Theme: A Minor Public: Performance Making Space
Deadline: 15 March 2022
Symposium date: 22 May 2022
Submissions and questions: jon.berry.2021live.rhul.ac.uk
Open to all PGRs at Royal Holloway
About this symposium
As we now return to a time (hopefully) less unprecedented, we notice a change in our relationship to space has occured: we are now rediscovering space; spaces left dormant, reinhabited by wildlife, changed at rapid speeds to become testing sites, hospitals, places for the dead.
In response to this shifting, this changing landscape, A Minor Public: Performance Making Space is an attempt to interrogate what we mean by Performance, and how it relates to space and the public in their broadest or narrowest senses. Taking cues from Performance Studies, the symposium aims to generate meaningful collision of ideas around various poles of discourse: the public, the performative, the minor, the spatial and the made. From the performance of the political speech to the performance of the everyday interaction, utilising Performance allows for broad yet detailed explorations of all aspects of human expression. "Performance” incorporates diverse notions, from the theatre, to film, to politics, to gender, and so on.
The multiplication of what we recognise as “performance” has both complicated and diversified the kinds of reality claims performance can make. Thinking through “performance” and its role in producing public spaces for new modes of reality is necessary in an increasingly atomised and marketised world. With attacks on bathroom rights for transgender people, a population under lockdown and concurrent closure of public spaces, and the proliferation of immersive theatre-events bringing stories into new avenues for capitalisation, how performance intervenes in the world has become more and more fractal.
Considering aspects of public performance, access and accessibility, mental health, and community participation, we invite papers from early career researchers that resonate with the title and the multifaceted turbulences it may cause.
With keynote speeches provided by Dr. Sophie Nield (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr. Adam Alston (Goldsmiths, University of London), we are seeking abstracts from any early-career PGRs from any discipline at RHUL which engages with, interrogates or expands the notion of performance and space. The symposium will take place on the 22 May 2022, and successful colleagues will deliver their papers along a day of other papers and discussion panels.
A Minor Public is a symposium designed to interrogate the connections and causations between performance and material conditions as they impact one another - politics, commerce, influence, media, public discourse and beyond.
It is an exploration, a chasing down of co-flations and reverberations. We welcome papers from any discipline inspired by and/or challenging of the theme. We aim to produce a symposium of aberrant movements, vibrant synergies, surprising connections and interruptions.
Please send all abstracts and any questions to - Jon.Berry.2021live.rhul.ac.uk by the 15 March 2022.