The Spring 2010 lecture series, “The Theatrical / The Performative / The Transformative,” will introduce screenings and panel discussions with paradigmatic works by key artists with strong influence on contemporary art and its theoretical discourse. The focus will be on time- based work that navigates between art, film, theater, and dance. We also seek to juxtapose artists and cultural activists of different generations and backgrounds who share an interest in feminist discourses and politics.
Xavier Le Roy was born in Juvisy sur Orge, France in 1963 and studied biochemistry at the University of Montpellier. He began his dance career in 1988, performing for companies including Véronique Larcher, Compagnie de l’ Alambic, and Detektor (Berlin). In 1993 he founded Le Kwatt, initiating his own collaborations and multi-media projects. He founded his current company, "in situ productions" with Petra Roggel in 1999. In 2007/08 he was an associate artist at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier (CCNM), and is a fellow at the MIT Program in Art Culture and Technology.
Nell Breyer is a research affiliate at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology; her work focuses on the intersection of dance, new media, and visual art.
March 1
Constanza Macras with Jay Scheib, moderator
Constanza Macras was born in Buenos Aires Argentina, studied fashion design at the University of Buenos Aires and trained at the Margarita Bali School of Dance. She continued her training at the New York at the Merce Cunningham Studio, working later in Amsterdam. Since 1995, she has been living and working as a performer, director and choreographer in Berlin. She founded her own dance company Tamagotchi Y2K in 1997, now Dorky Park today. Dorky Park. has toured in Korea, Japan, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, the United States and to various European festivals and venues. The company and its productions are supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, the Mayor of Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Cultural Affairs and the German Federal Cultural Foundation and works regularly with Berlin venues such as Hebbel am Ufer, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz.
Jay Scheib is Associate Professor for Music and Theater Arts at MIT and is a writer, director and designer.
March 8
Peter Schumann with John Bell, moderator
Bread and Puppet Theater director Peter Schumann will present a short fiddle lecture illustrated with cantastoria banners, after which moderator John Bell will lead a discussion with Schumann about Bread and Puppet's uses of public space, technology, the concept of progress, and the relations between puppet theater and modernism. A question-and-answer session will follow, and the evening will end with a drum and fiddle performance by Schumann and his grandson.
Peter Schumann (b. 1934 Silesia) founded Bread and Puppet Theater in New York City in 1963.
March 15
Magda Fernandez with Amber Frid-Jimenez, moderator
Magda Fernandez creates synthetic video worlds that question our real lives in these contemporary times. She is drawn to the strengths and weaknesses that make us tick, how those characteristics spill into our social behavior, and how greater forces in turn shape us. Power and helplessness, reality and fantasy, memory and history are some of the themes in her art. Fernandez's videos rely liberally on composite technology and special effects to make sense out of the nonsensical. Fernandez will screen four of her videos and discuss their subjects and means of production. In Song of a Bordertown Artist, a clown in a junkyard leads us on a mystical tour of the artworld. Family ghosts respond to the Cuban Revolution in Cuba Diaries, Part One. A crone conjures a virtual landscape in Desert. In Softie, a middle-aged woman's face waltzes in and out of soft-focus before a high-definition camera.
April 5 (Date: TBD)
Catherine Sullivan
Catherine Sullivan's works engage a variety of media - theater, film, video, photography, writing and sculpture. She has produced several performances and theater works wherein the performers are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, reenactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. The works address a broad spectrum of historical reference and often involve multiple collaborators such as composer Sean Griffin. Her work is often staged and shot on sets for unrelated productions and in settings that project social function beyond the mise en scène Sullivan builds within them. What hopefully emerges from the numerous layers of collaboration and reference is an anxious and unresolved political and social sensibility.
The Catherine Sullivan lecture originally scheduled for April 5 has been cancelled. We are please to announce in its place:
"Passageways - Theatricality as Feminist Practice"
Ute Meta Bauer and 4.310 Contemporary Curatorial Practices
Theatrical Fields Ute Meta Bauer introduces the evening with a thirty-minute lecture on theatricality as a feminist practice. Students from 4.310 Contemporary Curatorial Practice will present new and in process artist works. Works by Judith Barry, Alexander Gyorfi & Peter Holl, Joan Jonas, Pedro Reyes, Constanze Ruhm and Lorna Simpson, among others, will be screened. Ute Meta Bauer is a curator and director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
4.310 Contemporary Curatorial Practice: Theatrical Fields This seminar/workshop addresses curatorial practice as an activity that intertwines theory and practice, and reflects the socio-political context of artistic and cultural production. Introducing and discussing paradigmatic works by key artists with strong influence on contemporary art and its theoretical discourse Theatrical Fields is focusing on time based work whose producers/artists navigate between art, film, theater, and dance.
April 12
Yvonne Rainer with Joan Jonas, moderator
"Where's the Passion" is a lecture in which notions of self-expression, impersonation, and the politics of looking and being looked at are examined, accompanied by documentations of two recent performances choreographed by Yvonne Rainer.
Yvonne Rainer made a transition to filmmaking following a fifteen-year career as a choreographer/ dancer (1960-1975). After making seven experimental feature films — Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), MURDER and murder (1996), among others — she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project. Her most recent dances are AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M., a re-vision of Balanchine's Agon, RoS Indexical, a re-vision of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring and a Performa07 commission, and Spiraling Down, a meditation on soccer, aging, and war. Her dances have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Vienna, Helsinki, Kassel, Berlin, and Sao Paolo. A memoir — Feelings Are Facts: a Life — was published by MIT Press in 2006. Rainer is currently a Distinguished Professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine.
Joan Jonas is an artist and professor in the MIT Program of Art, Culture and Technology. She recently received the first annual Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guggenheim.
April 26 (Cancelled!)
Eva Meyer
UPDATE: The April 26 lecture by Eva Meyer has been canceled due to travel disruptions caused by ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano.
Eva Meyer will screen Sie könnte zu Ihnen gehören/She Might Belong to you, by Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, 2007, 37 min, and discuss her work: With the passing of time she has become clairvoyant. In her mind she finds a whole set of images and utterances she can give meaning to. If only she handled this wonderful collection properly, she would be able to traverse wider spaces than are at first visible. She could go beyond the perceptive and sensitive states of experience and entrust sensations surpassing them to a future perception. Film: Sie könnte zu Ihnen gehören/She Might Belong to you, Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, 2007, 37 min. (German/English, English/German subtitles).
The series is made possible in part by the Grants Program of the Council for the Arts at MIT.
We are located two blocks from the Kendall Square MBTA station (Red Line). From Kendall Square, walk towards Central Square on Main Street for one block. Take a left onto Ames Street. The E15 Weisner Building will be on your left at 20 Ames Street.
