Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 6a
Performance, exhibition and social memory
Thursday 9 September, 11.30 - 1pm
'Exploring social memory and ageing through theatre: preliminary findings from the ‘Ages and Stages’ project' - Michelle Rickett, David Amigoni, Miriam Bernard, Lucy Munro, Michael Murray (Keele University) and Jill Rezzano (New Vic Theatre)
This paper presents preliminary findings from a new multidisciplinary project funded under the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) programme - Ages and Stages: the place of theatre in representations and recollections of ageing. The project is a collaboration between a research team at Keele University and the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-Under-Lyme.
We are looking at representations and performances of ageing and old age within the New Vic’s social documentaries, which were produced between the 1960s and 1990s, and are also exploring the involvement of older people as participants within the theatre. Our mixed method approach is organised around three interrelated and complementary strands: Representation, Recollection and Performance. Strand 1 involves literary and cultural analyses of materials relating to the documentaries, held in the Victoria Theatre Archive. Through qualitative interviewing and ethnographic research, Strand 2 explores the involvement of older people with the theatre; as actors, volunteers, audience members, and sources for the documentaries. And in Strand 3, we will work with older people and the New Vic Youth Theatre to draw the research together to create a new piece of documentary drama and an associated exhibition.
Our paper will outline the project and present preliminary findings from work undertaken in the archive and through qualitative research. In particular, we focus on the role of the theatre in constructing and representing social memory, and the part that older people have played and continue to play within this process.
'Second life for the hunting trophy: mounted heads in contemporary art' - Petra Tjitske Kalshoven (University of Manchester)
Drawing on thing theory and anthropological approaches to materiality, my paper will explore symbolic and material affordances of hunting trophies as controversial presences in contemporary European art practice. Over time, the hunting trophy, a severed, expertly stuffed animal head mutely contemplating the high life in banquet halls, has been interpreted as a display of victory over an ontologically inferior animal, a show of guilty affection on the part of the hunter, a scientific tool for wildlife management, and a sublimation of death. As souvenirs of European imperialism, and in the light of a moralizing discourse on human-animal relations, hunting trophies have come to be seen as a source of embarrassment in the public space of the natural history museum (Manchester Museum included) and have been left to gather dust in the storage rooms. Trophies are starting to emerge from the closet, however, as artists rummage the stores to fill present-day cabinets of curiosities, seeking to revive a spirit of play that was lost with the rise of the scientific museum. In an attempt to think through trophies (Henare et al. 2006 'Thinking Through Things'), I will discuss the come-back of the trophy, re-contextualized in the sphere of art, focussing in particular on the work of conceptual artist Mark Dion ('Cabinet of Curiosities' featuring trophies, 2001) and photographer Eric Poitevin ('Bel-Val' 2006, portraits of freshly severed game heads). If trophies are metonymic refashionings of living animals, how does their second life as work of art inform shifting human-animal relations?
'The Effects of Institutionalization on Risk and Experimentation in Performative Experiences' - Lisa Newman (University of Manchester)
My research investigates the effect different modes of institutionalization has had on performance art concerning risk and experimentation in the artist's experience. Recent exhibitions and archiving projects have identified specific histories of performance art while excluding others, which raises the question of 'evidence' of experiences that are inherently transitory. In this conference, I would like to give a brief introduction of the origins of performance art and how these actions were created to communicate personal and social narratives outside of canonical and institutional formalities and limitations. Where performative actions have been used to challenge social norms, the element of risk and experimentation in these actions may now be compromised by a recent push to canonize performance art. By exploring the philosophies and ethos of performativity, I hope to generate discussion across disciplines around the larger question of how we work with ideas of authenticity within real life experiences in our research, and how that authenticity is presented through our writings and pedagogical practice. How does our selection of personal narratives and case studies in our research shape (and potentially skew) a larger collective memory? How do different disciplines address these problems in their research methods?
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