Panel Discussion: Friday, September 12th

(RESCHEDULED FROM SPRING)

Interdisciplinary Context of “Slow Dancing”

Friday, September 12, 2014 – 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: Yale University Art Gallery Auditorium 
1111 Chapel St. New Haven, CT 06510

Panel discussion with the artist David Michalek and Yale faculty, offering points of view from a wide range of disciplines.

  • Margaret S. Clark, Professor of Psychology and Master of Trumbull College
  • Emily Carson Coates, Lecturer in Theatre Studies
  • Richard O. Prum, William Robertson Coe Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology; Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, Peabody Museum; Professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies
  • Laura Wexler, Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and American Studies

 Admission: Free

Open to:  General Public

Contact: Institute of Sacred Music  203-432-5062
 
***IN THE MEANTIME, DON’T MISS THE EXHIBITION!***

Exhibition | David Michalek: Slow Dancing

Slow Dancing at Lincoln Center, 2007
AT YALE:
Wednesday, September 10, 2014 – 8:00pm to Tuesday, September 16, 2014 – 11:00pm
Hours of operation: 8:00-11:00 PM
Location: Cross Campus (outdoors)YALE CAMPUS

Slow Dancing video here.

Presented with support from the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Additional support from the International
Festival of Arts & Ideas and Site Projects New Haven.

 

 
 

April 22, 2014 — Season Finale

On TuesdayApril 22 from 1pm to 2pm, we will convene at 220 York Street in Room 202 for a group conversation about the state of the field of performance studies as it pertains to our work. We will discuss interdisciplinarity, pedagogy, ideology, institutionalization, professionalization, and other issues in the contemporary academy and broader cultural sphere.

Some questions to kick off discussion will include:

  •  What is the state of performance studies as an interdisciplinary field?
  • In a “disciplinary” institution such as Yale, how does this “interdisciplinary” group serve your work as a teacher and scholar?  How might the group better serve the “interdisciplinary” at Yale and beyond?
  • What are pedagogical strategies that seem to work particularly well when teaching interdisciplinary courses?  (do you define disciplinary borders? are there interdisciplinary methodologies that you have established?)
  • What challenges arise when marketing scholarly work as interdisciplinary (particularly in the realms of publishing and job market)?  What strategies help to meet these challenges?

 

Come prepared for a lively discussion as we send off the 2013-2014 season of PSWG. As always, a light lunch will be served.

April 15, 2014 — Isaiah Matthew Wooden

Black/Power/Nostalgia

Reading Eisa Davis’s semi-autobiographical play, Angela’s Mixtape (2009), alongside Tanya Hamilton’s film, Night Catches Us (2010), this talk investigates the emergence and significance of what I term “Black Power Nostalgia” in contemporary black expressive culture. A remixing of urban ethnographer Michele Boyd’s theorization of “Jim Crow Nostalgia”—what Boyd cite as the reimagining of contemporary blackness through nostalgia for the Jim Crow past—“Black Power Nostalgia” signifies a longing for the past that acknowledges the incredible systemic and personal violences of it as a means to celebrate the ability of resistance movements—notably, Black Power movements—to imagine, if not effect, social change while also opening space to critique investments in the time of progress. I turn to Davis’s play and Hamilton’s film to consider the ways that, through a series of backward glances, both use the leverage of performance to stake a claim for the currency of blackness in and against a moment awash in rhetorics of the “post.

**Join us Tuesday from 1-2 p.m. in room 202 of 220 York. A light, catered lunch will be provided.**

Isaiah Matthew Wooden is a director-dramaturg and Ph.D. Candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University with creative and research interests in popular culture and contemporary black theater and performance. His critical writings have appeared in academic journals including Callaloo and Theatre Journal and on popular sites such as The Huffington Post and The Feminist Wire, among others. Isaiah’s dissertation, “The Afterwards of Blackness: Race, Time, and Contemporary Performance,” analyzes the aesthetic strategies and practices that contemporary black cultural producers deploy to critique concepts of normative or “modern” temporality. Isaiah is currently a Guest Artist in Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University, where he is directing Robert O’Hara’s Insurrection: Holding History.

April 8, 2014 — Dominika Laster

Discussion of Back to Back Theatre’s Ganesh Versus the Third Reich 

(from the Back to Back website) The story begins with the elephant-headed god Ganesh travelling through Nazi Germany to reclaim the Swastika, an ancient Hindu symbol. As this intrepid hero embarks on his journey a second narrative is revealed: the actors themselves begin to feel the weighty responsibility of storytellers and question the ethics of cultural appropriation.

Cleverly interwoven in the play’s design is the story of a young man inspired to create a play about Ganesh, god of overcoming obstacles. He is an everyman who must find the strength to overcome the difficulties in his own life, and defend his play and his collaborators against an overbearing colleague.

The show is made before our very eyes and takes on its own life. It invites us to examine who has the right to tell a story and who has the right to be heard. It explores our complicity in creating and dismantling the world, human possibility and hope.

Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is a work for the near future, seemingly impossible to make.

Film Screening
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (Bruce Gladwin, dir.)
Monday, April 7
5:30pm – 7:15pm
220 York Street, Room 202
Group Discussion (light, catered lunch provided)
(Facilitated by Dominika Laster, DUS, Department of Theater Studies)
Tuesday, April 8
1pm – 2pm
220 York Street, Room 202
Dominika Laster is a native of Wrocław, Poland.  Her areas of research include:  20th century theatre, Eastern European theatre, intercultural performance, nonwestern theatre, postcolonial studies, immigration, memory and trauma studies, abjection, and the politics of performance.  In addition to her scholarly research, Laster has worked as a director and performer in work ranging from pantomime to opera.