WAR & COOLNESS: A BETWEEN-SHOWS SKIRBALL SALON
When: Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Performance Studies alum Sebastián Calderón Bentin (M.A. '05) helped to curate and lead an informal discussion about Gob Squad’s War and Peace and Teatro La Re-Sentida’s La Dictadura de lo Cool, which had their New York premieres at NYU Skirball on consecutive weekends, for a mini-festival of international contemporary theatre.
THE BETWEEN: COUPLE FORMS, PERFORMING TOGETHER
When: April 13-14, 2018
Performance studies faculty, alumni and students gathered for this symposium, which featured co-authored and/or co-performed papers, presentations, and performances, which seek to explode that stalwart object of queer and feminist analysis: “the couple form.”.
PERFORMANCE SYMPOSIUM: CURATION AS COLLABORATION
When: Friday, April 6, 2018
The question that led this year's Curating Symposium was: how do artists and curators, collaborate with one another, but also with different institutions and communities in the making of performance-oriented curatorial projects? PS Alum Yael Raviv (M.A. '95, Ph.D. '02) spoke on the Curating Food: conviviality, commensality, performance panel. And Noémie Solomon (Ph.D. '12) spoke on a panel about Choreographic curation.
WHO WANTS MONEY?: POLITICS, PERFORMANCE, AND THE CONSERVATIVE TURN IN BRAZIL
When: Thursday, February 15, 2018
This lecture by PS Alum Marcos Steuernagel (M.A. '08, Ph.D. '15) unpacked the ways in which an arbitration between billionaire TV Presenter Silvio Santos and legendary theatre director Zé Celso exposes an epistemological clash and amplifies tensions inherent in Brazil’s own version of the global conservative turn. In the context of the recent impeachment process that abruptly interrupted 14 years of Worker’s Party government, a New Right has risen that closely aligns neoliberal economics with social conservatism, specifically targeting advances made in the fields of gender politics, human rights, and culture as “left-wing ideologies” that must be eliminated “at all cost.” In this environment, theatre and performance serve as particularly charged sites of contention for these disputes in society at large, both in Brazil and beyond.
BLACK PERFORMANCE ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE LEFT: A HISTORY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
When: Thursday, September 21, 2017
In his newly published Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left, Malik Gaines illustrates the black political ideas that radicalized the artistic endeavors of musicians, playwrights, and actors beginning in the 1960s. PS Alum Ricardo Montez (M.A. '01, Ph.D. '07) joined a panel to discuss and celebrate Professor Gaines' new book.