Conference: Dialogue, Performance and the Body Politic in the Twenty-First Century

 

Co-convenors: Ondřej Pilný and Clare Wallace from the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, invite you to an online conference Dialogue, Performance and the Body Politic in the Twenty-First Century.

A feature of the cascading crises of the twenty-first century is the fragmenting impulse of polarisation. In what ways does theatre act or react to the radical oppositions and incommensurable differences of this socio-political arena? Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s writings on aesthetics and dissensus, Judith Butler’s reflections on precarity and the ethics of unchosen co-habitation, and Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki’s work on dissensual speech and performing resilience (Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy, 2017), this conference aims to generate discussions of (theatrical) performance as a site of dialogue.

We are particularly interested in explorations of the following questions/topics:

• In what ways does performance interpellate or create a demos?
• How do the conditions of contingency and co-presence in theatre speak to or of co-habitation in other social spaces?
• Forms of cultural dialogue prominent in contemporary (European) theatre practice: case studies, projects of inclusion, organisations.
• Agon and anger.
• Embodiment, demonstration – crisis points? Sites of contestation?
• Preaching to the choir – theatre and confirmation bias.
• Theatre and listening.
• Negotiation, mediation and mimesis.
• Performance and polarisation – what forms of dialogic discourse might work to propagate contact zones of better understanding or (re)distribution the sensible (cf. Rancière, 2000)?

 

Conference Schedule and Details

A zoom link will be available from the conference convenors upon request.

 

The conference is part of the European Regional Development Fund project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).