COLLISIONS
A FESTIVAL OF
PRACTICE RESEARCH
IN PERFORMANCE
26-28 SEPTEMBER 2017
Negotiating Practice Research: A Panel Discussion
Wednesday 27th September, 4pm
So Below (a performance duet by Karen Christopher & Gerard Bell). Photo Credit: Adam Levy
Join a panel of academics and artists who come together to discuss the complex relationship between academic and artistic work. The panel will be chaired by Kate Elswit (RCSSD) with panellists Karen Christopher and Simon Bayly (Roehampton).
Participants will speak to the fuzzier margins between the academy and professional life and, as people who engage in both academic and artistic practice, explore how they locate the art in practice as research, and the research in art practice. When do those modes feel complementary and when do they not, and how is that negotiated?
Followed by a wine reception.
Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer and teacher. Her London-based company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, is devoted to examining the collaborative performance-making process. She was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until the group disbanded in 2009. With Goat Island, Karen performed throughout the USA and the UK, and in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. Her focus is on artistic negotiation in the devising process and finding non-traditional structures for working and composing live performance works. Her work includes listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet. Employing both historical and studio-based research she works toward discovering each piece by making it. She is paying attention as a practice of social cooperation. She is an Associate Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London and Artist Research Fellow in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.
Simon Bayly is Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton; publications include the a philosophy of theatricality, A Pathognomy of Performance (2011) and recent articles on waste and gratuitous expenditure, the artistic project and the meeting as primary configurations of contemporary work and sociality. As part of a project funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship, he is currently undertaking research with artist Johanna Linsley on the dynamics, values and meanings of face-to-face meetings, gatherings and assemblies.
Kate Elswitt is Reader in Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and author of Watching Weimar Dance (OUP 2014) and Theatre & Dance (forthcoming Theatre& series). She is winner of the Gertrude Lippincott Award, the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize, and honorable mention for the Callaway Prize, and her work has been funded by sources including a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and the Lilian Karina Research Grant in Dance and Politics. She also works as a choregrapher, dramaturg, and curator.