Fading---Feminism---Practice---Process: An Evolving Performance Archive

The Scottish Journal of Performance, 2013

Palgrave Communications, 2016

Situated knowledge theories that focused on processes and contexts for knowing were developed by women in response to finding that what they knew was unspoken or unspeakable not only in various disciplinary fields but also in their lived lives. And it is not surprising that the performativities that sustain knowing rather than knowledge are often the focus of women performers attempting to give form to those not-saids to make living worthwhile. This article discusses the gendered contexts of two women performers for making performative forms and for carrying those forms into performance. Yet the primary focus is on what their work does, and how it generates a felt sense of the somatic complexity of becoming through performative practices and rehearsals. The dancer/choreographer Nicole Peisl and musician/multimedia artist Gretchen Jude are from quite different parts of the Anglo European West yet in practising for non-individual porous and expansive selving, and for collaborative differences that generate emergent form, the work is remarkably similar. In their focus on ethico-poetic politics rather than the politics of social ethics, they offer ways to sustain an engaged situated ethics in the performativity of gender in lived lives as well as in the performance of gender as necessarily multiple. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to gender studies.

Feminist Review, 2010

This article describes the event entitled 'Once More with Feeling' at Tate Modern on 27 June 2009, which was the culmination of the Women's Art Library/ Feminist Review Art in the Archive' bursary. The event responded to The Women's Art Library based at Goldsmiths University of London, by performing an abbreviated history of feminist performance art through playful and unorthodox reenactments of works originally created in the late 1960s to the 1990s by contemporary practitioners including Oreet Ashery, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Caroline Smith, Katherine Araniello, Davina Drummond, Nadine Jarvis, Lucy Thane and the author. The article explains each artwork and the overarching premise of the project to not only celebrate feminist art but to locate intergenerational points of connection.

2021

The image and performance art are intrinsically linked. Whilst the conceptualisation of the nexus between live event and its 'documentation' (Auslander), 'traces' (Jones, Presence in Absentia) or 'records' (Westermann) is subject to ontological debate, it is clear that performance and the image have a tense, contested and ongoing relationship. In her 1998 reading of images of early live works of the 1970s, Kathy O'Dell argues that: "While leafing through publications (still by far the predominant way one comes to know about performance art), the viewer participates in a sort of narrative." (14). She describes the tacit experience of handling photographs, asserting that their material qualities produce a "haptic response" that connects the viewer with the live moment (14). It can be inferred from this analysis that the materiality of the image and the framing device that the photograph sits within play a constitutive role in the meaning of the artwork. Digital, and especially social media I argue, is now the dominant form through which performance is received, as still-and, increasingly, moving-image. Whether published by the artist, gallery or spectators, it is difficult to avoid the dissemination of live artworks on digital platforms. The ontology of the image has dramatically changed since O'Dell's reading of performance works through the grain and materiality of the film image reproduced in the low-fi art zine. Under the digital, the image becomes encoded pixels, compressible, transmissible and networked. Image making and online publishing are normalised and taken for granted as everyday activities. In social media platforms such as Instagram, users frame and narrate their lives through ongoing posts, from banal images to major life events. In this context the posting of artwork on social media is an apparently incidental-yet meaning makingact. However, performance works are read, re-read, and then subsequently re-made and transformed through its circuitry. Thus, how live and image-based practices cross

Ulrike Rosenbach. Witnesses, ed. Hendrik Folkerts (ZKM/Walther König), 2024

2016

Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics (SiCA) is a peerreviewed series of monographs and edited volumes published by Stockholm University Press. SiCA strives to provide a broad forum for research on culture and aesthetics, including the disciplines of Art History, Heritage Studies, Curating Art, History of Ideas, Literary Studies, Musicology, and Performance and Dance Studies. In terms of subjects and methods, the orientation is wide: critical theory, cultural studies and historiography, modernism and modernity, materiality and mediality, performativity and visual culture, children's literature and children's theatre, queer and gender studies. It is the ambition of SiCA to place equally high demands on the academic quality of the manuscripts it accepts as those applied by refereed international journals and academic publishers of a similar orientation. SiCA accepts manuscripts in English, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian.

Feminist Review, 2010

My PhD thesis examines how a performance that integrates documentation into it's dramatrugy can engender a type of participation that stretches the theatrical event into an open-ended discourse between audiences.

Anglistica aion an interdisciplinary journal. Forthcoming Issue: Attention, Agency, Affect: In the Flow of Performing Audiences, 18.1

Drawing on Augusto Boal’s revolutionary deconstruction of the aesthetic space of theatre in preference for social action theatre existing beyond the proscenium the article focuses on the concepts of performativity, emotion and embodiment as they occur in experimental forms of improvised performance and explores the relationship of affect to agency. It suggests that the symbiosis of affect and performance marks the shift to performativity, recognising performativity as a tool of agency. Integral to the argument is the recognition that, again drawing on Boal, people have a capacity to see themselves seeing themselves, prompting deeper understandings of self in relation to the social. Accordingly, the paper espouses an awareness of how improvised, community theatre projects shift participant understandings of emerging and liminal identities and argues that in order for the performance to become performative, there must be the taking up and nurturing of a contingent, discursively produced agency. Keywords: agency, affect, performativity, improvised performance, embodiment Dr Sue Lovell Sue Lovell teaches ethics, gender, Australian literature and academic writing at the School of Humanities, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. She supervises at all levels where candidates are interested in identity issues. She has published within Australia and internationally on the Australian visual artist Vida Lahey exploring the artist’s life, ouvre and the ways in which biographical narrative relates to the past and subjectivity. She is increasingly interested in narratives broadly, as well as the embodied and cognitive aspects of engagement with narratives. It is this aspect that has led to her interest in affect and agency. Dr Teone Reinthal Teone Reinthal has published in Paris and in Australia on inter-disciplinary relations between creativity and constructions of identity, experimental methods in film and theatre, collaborative creative discourse and art as social action. These interests have emerged from her role as a filmmaker working in partnership with culturally diverse communities. Exploring practice-led studio methods and approaches used in creative community development, her research describes how problem-solving strategies and internal resources that she names collectively as Adaptivism have shaped her studio methods. Teone is currently an adjunct research fellow in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, where she is also engaged as a sessional tutor and student success coach for the Learning Futures Department.