[rohrpost] James Frieze: Is Paradise A Crime Scene? Participatory Performance and the Forensic Turn, Monday, June 1st at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin-Mitte

Mit Mai 27 16:33:39 CEST 2015

Lecture Series of the Research Training Group »Visibility and Visualization. 
Hybrid Forms of
Pictorial Knowledge« at the University of Potsdam

James Frieze: Is Paradise A Crime Scene? Participatory Performance and the 
Forensic Turn

Monday, June 1st, 2015, 6.00 to 8.00 pm c.t. at KW Institute for 
Contemporary Art, Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin, Studiolo, Front Building

Contemporary theatre, like much of contemporary culture, is obsessed with 
evidence, with means of detection, with the processing and circulation of 
information. In theatre, this obsession manifests itself as an investment in 
the procedural endeavour required to unmask reality. Culturally, this turn 
to the forensic can be situated as the latest reaction against a steady 
erosion of epistemological certainties. Questions about how we see and how 
we know are shepherded, in the forensic turn, to questions of how we verify. 
The age of information is, more precisely, an age of evidence, in which 
everything must be legibly verified. These imperatives fuel intense 
questioning of the boundaries of privacy, the ideology of platforms that 
enable the transfer of knowledge, and the substance of democratic 
participation. This questioning is crucial to theatre and its relationship 
to culture. Theatrical performance addresses these issues in ways that 
inform, as well as being informed by, ideas of a forensic turn. I will offer 
examples of performances that defy generic categorisation, arguing that 
these examples both deploy and disrupt forensic logic.

James Frieze is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Liverpool John Moores 
University, where his teaching focusses on devising, improvisation, 
performance theory, participatory performance. He has collaboratively 
devised and directed numerous site-responsive performances, including 
theatrical adaptations of non-fiction prose, poems, online virtual worlds 
and other kinds of source-text. His essays have appeared in journals 
including Contemporary Theatre Review, Modern Drama, Performing Arts 
Journal, Theatre Research International, Performing Ethos. The follow-up to 
his monograph Naming Theatre: Demonstrative Diagnosis in Performance 
(Palgrave, 2009) is in progress (under contract with Routledge): it 
addresses the forensic turn in contemporary performance.

The upcoming dates of the lecture series:

6/15/2015
Sybille Krämer (Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin): Sichtbar machen – 
sagbar machen. Über den Unterschied zwischen Spuren und Zeugen

6/29/2015
Ralph Rugoff (Hayward Gallery, London): Scene of the Crime

7/6/2015
Andree Korpys/ Markus Löffler (Künstler, Berlin und Bremen): Ein paar 
Halbstiefel, die unter dem Regal im Abstellraum auf Glasbausteinen stehen

You will find further information at:

http://www.sichtbarkeit-sichtbarmachung.de/veranstaltungen/s/article/ringvorlesung-im-sose-2015/
https://www.facebook.com/events/1582925741977081/

-----
»Sichtbarkeit und Sichtbarmachung. Hybride Formen des Bildwissens
DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 1539
Universität Potsdam
Am Neuen Palais 10
14469 Potsdam
http://www.sichtbarkeit-sichtbarmachung.de