” (2004). His most recent book is Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance (2013) http://facultimedia.com/tag/alan-read/ (*)

Dr Georgina Guy (Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London) works on contemporary intersections between theoretical thinking and practices of performance, visual culture and display. She has undertaken collaborative research with the Courtauld Gallery, Tate and the Science Musuem (London) and her current book project, _Displayed & Performed_, articulates an emerging field of arts practice distinct from but related to growing curatorial provision for 'live' performance. She curated the seminar series 'FAO: For Attention Of' (2014), a cross-period investigation of how attention is cultivated and distributed in criticism, art and performance and 'Performing from…' (2013), a series of dialogues between artists, theatre makers and scholars addressing the relevance, or otherwise, of being 'from' in relation to performance.​
 

Ellie Lavan is a writer, performer, and PhD candidate in the Faculty of English, researching the circus in Ireland (Cambridge).

 

 

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