Missing Performance
Missing Performance
A TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium
Saturday 1st March 2014 – Millburn House, University of Warwick, CV4 7HS
With a Keynote by Professor Nadine Holdsworth
Registration Open
The TaPRA Postgraduate Committee is pleased to announce that registration for ‘Missing Performance’ is open. We warmly invite postgraduates, artists and academics at any stage of their career to attend the TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium on Saturday 1st March at the University of Warwick.
The day will commence with a keynote from Professor Nadine Holdsworth (University of Warwick): ‘From Military Campaigns to Mother Goose: Why does the Royal Navy do amateur theatre?’ Holdsworth’s keynote will examine ‘the value of amateur dramatics… in terms of constructing and sustaining particular communities’.
The panels and presentations that make up the rest of the symposium celebrate the forgotten, flawed and misunderstood aspects of drama, theatre and performance, aiming not just to retrieve performance, but to enquire into the value of what’s missed. The speakers on our first panel, ‘Reclaiming Missing Voices’, consider the ways institutions shape our understandings of nationalism and canon. ‘The Living Dead’ offers consideration and critique of the spirit of performance: its aura, untimely ends, and productively messy processes. The scholars on our final panel, ‘Passionate Participants: On Inclusion and the Anti-Engaged’, question the ethics of participation, both in performance and in research: who participates, how, and to what effects?
This year, Katie Elliott is our Costume Designer in Residence. Her lunchtime event offers a chance to explore Katie’s current research on the costumed body in performance. Daniel Oliver and Mr. Ferris, our Artists in Residence, will host ‘“The Missing”: An Artist Q and A’, before our roundtable discussion, chaired by Nadine Holdsworth.
These provide only a few glimpses of the breadth of material relevant to the theme of ‘missing performance’ that this symposium seeks to collate. ‘Missing performance’, both inside and outside the theatre, is central to what performance is and/or can be. In what ways can theatre and performance studies researchers contribute to understandings of ‘missing’ and its relevance today?
Details of the symposium are as follows:
10.15 – 10.40 Registration
Keynote:
Professor Nadine Holdsworth – ‘From Military Campaigns to Mother Goose: Why does the Royal Navy do amateur theatre?’
Panel 1: Reclaiming Missing Voices
Rebecca McCutcheon – ‘Collaborating with Dead Rebels – Performing Unperformed Texts in the Wrong Places’
Eve Smith – ‘An Accumulation of Absences: the Collector of Theatrical Ephemera’
Rachel Cockburn – ‘The British Library’s making of Modern Britain: Isn’t there something Missing?’
Costume Designer in Residence, Katie Elliott
Panel 2: Living Dead
Lauren Barri Holstein – ‘The Cyclical Pleasure/Death of Symbolization in How to Become a Cupcake/The Famous’ Adaption of Frankenstein’
Christopher O’Shaughnessy – ‘Reclaiming a lost dimension: spirituality as a phenomenon of a dramatic text’
Kirstin Smith – ‘Trips, Slips and Disappearances: Misses and Near Misses in Stunt Performances of the 1890s’
Panel 3: Passionate Participants: On Inclusion and the Anti-Engaged
Beth Emily Richards – ‘Yoshua Okón’s ‘Octopus’: re-performing histories of the Guatemalan Civil War’
Joe Mcloughlin – ‘Silent Victims: The Labelling of The Anti-Engaged, Symbolic Violence & Cultural Capital’
Eleanor Massie – ‘Amateurs and professionals: performance, mimicry, and unasked questions’
Artists in Residence
Daniel Oliver and Mr Ferris – ‘“The Missing”: An Artist Q and A’
Roundtable Discussion
We aim to close the symposium at 6:30 pm.
If you would like to attend this event, please notify Adam, Charlotte and David by emailing: [log in to unmask] by Monday 17 February. The event is free, but all attendees must be a member of TaPRA. Membership costs £25 or £10 for postgraduates and the unwaged. If you are not already a TaPRA member, please contact our treasurer on the TaPRA Executive Committee, Hayley Bradley, to arrange online payment via bank transfer: [log in to unmask]. Alternatively, we advise bringing a cheque book on the day if the membership fee has not been paid in advance.
We look forward to hearing from you!
All Best Wishes
Adam Alston, Charlotte Bell and David Coates
TaPRA Postgraduate Representatives
