Author: del46

October 9 – Joseph Clarke: Theater Acoustics and Immersive Aesthetics

by del46

In the early nineteenth century, German architects used a brief enthusiasm for technical research on theater acoustics as an occasion to consider the experiential aesthetics of bourgeois collectivity. When the designer Carl Ferdinand Langhans rejected as sonically problematic the classic French model of the elliptical theater — with the performer stationed at one focus and the royal box at the other — he effectively overturned the assumption that each performance had one “correct” instance of perception, defined as whatever reached the privileged sensorium of the enlightened despot. His challenge to the old optical model and his new theorization of building sound as an immersive medium paved the way for aesthetic theories of empathy later in the century.

We invite you to attend the “Sound of Architecture” Symposium in preparation for our discussion session and Joseph Clarke’s talk on October 9th.

 

Elizabeth Wiet – October 2 – Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam, and the Objects of Camp

by del46

My paper is propelled by a series of interrelated questions concerning the uses of Camp—and its relationship to queer community formation—in the work of Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam, both of whom have been lauded by various admirers as the “father” of (contemporary) queer theatre. If Smith’s influence is so strongly felt in the work of artists as diverse as John Waters, Robert Wilson, John Vaccaro, and Andy Warhol, then why has his name largely dropped out of popular consciousness? If Camp is a performance style marked by “excess” and aimed at producing queer social visibility, then why and how does Smith use it to stage his own disappearance? If Smith is a notoriously antipathetic (and antipersonal) performer, then how does Ludlam’s performance style, which owes much to Smith, become indistinguishable from his affability and personableness in the reception surrounding his performances? How do Smith and Ludlam negotiate their relationships to the “objects of refuse” that litter their stages and their scripts, and how do those relationships alter the affective resonances of their performances? How does the relationship Smith and Ludlam establish with their audiences affect our understanding of their relationship to their communities? By framing my analysis in terms of the way Smith and Ludlam have been variously received by their successors, it is ultimately my goal to complicate our understanding of queer performance as a genealogy.

 

Elizabeth Wiet is a doctoral candidate in English working at the nexus of performance studies, queer theory, and affect theory.

 

Elise Morrison – Discipline and Desire: Surveillance, Feminism, Performance

by del46

 

Discipline and Desire: Surveillance, Feminism, Performance investigates the emergent genre of ‘surveillance art,’ or art works that centrally employ technologies and techniques of surveillance to create theatre, installation, and performance art.  Theoretically grounded in cultural theory, feminist theory, and performance studies, and focused on practices within performance and new media art, this book project examines the wide variety of ways in which surveillance artists tactically utilize material technologies of surveillance to politically and aesthetically address a multitude of social, political, and technical issues raised by increasingly pervasive surveillance around the world. By appropriating surveillance technologies from military, state, and consumer markets into public and private spaces of performance and interactive installation, surveillance artists re-contextualize these technologies and the power dynamics that historically attend them, provoking critical inquiry of the disciplinary functions of the human-technology interface of surveillance.  The book explores a range of surveillance art works by groups such as The Surveillance Camera Players, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, and the Shunt Collective, and artists as Sophie Calle, Jill Magid, Steve Mann, Janet Cardiff, Mona Hatoum, Giles Walker, and Edit Kaldor, each of whom stage performances and interactive installations that show up, critique, and/or re-structure dominant surveillance technologies and techniques.  Though most contemporary surveillance artists do not draw explicit allegiances to feminism, this book argues that such artists are in implicit conversation with feminist approaches to defining, critiquing, and building alternatives to a dominant, disciplinary gaze in visual culture.

 

John Cooper – Imperial Balls: An Art History of Sex, War, and Dancing in India, England, and the Caribbean

by del46

Nautch dancing in Lucknow and Calcutta

The Anglo-Indian word nautch derives from the Urdu nach, the Sanskrit nritya and the Prakit nachcha, meaning ‘dance’. Rather than signifying a specific dance form, nautch points towards a social setting for dance in diplomatic, mercantile and social exchanges between Indian elites and the British Raj from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The visual culture of nautch dancing is rich. It was inflected by multiple traditions of image-making. It was one of the most repeatedly illustrated scenes of imperial experience and includes work by both Indian and colonial artists in a variety of media.

This part of the dissertation is an art history of nautch dancing and its performers: those who danced, those who watched, and those who made its visual records.

Colonial ballet in England

The ‘Classic’ or ‘Romantic’ ballet of the 1830s and 1840s was replete with what were then called ‘dances of national character’. These folk-based forms encompassed an international geography including the Caribbean, North Africa, Eastern Europe and India, with a special fixation on dances of Spanish origin. A new professionalized class of flexible dancers emerged to render these national idioms in step with audience demand and they were matched by a class of artists and printers who documented, amplified, and embroidered their travel in images.

This part of the dissertation follows the traces left in the archive by women dancers who passed not only across the boundaries of national habits but also across the stages of theatres, clubs, saloons, music halls, drawing rooms and streets in imperial London.

Social dancing in the Caribbean

The complex social fabric of Caribbean colonies gave rise in the early nineteenth century to a range of dance cultures. Plantations, colonial theatres, markets, ball rooms, barracks and streets were all sites of expressive physical movement in which a range of West African and European performance traditions were articulated under conditions of profound social change. These various dance worlds were represented by a range of artists who reflected- by turns indulgently, satirically, ambivalently, and critically- on the make up of Caribbean society.

In this section of the dissertation I document the process by which the social forces at work in the Caribbean were transformed into choreographic ornament borne in different ways on different performers’ bodies.

 

Lynda Paul – Sonic Vegas: Live Virtuality and the Cirque du Soleil

by del46

My current work addresses the role of music and sound in a particularly complex and significant subset of Cirque du Soleil’s output: its permanent Las Vegas shows. My study uses a performance-centered methodology, based on direct observations of Cirque’s Vegas shows as audience member and backstage guest (during performances and rehearsals); personal interviews with the shows’ musicians and directors; and analyses of the shows’ more “fixed” traces (CD recordings, “Making of ” DVDs, souvenir programs, and so on) in relation to their performances. Through this approach, I situate Cirque du Soleil’s resident Las Vegas shows within the culture of the Vegas Strip as well as in circus and theater history more broadly, and demonstrate the ways in which Cirque’s Vegas productions utilize interactive, part live and part technologically mediated musical soundtracks to structure and give meaning to their visual spectacle. By seeing how music is used toward such ends, we are able to reconceptualize music’s role in multimedia genres more generally, and to understand more deeply how music can be used to negotiate the relationship between the physical and the virtual in multimedia theater.

(Lynda Paul, “Sonic Vegas: Live Virtuality and the Cirque du Soleil,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2012)

Dominika Laster, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Lecturer in Theater Studies

by del46

dominika.laster@yale.edu

Dominika Laster is the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) and Lecturer in the Theater Studies Program at Yale University.  She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY) from 2011 to 2013.

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.

Dominika Laster is a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award from Performance Studies international for her research examining Islamic practices of witnessing within the context of post-9/11 detentions and deportations.  Laster’s doctoral dissertation, a critical analysis of key aspects of performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski’s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, earned her the Monroe Lippman Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation.

In 2009, Laster served as the Associate Curator of Tracing Grotowski’s Path:  Year of Grotowski in New York.  Laster has published articles in Performance Research, Slavic and Eastern European Performance, New Theatre Quarterly and TDR.  Her books A Bridge Made of Memory:  Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland (Editor) are forthcoming from Seagull Press, distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press.

Elise Morrison, IPSY Postdoctoral Associate, Lecturer in Theater Studies

by del46
elise.morrison@yale.edu
Elise received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University in 2011.  Her book project, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press, looks at artists who strategically employ technologies of surveillance to create performances and installations that pose new and different ways of interacting with and understanding apparatuses of surveillance.

Elise has taught courses on this topic at Yale, Brown and as a Lecturer on Dramatic Arts at Harvard University, where she also worked as the Associate Director for Speaking Instruction and Preceptor in Expository Writing.  She co-edited a special issue on “Digital Performance and Pedagogy” for theInternational Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media (Intellect), forthcoming in fall 2012.  At Yale she has also taught courses on Digital Media in Performance and expository writing.

As a practicing artist, Elise has performed a number of surveillance art pieces on the public thoroughfares of New York, Providence and the INTERNET, and, in collaboration with Molly Flynn and Michelle Carriger, created the live music-performance events Cabaret Murderess (2007) and Mirror Stage (2008).  She was a Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre in Providence, RI from 2009-2011, where she taught acting, appeared in numerous productions, including Sweet Disaster (2008), Biography of a Constellation (2008), Anna Bella Eema (2009), and the burlesque cabaret Jingle Belles and a Few Balls (2009, 2010), and developed original mixed media cabaret work.  Most recently she has developed and performed Through the Looking Glass: A Surveillance Cabaret with the support of Sleeping Weazel artist’s collective in Boston.