Steve Luber // Oct. 22, 2019

FPS: First-Person Spectator
Steve Luber, Oct. 22, 2019 2-3pm. 220 York Street, Room 100.
Much has been made of the cross-pollination between video games and performance, including categories of analysis such as interactivity in performance, narrative and spectatorial dynamism. Given the cultural and economic juggernaut that gaming has become internationally, it is no surprise that theatre and performance begin to not only examine, but take on gaming phenomena. I will focus on repurposing the effects of remediation as older forms remediate newer forms remediate older forms.
Steve Luber is Associate Director of the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College. His current book project is entitled Last Gasp: The Ends of Multimedia Performance.

Charles O’Malley // Oct. 15, 2019

A Specific Anarchy: The Cockettes, Genderfuck, and the Beginning of the 1970s

Charles O’Malley, Oct. 15, 2019 2-3pm. 220 York Street, Room 100.

This talk comes from Charles O’Malley’s current project, a critical history of the genderfuck performance collective the Cockettes, a group of mostly queer artists working in San Francisco from 1969-1972. Situated between the rise of the New Left and the opening of the queer liberation movement, the Cockettes worked to blur the line between performance and the everyday, all while constantly needling at definitions of gender and asking which walls needed to come down. Drawn from interviews and performance detritus left by members of the group, this talk analyzes the use of “genderfuck” as a tool and considers the group’s legacy.

Charles O’Malley is a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Drama; his dissertation focuses on queer radicalism in 1970s San Francisco. At Yale, he co-convenes the Performance Studies Working Group and is the Artistic Fellow at Yale Repertory Theatre. His writing has appeared in the New Republic, Lambda Literary, Indiewire, and in the journal QED. He has taught at Yale College and Connecticut College.