Spring 2016 Events

Performance Art in Ireland: A History

A Lecture by Áine Phillips

Áine Phillips will present a slide show on performance art in Ireland from the 1970's to the present day, focusing on political artists responding to the 'Troubles' (the military and civil war in Northern Ireland in the 1980s - 1990s), feminist performance from the 1980s to the present day, the evolution of Irish sound art and current live art that is often radical, socially engaged and collaborative.

Read More.

Enactments: Rhythm Field - The Dance of Molissa Fenley

The Department of Performance Studies welcomes you to join Andre Lepecki and Molissa Fenley as they introduce the book, "Rhythm Field: The Dance of Molissa Fenley" Enactments Series, edited by Richard Schechner, published by Seagull Press, 2015. Contributors Molissa Fenley, Stephen Greco, Richard Move and Elizabeth Streb will read their essays.

Read More.

PRAXIS 2016

PRAXIS, a special all-day Performance Studies community event, brings together current students, alumni, faculty, staff, prospective students and friends, to learn new skills, engage in important conversations, and stay connected with colleagues and peers.

Read More.

First Annual José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Lecture: "The Blur and Breathe Books"

A Lecture by Fred Moten

The Department of Performance Studies would like to welcome you to a lecture by Fred Moten. This event is the first annual José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Lecture, and is a part of the Tisch50 celebrations.

Read More.

Memories of the Revolution: Locating Lesbian Culture in the Age of Queer

New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections presents a panel discussion, “Memories of the Revolution: Locating Lesbian Culture in the Age of Queer,” in conjunction with the publication of a new anthology of scripts, monologues, photos, and interviews from the first decade of the WOW (Women’s One World) Café, entitled: Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater (U of MI Press).

Read More.

Andrea Fraser In Conversation

Andrea Fraser speaks with Malik Gaines about her uses of performance, from her influential institutional critique works to recent re-performances of historical texts in “Men on the Line” (2012), taken from a 1972 radio conversation among movement men about feminism, and “Not Just a Few of Us” (2014), which re-enacts a 1991 New Orleans city council hearing discussing Mardi Gras and segregation.

Read More.

Wednesday Night Live!: A Roundtable Conversation on Humor & Politics

Featuring comments by Marlene Ramírez-Cancio of “Fulana”, Denae Hannah of “DNA Comedy”, and Ricardo Gamboa.

Together we ask: Is humor a valid platform to seek truth, maintain hope and combat oppression?

Read More.

Tuning Speculation: 'Maginary Magnitudes and Sonic Refractions

A Symposium

This one-day symposium approaches such things as sound writing, auditory apophenia and “exploding head syndrome” as critical techniques of existence that dramatize the conditional gap between what a life “is” and what it “could be.”

Read More.

"An Eight Day Passage"

A Lecture by Dominic Johnson

“On the morning of the 25th October 1977 I shall be incarcerated within the confines of a concrete cell and the entrance sealed behind me […]. [My] task within the eight day duration of this work will be to attempt to free myself from the isolation of these chosen limits of time and space.” So reads in part a statement of intent by the late British artist Kerry Trengove, ahead of his endurance performance An Eight Day Passage (1977), in which he dug his way out of a gallery, through foundations and walls. The action received extensive coverage in the national press, and was iconic among fellow artists and their audiences, yet it has since slipped into obscurity. In this lecture, I “recover” the action and situate it in relation to better-known works of durational endurance in the period, in order to ask critical questions about political, class and masculine struggle in the 1970s.

Read More.

A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain

Christina Crosby (Professor of English, Wesleyan University) will read from her just-published memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love. In October 2003, she was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, when a branch got caught in the spokes of her bicycle, instantly pitching her to the pavement: in an instant, she was paralyzed. A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.

Read More.

Immersing Miami with Alexandra Vazquez

This talk involves a willful submerging into the performance ecologies of Miami, Florida. “Immersing Miami” is and isn’t about the city; it is an exercise on how to write through the intimacies of the local and out towards parallel gatherings. The talk specifically works with the 1998 “Speed Split” series by the Cuban born, Miami-based artist Consuelo Castañeda (b. 1958), as an opportunity to transpose an artist’s visual mode into a musical response to displacement and dispossession. Castañeda extends a call to listen on the insides of the alienating narratives that drown Miami and in doing so enables us to hear robust aesthetic histories everywhere else.

Read More.

Reparative Work in a Paranoid Structure: Vulernability & Harassment Dynamics

A Lecture by Jennifer Doyle

Victims of workplace harassment and discrimination who don't lose their jobs are forced to find ways of repairing their relationship to their work. How does one do this, within a paranoid institutional context? Or in a cultural context that pathologizes openness and vulnerability as forms of naïveté? What would it mean to accept harassment as an organic potential of groups, especially within a large organization identified with the reproduction of knowledge and power? Here Jennifer Doyle revisits Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading" in order to bring its ethos to bear upon the ubiquity of harassment. The aim is not to explain where harassment comes from, or to propose solutions to the harassment dynamic. It is, instead, to describe those modes of working-through which are prohibited/rendered unthinkable by contemporary discourse on sex and the workplace (in which one can never be paranoid enough).

Read More.

Curating and Performance

A Colloquium

Participants include: Diana Taylor, Malik Gaines, Tavia Nyong'o, Barbara Browning, André Lepecki, and Allen S. Weiss

Read More.

2016 MA Final Projects Symposium

A two-day symposium featuring the final projects of Performance Studies MA Students.

Read More.