Performance Management: Panel Discussion

About

In his latest book In Praise of Theatre Alain Badiou writes “the theatre attempts to make a previously unseen possibility emerge". For him, there is a precariousness about theatre, which not only responds to our present crisis in global capitalism, but which, through its provocation, enables the spectator to orientate him or herself in the present day. So it is that the mechanisms of theatre—its language, its arrangement of spectators and stage—have increasingly become the site for experimentation and radical performance that spans across the arts. There is something about the ability of theatre to enable the unexpected—a newness—that makes it an exciting ground on which to stage inventions, even interventions.

This event will discuss and interrogate the idea of Performance Management in a twofold sense. On the one hand it will be considered from the perspective of delegation: what happens when the authority of the staged performance gives way to alternative or democratized modes of engagement? What conditions of ‘newness’ enable possibilities to emerge that resonate with our current political moment? On the other hand Performance Management will be used as a trope to raise questions around the social and institutional structures and constraints that influence performance work today.

Speakers:

Nicholas Ridout, Professor of Theatre at Queen Mary University of London, has written extensively on political and social understandings of theatrical events. His work considers theatre not just as a mode of cultural production, but also as an affective experience and mode of social organization.

Sarah McCrory is a curator and director of Glasgow International.

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd is a visual artist who is best known for her improvised re-workings of iconic moments from cultural history.

Lois Rowe is an artist and writer who is Programme Director at Wimbledon College of Arts.

This event is part CCW Graduate School’s public programme, and will launch Acts Re-Acts 3, a month long series exploring performance and new media, with workshops, disucssions, events,interventions, seminars and installations which take place art Wimbledon Space between 22 February and 18 March, 2016.