Events
Exploring Intermedialities:
Tuesday March 27th, 6-8pm School of Arts, Jarman Studio 2
A reminder of next Tuesday's presentations and social with staff contributions from the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance .
Dr Nicola Shaughnessy and Dr Melissa Trimingham (with project practitioners) will present a review of the first stage of the practical workshops for the AHRC funded Imagining Autism project. This will include footage from each of the performance environments.
Dr Rosemary Klich will talk about her recently published book with Edward Scheer: Multimedia Performance (Palgrave) and will reflect on her experience of Imagining O in India this term.
All welcome. Refreshments will be served.
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Guest lecture presented by Dr Matthew Reason, York St John,
Tuesday 6th March, 1pm -2pm Jarman Studio 7.
Title: Drawing on the Experience: Watching Dance and Audience Research
"This talk discusses what happened when I asked research participants to draw in response to their experience of watching a dance performance. In particular it explores the relationship between the drawings, and the reflections produced through the drawings, and what we might consider to be the experience of the performance."
Matthew is visiting the AHRC project Imagining Autism. The talk is hosted by the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance.
All welcome.
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Reckless Sleepers
THIS IS NOT AMERICA
Saturday 15th October 2011, 7pm
Aphra Studio, University of Kent
There are several lines running through this piece. Several structures. Practically, it's a group of seven individuals on a stage with seven different histories and experiences, worries and aspirations. At times they move together. At times they are one big collective – a pack of dogs, a dancing chorus, a group getting ready for a late 70's/early 80's discotheque, a group of fallen stars, a group of forgotten celebrities, a group of heroes and heroines.
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More International Screenings for Lecturer's Film
Following screenings at international film festivals in the U.S, Canada and New Zealand (including an award for Best Actor), Virginia Pitts' dance film, Beat, has been selected to screen in competition at the 6th Cyprus International Film Festival in October and Buenos Aires' 13th VideoDanzaBA Festival in November.
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Walking in Motion
Westgate Towers Canterbury
Thursday 22 September 2011
Freshers Week saw the spectacular realisation of a collaboration between CKP (Melissa Trimingham) and the Kent School of Architecture (Gordana Fortuna-Giusti and Howard Griffin) on urban walking and urban spaces.
Live- and huge- images of walkers in the city of Canterbury were projected on to the inside of the Westgate Towers, and could be seen from far down the High Street, attracting much attention. Students who had been taking part in a workshop on walking with Torsten Blume, Director of the Bauhaus Stage Workshop, 'walked their walks' across a giant shadow screen. Passers by could watch the live action or take part themselves.
The project was designed to draw attention to the way urban spaces direct our walking, and how we shape those urban spaces. Passers by were filmed and their responses will form part of the analysis. The event demonstrated that urban walking is not a passive activity but one in which we are actively engaged. The project impacted strongly upon the audience that urban design is a social, cultural, aesthetic- and ethically responsible- task.
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CKP Reading Group
The CKP Reading Group meets regularly and is welcomes new participants. To find out more and see what we are reading, click here.
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Visit and Lecture by Professor Bruce McConachie
Tuesday May 24th, 5pm, Jarman Studio 7
Studio 1, Jarman Building,
University of Kent, Canterbury
http://www.kent.ac.uk/maps/canterbury/maps.html
The Center for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance (www.c4ckp.org) at the University of Kent / Drama & Theatre Studies is delighted to welcome the distinguished Professor Bruce McConachie, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, University of Pittsburgh.
Professor McConachie, a leading academic on studies in cognition and performance, will be giving an open lecture on Tuesday 24th May. Professor McConachie is an entertaining and stimulating lecturer and his talk will last about 45 minutes with questions afterwards. This promises to be a most enjoyable occasion, to which all are warmly invited. If you have any questions please contact Melissa Trimingham on M.F.Trimingham@kent.ac.uk.
ALL THE WORLD IS NOT A STAGE
"All the world's a stage" is a truism in performance studies, legitimating investigations of role playing, impression management, social disability, and the wide field of "performance in everyday life." But how true is it, really? Since the publication of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and subsequent work by Erving Goffman, the fruitfulness of this metaphor has enjoyed some popularity in sociology but also much recent criticism. In the field of cognitive studies, several scholars have attacked mainstream sociology, including Goffman's work, for its blindness to the importance of the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of social dynamics. I'll examine a common social interaction from an evolutionary and cognitive perspective to demonstrate that Goffman's dramaturgical approach is not only unnecessary, but also misleading. Memory, empathy, habit, and the perception-action cycle are sufficient to understand most everyday social interactions; theatre-like role-playing does not occur. In contrast, stage acting always involves "conceptual integration," the cognitve operation that facilitates the merging of an actor and character. Finally, Goffman's dramaturgy involves an understanding of mimesis as the creation of illusions, a misreading of both social interactions and theatrical performances. Goffman's approach limits the reach of performativity, which occurs in all performances, including the theatre.
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Research Seminar - Virginia Pitts
Wednesday May 25th, 5pm, GLT3
As both an academic and a filmmaker, Virginia Pitts aims to foster dialogue between critical enquiry and creative practice. In her first research seminar since joining Film Studies at Kent, Virginia will screen a selection of her short films, trace the multi-directional flows between scholarly engagement and creative practice that have informed her work, and discuss how this culminates in recent and forthcoming Practice as Research projects centering on kinesthetic engagement with performers on screen.