Some of you who plan to attend the Performing Monstrosity
symposium may also be interested to attend/send in abstracts for the following
symposium on zombies:
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Thursday, 19 July 2012
Changes to the Catalan Panel
Due to unforeseen circumstances, there has been a change in our Catalan panel in the afternoon.
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Laia Manonelles from the University of Barcelona to our panel, which will focus on the so-calledVampiress of the Raval, the notorious case of Enriqueta Martí, a woman who led a double life; prostitution and pimping out children by day and appearing in finery in the upper echelons of turn-of-the-century Barcelona society by night. Together with Merce Saumell, she will discuss the case of this grotesque 'social monster', and on the one hand bring a sociological analysis of her behaviour, whilst on the other Merce Saumell will discuss her reappearance in theatre in Barcelona on the centenary of her death.
This panel promises to be a fascinating insight into one of Spain's most grotesque characters; a true urban monster, and we are very grateful to Dr. Manonelles for agreeing to step in and complete this very promising panel.
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
Registration form...
Performing Monstrosity in the
City
1st
September 2012
ArtsOne
Building
Queen Mary,
University of London
Registration Form
Name:
Affiliation:
Address:
Phone:
Email:
Registration fee: £10
Please pay your registration at
our online Performing Monstrosity page at this address, http://eshop.qmul.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=260&deptid=34&catid=1 and please return the form to
performingthemonster@gmail.com before the 20th August.
We look forward to welcoming you
to our event and thank you for your participation,
Anna Wilson and Charlie Allwood
The first programme draft...
Performing Monstrosity in the City
Queen Mary, University of London
1st September 2012
9am – 10am Registration
10am – 10:10am Introduction
10:10 – 11:00 Keynote: Deborah Dixon and Carl Lavery (U. Aberystwyth)
Sites of Contagion: Hashima Island
Chair: Kim
Solga
11:00 – 12:30 Panels:
|
Birthing Monsters
|
The Transnational Lens: Monsters on Film
|
Urban Zombies
|
|
Chair: Jonathan
Marshall (U. Otago)
|
Chair: Debra
Shaw (U. East London)
|
Chair: Paul
Coulton
|
|
Emily Garside (Cardiff Metropolitan U.)
‘This is your
universe Frankenstein’: the re-appropriation of the monstrous in Danny
Boyle’s Frankenstein.
|
Maria d’Argenio (KCL)
The Inner
Monstrous in Latin American Cinema: the Inhumanity of War in Días de Santiago (Josué Méndez, 2004)
and La sombra del caminante (Ciro
Guerra, 2005)
|
Belén
Martín-Lucas (U. Vigo)
Utopian biocommunism among the ruins:
Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in
the Ring as anticapitalist dystopia
|
|
Katie Beswick (U. Leeds)
The
Brutalist Monstrosity of the Council Estate: Habitus, performance and the
potential of place
|
Chris Perkins (U. Edinburgh)
Kon Satoshi and
the Dialectics of Monsters in post-bubble Japan
|
Andrea Ruthven (U. Barcelona)
Globalized
Zombies in the City
|
|
Charlotte Bell (QM, UoL)
The Inner City
and the Hoodie
|
Adam Scales (UEA)
Identity in Crisis: Sexuality and the
Slasher Film
|
Alba de Béjar
(U.Vigo)
Posthuman
Apocalypse: Grotesque Bodies and Monstrous Cities in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl
|
12:30 - 12:45 Coffee Break
12:45 – 1:30 Keynote: Claire Hind (U. York St. John) and Gary Winters (Lone
Twin)
KONG LEAR
Chair:
Siddharta Bose
1:30 – 2:15 Lunch (provided)
2:15 – 3:30 Keynotes: Josep-Anton Fernàndez (Open U. of Catalonia) and Mercè
Saumell (Institut del Teatre, Barcelona)
La Vampira del
Raval and Barcelona’s Grand Guinyol
Chair: Helena
Buffery (UCC)
3:30 – 5:00 Panels:
|
Playing with Monsters
|
The Ephemeral Urban: From the real to the
virtual
|
The Monstrous Politics of Fear
|
|
Chair: Chris
Perkins (U. Edinburgh)
|
Chair:
Charlotte Bell (QM, UoL)
|
Chair: Belén Martín-Lucas (U. Vigo)
|
|
Maggie Irving (U. Plymouth)
Sedusa Medusa
Clowning Revisions Clowning for Women
|
Richard Freeman (Centre for Fortean Zoology)
The thing on
the doorstep: In search of Urban Monsters
|
Jonathan Marshall (U. Otago)
“Who
will unchain the monsters?": Radical catharsis and neuropsychology at
the Théâtre du Grand Guignol
|
|
Hannah Nicklin (U. Loughborough)
Playing with the monstrous; restructuring the ‘other’ through loveliness,
adventure, and curiosity.
|
Paul Coulton and Andrew Wilson (U.?)
The Peoples Republic of Monsters
|
JD Taylor
“Sacrifice, monstrosity and
negativity in the neoliberal era: thirteen theses on the damaged body”.
|
|
Phil Smith (U. Plymouth)
Walking in
Monstrous Cities
|
Garfield Benjamin (U. Wolverhampton)
Virtual
Monsters: Becoming Death and the Quantum Immortal
|
Debra Shaw (U. East London)
Pirate Utopias and the New Politics of Space
|
5:00 – 5:20 Coffee Break
5:20 – 6:30 Round table
6:30 Wine reception
Friday, 22 June 2012
Symposium update
We will shortly be posting the draft programme here. In the
meantime we would like to update this blog with confirmation of key-note
speakers. We will be having three joint key-notes:
Deborah Dixon and Carl Lavery
Claire Hind and Gary Winters
Mercè Saumell and Josep-Anton Fernàndez
For those interested in the urban, the term 'topology' has
come to denote a 'stretching' and 'folding' of space that brings points into proximity,
thereby allowing connections to be made between people and things. Yet, what is missing from such accounts, we want to suggest, is an
'ontology of touch' that might account for and simultaneously 'ground' topological
geographies, lest they become one more imaginary spatiality. By its very name, an ontology of touch would
focus on the material connections among mobile bodies. Its topological
counterpoint are the various materials and forces that rub up against each other, interpenetrate and reassemble at various speeds
and intensities, such that diverse proximities and distances, contacts and
connections are made and remade.
Here, we take Hashima, Japan - once the most densely populated site in the world, now a 'ghost island' -- as a site of 'contagion'. That is, as offering an opportunity to speculate on what such an ontology of touch might feel like. The touch that we are interested in exploring is variegated: the touch of matter, the touch of an image, the touch of language - a call, a refrain, a rhapsody. For us, Hashima Island is akin to what Antonin Artaud called the plague, an interstice, a contact zone, a way of becoming monstrous, of dissolving. To go there is to enter a no-man's land, to encounter a past made future, to lose oneself in the toxic effluent of plastic rivulets, broken silicon, discarded children's shoes - the ecological sublime, one might say. Hashima is a synthetic Saturn, a dark star of waste. To actualise the monstrous touch of Hashima - its toxic topography - the good sense of academic language, with its dream of measured communication, break downs, prey to a viral entropy. The only response is to write monstrously, to embrace its molecular abundance. To do this, we write postcards from the island, addressed to performance artists, film-makers and geographers, in the hope of transmitting an 'aesthetics of contagion', a dosage of monstrous affect.
Here, we take Hashima, Japan - once the most densely populated site in the world, now a 'ghost island' -- as a site of 'contagion'. That is, as offering an opportunity to speculate on what such an ontology of touch might feel like. The touch that we are interested in exploring is variegated: the touch of matter, the touch of an image, the touch of language - a call, a refrain, a rhapsody. For us, Hashima Island is akin to what Antonin Artaud called the plague, an interstice, a contact zone, a way of becoming monstrous, of dissolving. To go there is to enter a no-man's land, to encounter a past made future, to lose oneself in the toxic effluent of plastic rivulets, broken silicon, discarded children's shoes - the ecological sublime, one might say. Hashima is a synthetic Saturn, a dark star of waste. To actualise the monstrous touch of Hashima - its toxic topography - the good sense of academic language, with its dream of measured communication, break downs, prey to a viral entropy. The only response is to write monstrously, to embrace its molecular abundance. To do this, we write postcards from the island, addressed to performance artists, film-makers and geographers, in the hope of transmitting an 'aesthetics of contagion', a dosage of monstrous affect.
Claire and Gary will be presenting KONG LEAR
Claire and Gary collaborate as writing artists on live performances for
the city their collaboration encounters the relationship between writing, play
and performance and the possibilities of slippage between the self and
character. Claire Hind is a performer, researcher and lecturer at York St John
University and Gary Winters is the co-artistic director of the internationally
renowned company Lone Twin a company with a 15-year history of performance
making practices.
The artists will offer a talk illustrating their practice and sharing
footage of the 12-minute Super 8mm silent film of Kong Lear that Claire
Hind and Gary Winters made during the Gorilla Mondays tour: Gorilla
Mondays are performance walking tours remapping a city through the merging
of the two stories of King Kong and King Lear where the public can join the
character Kong Lear on her tour of different city sites that playfully
psyche-map the streets of our imagination and call upon our dreams.
Kong Lear as well as
a play on words, is a humorous and touching film referencing King Lear’s
madness upon some mythologised heath. We re-imagine Kong inside Lear’s psyche
wandering the streets of York. Kong Lear is played by a female performer who
comes with her own story - Freud would have a field day! We celebrate
alternative interpretations in art making practices through the use of old
technologies. Kong Lear slips, occasionally, into a narrative about the
material quality and the aesthetic of super 8mm film with silent movie
intertitles revealing a hint of what is hidden inside the character’s and the
performer’s unspoken thoughts and desires.
Mercè Saumell and Josep-Anton Fernàndez:
will be presenting a panel relating to the performance of monstrosity in Catalonia. We will post further details here shortly.
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