Event overview
Performance Research Forum hosts a range of public events, talks and presentations by established and early-career researchers and practitioners in theatre and performance.
Milo Harries: ‘“It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. But it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work”: David Finnigan’s Dramaturgy of Errors’
This paper will discuss a pattern of pieces that reimagine what it might mean for a piece of climate theatre to ‘work’. The paper will focus on the work of David Finnigan, centring its discussion on 2020’s ‘Remote Socials’, a series of online scratch performances Finnigan created with Tassos Stevens in the early weeks of the UK’s first lockdown.
Harries will argue that Finnigan's work represents a comparatively direct form of ‘weak performance’, with Finnigan deploying a provisionality of position in Kill Climate Deniers and You’re Safe Til 2024 as the foundation of a practice of vulnerability – and, in the ‘Remote Socials’, as a necessary condition of the works’ performance. In taking an attitude of not-knowing as their motive force, the paper will argue, these pieces reorient their definitions of success, moving away from monodirectional models of impact towards more reciprocal relational forms. These works work, in other words, by not working, making their mistakes in public to open space for solidarity, and repair.
Milo (he/him) is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. His writing has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Scènes Critiques/Critical Stages, Platform: Journal of Theatre & Performing Arts, and the IJPADM. For more, see https://miloharries.com.
Heath Pennington: ‘Yes, no, I don’t know: Beyond consent’s binary’
Is consent binary? What can the emerging practice of intimacy coordination, which works to support consensual portrayals of intimacy and nudity on stage and screen, teach us about agency and policing? How does a kink-informed methodology take seriously the idea that BDSM can illuminate much about power and negotiation, sex and sensation?
Drawing on their long-term scholarship on BDSM and my training, certification, and experience as an intimacy coordinator, Heath is concerned with what consent is, how it works, and its liberatory political promise. Situating themselves at the interdisciplinary intersections of performance and gender studies, affect and queer theories, they ask in what ways consent can both empower and constrain.
This provisional research is part of Heath's larger dissertation project in which they argue that kinky and consensual intimacies in contemporary North American and Western European theatre and performance display and disrupt hierarchical systems of identity and otherness.
Heath (they/them) is a Visiting Postgraduate Research Associate in Drama at Queen Mary, doctoral candidate at the University of California Santa Barbara, and certified intimacy coordinator. They have been published in Performance Research, Corpo-Grafías, and Performance of the Real. Find Heath on IMDb https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3227035/ and at http://www.hpenningtonintimacy.weebly.com.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Dec 2023 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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