Misperforming Symposium

MISPERFORMING SYMPOSIUM                   

   Image: David Cross, 'Pump' performed at PSi#15, Zagreb, Croatia.

CoLab, in collaboration with the School of Art & Design at AUT, is pleased to announce “MISPERFORMING: A SYMPOSIUM ON THE UNSTABLE PARADIGMS OF PERFORMANCE AND MEDIA ARTS” to be held on 28th November at AUT University.

‘MISPERFORMING’ is a cousin event to the 15th PSi (Performance
Studies International) conference ‘MISPERFORMANCE: Misfiring,Misfitting, Misreading’ held in Zagreb earlier this year. It will continue to explore the emerging 21st language of transdisciplinary performance/technology art in the context of the rapidly changing creative and technology industries environment. The symposium will be followed by a 3-hour evening performance event, GLITCH, at St Paul St Gallery. Speakers and programme details hav been finalised.  For these details, and for an AUT map, please download the attachments above and for registration details please click here. 

The keynote speaker will be HELLEN SKY the renowned Australian digital
choreographer / performer/ director/ writer, Helen Sky. A graduate of
the Australian Ballet School, Helen was a founding member of the
Australian performing group PRAM and Circuz Oz. She co-founded and
directed new media performance companies In Space, Dancehouse and the
Centre for Moving Arts. Her multidisciplinary work merges human
creativity and computer productivity through performance, dance, theatre
and installation. Hellen Sky & collaborators aim to innovate in the
performing arts and media arts, by devising transdisciplinary projects,
using the potential of human creativity and the inventiveness of
computer interactivity to find new ways of telling stories relevant to
the complex climates of the 21st century. She seeks to engage audiences
regardless of age or culture, through the imaginative interplay of
images, movement, spoken word and virtual through physical design that
touch our senses with humour and beauty. Her projects are
multidisciplinary, and merge human creativity with computer productivity
to pioneer a language that is better suited to transcribing the
experience of the 21st Century.

"Hellen Sky is a visionary in the field of performance/technology truly
a hybrid artist who creatively orchestrates physics, consciousness and
aesthetics to create multi-dimensional transformative theatrical
experiences that integrates computer animation, motion capture and
interactive technologies to poetically bridge the human and the
technological, the mundane and the lofty" (Ellen Bromberg, Director, The
Center for Interdisciplinary Arts and Technology, University of Utah,
USA).

Further information on Hellen Sky at: www.hellensky.com.

OTHER SPEAKERS:

BRANDON HUR

Brandon Hur is an Industrial designer with an interest in tangible interaction between an object and human body movement. Brandon devises interactive objects using a range of remote sensor technology to orchestrate connectivity to actual unique design objects to virtual projection environments. He does this in collaboration with dancers, choreographers, and industrial design projects. Through interaction design, he brings out the importance of movement as extension of perceptional field and its relationship to surrounding environment, especially objects. By collaborating with dancers, choreographers and designers, he reintroduced the notion of design as interdisciplinary research and practice.

DAVID CROSS

PARTIAL BODIES, PARTIAL OBJECTS: THE NECESSITY OF HYBRIDISED PERFORMANCE 

This paper interrogates Marina Abramovic’s position that the future of performance is based on its ability to transcend an engagement with objects and operate as a discrete discipline in its own right. Such an idea, redolent with a coherent disciplinarity, runs counter to the modalities of art in the post-medium condition. My paper will examine relationships between the body and object in contemporary performance with reference to the idea of the object as filter, or blind spot, that does not diminish but rather serves to enhance and unfold a fuller understanding of corporeality. The partial use of objects in tandem with the partial manipulation/representation of the body, offers a litany of possibilities for drawing audiences into new understandings of liveness that are compelling precisely because the body is not made coherent or complete. Working with a number of case studies, including Paul McCarthy and two of my own recent performance/installations, I locate a hybrid category of performance/installation as a critical and evolving modality by which audiences might come to rethink what and how they know the live body. 

DAVID CROSS has exhibited widely across New Zealand, Australia and Eastern Europe. His work was selected for inclusion in Perspecta 99 at Performance Space in Sydney and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. A major performance project was developed for the leading performance festival Interactions 5 in Poland (2003). More recently his work was included in Play: Performance and Portraiture in Australian and New Zealand Performance Art. His work ‘Bounce’ was part of the critically acclaimed performance series Mostly Harmless at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2006). His enormous performance installation ‘Hold’ has been shown across New Zealand to critical acclaim. He is well known for his often confrontational and challenging performances that place particular emphasis on the audience as collaborators. He is Associate Professor in Fine Arts at Massey University and Director of the Litmus Research Initiative.

ALYS LONGLEY

NECESSARY DISPLACEMENT: A DISCUSSION OF PERFORMANCE MAKING AND WRITING via THE IMMERSED PROJECT 

This paper will discuss a performance making/writing project that followed the choreographic research project immersed from conceptual development, to duet rehearsal, into a sharing of choreographic material, to the creation of an artist’s book that continued studio experimentation into a play with binding, text and design. The immersed project takes misunderstanding, instability and mistranslation as key generators for conceptual development. The installation work of Ann Hamilton and the concept of the minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, 1987) present methodologies for pushing performance to productive thresholds of meaning, as Bruce Ferguson writes of Hamilton’s work with the materiality of language; 

“Not only should language not be trusted…but more simply, it cannot be trusted. Instead, there must be practices that have no assurances of meaning, practices that moonlight from the economy of language, acting as offerings of a necessary displacement; practices that generate catastrophes of meaning” (Ferguson, 1994, p.14) 

The displacement of ideas as they move between director and dancer, from concept to choreographic materialisation, photography, writing, design and binding, present ample opportunity for accident, invention and ‘catastrophes of meaning’. This presentation will ask: How might the sense of immanent failure and lack of direction common to performance practice be usefully translated into an artist book that interrogates the process of performance making? 

ALYS LONGLEY is a performance maker with a focus on interdisciplinary performance practice. She lectures at The University of Auckland, New Zealand, where she specializes in teaching Performance Writing and Creative Practice. Her doctoral research is with the University of Victoria, Australia and explores movement-initiated writing practices.

DORITA HANNAH

BUILDING BABEL: MAKING ARCHITECTURE TREMBLE

This paper examines the failure of the modernist utopian project in relation to the historical avant-garde and its impact on contemporary architecture. The 20th-century’s Modern Movement attempted, through its faith in instrumental rationality, to build a secure world over a fractured abyss, previously exposed by Nietzsche whose proclamation of God’s death undermined the ground of philosophy, theater, and architecture. As a monolithic practice, architectural modernism upheld an ontology of stasis, resisting the “play” of spatial dynamics in favor of abstract, fixed identities of pure form that foreclosed on multiple and resistant performances demanded by the avant-garde. This paper takes the unfinished mythical Tower of Babel – an incomplete construction that discloses its visible structures – as signifying the inability to build an indestructible edifice for a unified global culture. Heir to failure, Babel stands in for the instability of communication and structural weakness. It prompts the development of Sola Morales notion of ‘weak architecture’ – offering a range of border conditions and in-between zones for creative encounter. Space-in-flux, Babel also challenges the stasis and passivity of performance space as hermetically sealed and neutral container.

DORITA HANNAH is an architect and scenographer whose design research focuses on the intersection between space and performance. Co-edited publications include an anthology on Performance Design (2008) and a themed issue for the JAE Journal on Performance/Architecture (2009). Awards for her design practice include World Stage Design (2009), DINZ (1999 & 2007), NZIA (2003), Bliznakov Prize for International Women in Architecture (2003) and a UNESCO Laureate (1999). Dr Hannah is on the Board of Directors for Performance Studies International and is Commissioner of Theatre Architecture for the 2011 Prague Quadrennial. 

KEREN CHIARONI

"GET IN BEHIND": MISPERFORMING, MISFITTING AND MISFIRING IN DOUGLAS WRIGHT'S INLAND 

Douglas Wright’s 2002 work Inland performs with wit and mythic power the tale of the human misfit: lost between the herd and solitude, between safe enclosures and a vast landscape, between leaping freedom and a shot at point blank range. Amongst the “Baa baa … banks of grass,” subjected to the same poignant lessons of life as any heroes of Greek mythology, Wright’s dancers are coaxed and corralled like sheep. In a re-imagining of the battles between farmer, sheep and dog as funny as the Topp Twins, Wright’s narrative of misperforming creatures also bears a marked resemblance to Janet Frame’s tale of sheep on the way to the slaughterhouse. Caught under a sun that at one moment “blesses … with so much warmth” and then suddenly “batters … about the head with gigantic burning bars”, Frame’s sheep journey from paddock to paddock, and so to their final destination, “while the hawks congregate above, sizzling the sky with their wings.”

Like all true tales of misfits, Inland extends beyond isolated acts of not fitting in or of misperforming the accepted code. It reminds us, slyly, that we are all misfits, all shuffling together for comfort under a sizzling sky, blessed and threatened, fearing and longing for freedom, travelling towards and away from the certainty of death.

How then do we perform our lives, caught between infinities of joy and fear, between reaching beyond our walled enclosures and the repetition of daily monotonies?

Through a perfect mixage of dance, film, sound and scenography, Inland gives back a sense of connection to the land, while restoring its strangeness, its bleakness and its beauty. At the same time, with its raw and luminous energy, Wright’s choreography dares us to hope for spacious places in the midst of confinement and for surefootedness in the face of uncertainty. It provokes us to risk a life too abundant for containment, even if we misfire.

KEREN CHIARONI is Programme Director for French at Victoria University of Wellington. Her teaching programme includes courses on 19th-century Paris art and architecture and the history of French scenography. Her research interests include design for performance, fashion and dance theatre, and the use of French cultural theory as an analytical tool for the performing arts. 

CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK 

SYMPATHETIC MIMESIS AND THE FORCE OF FAILURE

The paper explores performance and part-sculptural ‘objects out of action’ via the histories and practices of sympathetic magic. Revealing the manners in which various rituals act to animate objects, I focus on notions of mimesis, similitude and contagion. British anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah’s thinking on persuasive analogy in ritual performance draws a crucial link between J. L. Austin’s performative utterance and James George Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic. Applied to contemporary debates on performance and ‘objects out of action’, these part objects act as partial ‘subjects’ that are unlocatable as trace (substitution) and contagious contact (liveness). What is lacking in the operations of sympathetic mimesis is precisely what ‘draws out’ the body/s of the audience. Put another way, redundancy is viewed as necessary to an efficacious or ethical practice. This paper will include my own recent video and sound installations as well as exploring some Euro-American genealogies of performance / body art in relationship to the work of New Zealand artist Richard Maloy.

CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK is an artist and academic. He is Associate Professor of visual arts in the School of Art & Design, AUT University, and Chair of the AUT St Paul St Gallery. His art practice involves elements of performance, video, sound and sculpture. He is particularly focused on relationships between performance and its subsequent exhibition as documents and re-enactments. From this perspective he is interested in how objects become animated by performance. His work can be viewed at www.imageandtext.org.nz.

BRENT HARRIS

RANGE HILL

I intend to use this paper to try to find something my research had previously missed, and consider the time and method of turning back. At the AUT Postgraduate Conference in August I played and interrupted audio recordings of myself performing a task while reading draft reflections on my performance Bow. My paper at PSi #15 discussed Common Series (2008) which involved six walking and talking performances through Dunedin central business district. During those performances I said, and pointed to, places where the performance had gone in previous pieces. In those projects, events of speech recalled previous actions that resembled what was happening at the time of speech. Ethics philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1981) performatively responds to a “methodological problem” (p. 7). Levinas’ notion of “the saying”, the subject’s “pre-original” (p. 10) ethical relation to the other person, cannot be “said”, cannot be described or constated. For Derrida (1991), Levinas’ ethics signifies through a heterogeneous serial structure, tying its own interruptions together. Range Hill attempts to find its’ object-subject through combining recording, playback, movement of my body, and voice. It will consider the time and method of turning back in the audio recording and public play-back of Vito Acconci’s Face-off (1973) “a tape I’ve recorded is revealing intimate parts of my life. When things get too close for comfort, when I don’t want you to hear, I shout, “No, no, no, no”: I’m blocking out the tape, suppressing my secrets” (Acconci 2006 p. 326).

BRENT HARRIS lives in Auckland and is a PhD student at The School of Art and Design, AUT. His research explores relations between performativity, witnessing, and contemporary concepts of “the event”, through experimental performance arts practice. brent.harris@clear.net.nz .

SHARON MAZER

MIKA: THE MIRROR BALL STAGE

This paper considers the ways in which Mika – world-famous, and not just in New Zealand, for his performances of what might be called “native drag” – has come to embody the core, conflicting facets of New Zealand cultural identity. It is tempting to psychoanalyse Mika’s performances as rooted in his personal story of adoption into a Pakeha family and, as such, to see his iconic image as constructed in response to the loss of the connection to his Maori birth father – a rupture at the Mirror Stage, in Lacanian terms. However, for me, the answer lies in the mirror ball, which unlike Lacan’s mirror, refuses direct reflection of the subject. What may be seen as a mistaken performance of Maori cultural identity, can thus be seen also as an affirmation of Mika’s emergence as a queerly self-invented, essentially Maori man. “Mika: The Mirror Ball Stage” began as part of a joint presentation with Peter Falkenberg (University of Canterbury) entitled “Nico and Mika: Missed Identities, Brand Performances” for this year’s PSi in Croatia. Because Peter cannot join us in Auckland, I am taking this opportunity to revise my paper toward its eventual incorporation as a chapter in Matiro. SHARON MAZER is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury. She is currently collaborating with Mika on a book entitled Matiro: Look Inside.

DR. SCOTT WILSON

Dr. Scott Wilson teaches film theory and cultural studies at the
Unitec Department of Performing and Screen Arts. He is the author of a
number of articles on cinema, popular culture and fan hermeneutics.