Performance Studies (Canada) Speaker Series, Theme: Moving Bodies

speaker series poster 2013_draft_Final

This speaker series is organized and sponsored by the Graduate Program in Theatre & Performance Studies at York University and the Performance Studies (Canada) Project. These events are open to the public. 

  • Wed, Sept. 18, 2013, 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm

    Location: Gladstone Hotel, North Ballroom, 1214 Queen St. West

    With the Community Arts Practice Program, York University

    Harvey Young

    “Collecting the Black Body: African Colonial Postcards and 1930s World Fair Culture”

    This presentation centers on the popular appeal of colonial displays, specifically the exhibition of Africans, in early 20th century world fair culture. Looking at the 1931 and 1937 international expositions in Paris, Dr. Harvey Young discusses the frenzy to see, interact with, and even own black bodies.

    Bio:

    Harvey Young is Associate Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, where he also holds appointments in African American Studies, Screen Cultures and Performance Studies. His research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals, profiled in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and The Chronicle of Higher Education and cited in The New York Times and The Boston Globe among other media outlets.

    He is the author of Theatre & Race and Embodying Black Experience, winner of book awards for outstanding scholarship from the National Communication Association and the American Society for Theatre Research; and editor of three books: Performance in the Borderlands, Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun, and The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. His sixth book, Black Theater is Black Life: An Oral History of Chicago Theater and Dance, will be published this November.

    Dr. Young is a former Vice President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and a past President of the Black Theatre Association. He has served on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research and on the Board of Directors of the Yale Club of Chicago and the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago. He is associate editor of Theatre Survey, and will become editor in 2015.

  • Wed, Feb. 19, 2014 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm

    Location: Gladstone Hotel, North Ballroom, 1214 Queen St. West

    With the Walker Cultural Leader Series at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University

    Jill Dolan

    “Moving the Body Politic: How Feminism and Theatre Inspire Social Re-imaginings”

    Jill Dolan’s talk will explore how feminist criticism/commentary can profitably influence the “body politic” and “move” people (emotionally) toward revised understandings of social relationship in the public sphere.

    Jill Dolan is the Annan Professor in English, Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts, and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She began teaching at Princeton in 2008, arriving from the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and headed the Department of Theatre and Dance’s MA/PhD program in performance as a public practice from 1999-2008.

    Prof. Dolan received the 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her blog, which can be accessed at “The Feminist Spectator” (www.TheFeministSpectator.com). She posts regularly about recent theatre, performance, film, and television. In 2013, Palgrave Macmillan published her book, The Feminist Spectator in Action:  Feminist Criticism on Stage and Screen, which collects 20 of her blog posts and includes 10 new essays, as well as an introduction and a “how to” section on writing feminist criticism.

    Prof. Dolan received the 2011 Outstanding Teaching Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She was inducted into the University of Texas at Austin’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers in fall 2006, after receiving a College of Fine Arts teaching award earlier in her UT career.  During her six years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from 1988-1994, Prof. Dolan received the William Kiekhofer Award for Excellence in Teaching.

    In 2009, Dolan was inaugurated into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and in 2011, became an invited member of the National Theatre Conference, a limited-membership organization for theatre professionals. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women and Theatre Program in 2011.

    Prof. Dolan edited A Menopausal Gentleman:  The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw (University of Michigan, 2011), which won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Drama. Her other books include Theatre & Sexuality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (University of Michigan, 2005); Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Michigan, 1993); and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan, 1991), which has been translated into Korean and was reissued in an anniversary edition in 2012.  She is working on a critical study of the plays of Wendy Wasserstein, and will soon start a similar study about playwright/director Emily Mann.

    Dolan is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a past president of the Women and Theatre Program, also of ATHE. She is the former Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she taught in the PhD Program in Theatre from 1994-1999.

    Dolan holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University.  Her interests include theatre and drama; performance studies; women’s and feminist studies; LGBTQ studies; and American studies.

  • Fri, Feb. 28, 2014, 10:00 am -11:30 am

    Location: Ada Slaight Hall, Daniels Spectrum 585 Dundas St.

    With Aluna Theatre and the Panamerican Routes/Rutas Panamericanas Festival

    Diana Taylor

    “Keynote Lecture”

    Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU.  She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, Duke U.P., 1997, and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003) which won the Outstanding Book award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association.  She is co-editor of: PMLA’s special issue on WAR, published October 2009, Stages of Conflict: A Reader in Latin American Theatre and Performance (Michigan U. P.), Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (Duke U.P., 2004), Defiant Acts/Actos Desafiantes: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich, Bucknell U. P., 2002, Negotiating Performance in Latin/o America: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality, Duke U.P., 1994, and The Politics of Motherhood: Activists from Left to Right, University Press of New England, 1997, and editor of five volumes of critical essays on Latin American, Latino, and Spanish playwrights.  Her articles on Latin American and Latino performance have appeared in The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Estreno, Gestos, Signs, MLQ and other scholarly journals. She has also been invited to participate in discussions on the role of new technologies in the arts and humanities in important conferences and commissions in the Americas (i.e. ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure). She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005-6. Diana Taylor is founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, the Henry Luce Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

  • Wed, April 16, 2014, 9:30am – 10:30am

    Location: Accolade East, Room 207, York University

    With the Theatre & Performance Studies Graduate Symposium

    Erin Manning

    “Choreographing the Political”

    Erin Manning’s talk will move through her trilogy of books, from The Politics of Touch through to Always More Than One.

    Erin Manning, Ph.D., is a philosopher, visual artist and dancer, and is currently a University Research Chair at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Montreal. She is also a founder and director of The Sense Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory on research, creation and an international network focusing on intersections between philosophy and art through the sensing body in motion. Erin Manning received her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Hawaii (2001) and has been teaching philosophy, political theory, visual studies, cultural studies, and film theory. She is a member of the editorial board for the online journal Inflexions and the author of works on movement and ephemerality, for which she frequently collaborates with Brian Massumi.

    Erin Manning founded The Sense Lab in 2004 with the hopes of creating a collaborative environment to allow for and nurture new modes of encounter. Since its founding The Sense Lab has held monthly reading groups and a speaker series, Bodies-Bits///Corps-Données. Dancing the Virtual (2005), was The Sense Lab’s first event. Erin Manning writes in her book Relationscapes: movement, art, philosophy (2009) that Dancing the Virtual:was conceived as a challenge to the often upheld dichotomy between creation and thought/research. The specific aim of “Dancing the Virtual” was to produce a platform for speculative pragmatism where what begins technically as a movement is immediately a movement of thought. In the active passage between movement and movements of thought, the participants of “Dancing the Virtual” collaboratively began to build a repertoire of new techniques for experimentation that performatively bridge the gap between thinking/speaking and doing/creating. Not only did this facilitate creation and communication across fields of inquiry during the events that challenge the active/passive model of speaker/listener or artist/spectator.The Sense Lab has since hosted Housing the Body, Dressing the Environment(2007), Into the Folds (2008), Society of Molecules (2009) and Generating the Impossible (2011). Since 2007 The Sense Lab has hosted an online journal Inflexions. In 2007 Sense Lab also began a book series with MIT Press that is edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction. The Sense Lab now also hosts residencies. Erin Manning says, “At SenseLab, I seek to allow for a wide regrouping of collectives and individuals who similarly are impatient to create modalities of existence and thought that propose more creative ways of working academically and in the art world.” In July 2011, The Sense Lab will co-­curate (with the SAT) the launch of the new third floor and green roof of the Society for Art and Technology. The Sense Lab’s concept of Inflexions (also the title of the Sense Lab journal) will guide this 6­ month event. The focus will be on research­ creation.

    Erin Manning has received numerous awards including: University Medal in Arts for highest standing, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada (1996), Governor General Silver Medal in Arts for highest standing (1996), Werner Levi Award for high standing, University of Hawaii at Manoa (1999) and the University Research Award: Concordia University Research Fellow, Emerging Scholar in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Fine Arts (2008). Her publications include:Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003).