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Dear friends,  As some of you know, I have been working with Esther Neff on an independent conference to gather people from various disciplines to theorize together prompted by --and through-- specific acts of performance. "Theorems, Proofs, Rebuttals, and Propositions: A Conference of Theoretical Theater" will happen in September 2013, in New York. (For more info: http://theatreastheory.wordpress.com/home/)I am really excited to announce that we will have a preview benefit event on March 23rd, with a lecture by Dr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on imaginative training forepistemological performance. Also performances by Varispeed and Doug Barrett, and others. The event will be at Glasshouse in…

I have had the pleasure to spend much of the last couple of weeks reading through the great quality and quantity of proposals that we received for the Performance Philosophy conference in April. (NB. Decisions will be out by Jan 15th once the organizing committee have had a chance to meet and confer). What was fantastic and thought-provoking was the number of papers that really dealt with the questions of the CFP head on - particularly perhaps the question of what the future of this area of performance philosophy might be. Do we automatically restrict our thinking if we submit…

Hello. I have recently returned to, spruced up and tagged my blog "Unattended Articles". Have a sift. There's a post here that perhaps serves as an introduction - Reality: A User's Guide. Thanks. http://slepkane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/reality-users-guide.html

A new journal hass been founded: Sublin/mes. philosophieren von unten. a queer reviewed journal. The first issue will be published soon.http://sublinesblog.wordpress.com/ A liquid Manifesto What is philosophizing from below and why do we affirm it unconditionally? Philosophizing from below is affective, bodily, precarious, rhizomatic, cynic, wild, feminine, full of pleasure, poetic, prosaic, horizontal, performative, fierce, tender, abyssal, underlying, sublime, dangerous, erotizing, sexy, magnetic, repellent, sensitive, brute and rough, rhythmic, expanded, disadvantageous, powerful. And still much more. Philosophizing from below means not to relinquish philosophy to the heads and chairs of “academia” alone but to let it happen and occur everywhere it…

' To stay still and to step aside, both pertain in the end to a method of performance, to play. So it is not surprising that on the impossible horizon of the anarchy of language, at that point where language tries to escape the power inherent in it, to escape its own servility, one finds something that relates to theatre. To indicate the impossible limit of language I have cited two authors : Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both of them write , nevertheless. But what was at sake for both of them was the very inverse of identity; it was the…

To mark Caroline Bergvall's arrival as the incoming Judith E Wilson visiting fellow, there will be a special poetry event in the Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Monday 15th October, 8 pm. Caroline Bergvall and Lisa Robertson will present and read from their work. All welcome. Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP Caroline Bergvall is a poet of French-Norwegian nationalities who has lived in England since 1989. She has developed audio texts and collaborative performances with sound artists in Europe and North America. Her many books…

Gay McAuley's talk at the TFTS Department in Aberystwyth yesterday made me wonder about the worth of words. She spoke of a 'wave of official apologies' that were happening across the globe and - if I remember correctly - that she deemed 'necessary'. Perhaps my issue is as much with the politics of such a gesture - the official apology - as with the word 'necessary'. Necessity indicates need, at least to me, especially since it stems from Latin, 'indispensable'. Is there a need for an absorption of historical (and in some cases still ongoing) trauma into the discourse of…

Upon reading Pavis' 'Analyzing Performance' (p. 24: "theater lovers capable of feeling and understanding the sensations and movements of their own bodies, [...] the bodies of performers [...] as an auto-bio-graphy in its true sense..."; italics not mine) I wonder: How do we get there? Is practice (i.e. constant exposure to various forms of performance) enough? Do you need to train yourself to "perceiv[e] 'thought-in-action'"? It cannot depend upon the often referred to suspension of disbelief for as soon as one is aware of it, one does not employ it anymore and yet I can consciously enjoy a performance, whole-heartedly…

Rogue Event Agency: Teh blog that does not take (a) place. I have just submitted my Practice Research PhD (on the 31st August) and I am fortunate to be a long-standing Senior Lecturer in the Performing Arts Department at the University Of Chichester since 2003. I am also fortunate to be part of the ASTR 2012 Bio-politics and Performance working group and before my attentions turn to my first post-thesis paper, I thought I would set-up what will be an infrequent but themed blog as host some larval and labile post-thesis thinking. For over ten years I've been researching and writing on…

I have been reading "The Normal and the Pathological" by Georges Canguilhem. Epistemological understanding of norms that direct the everyday perceptions, stemming from scientific authorities, empiria and theoretical delienations (those that make theories logical) is more than desirable if we do not want those rigid formations to direct our sense of the real  via unconscious belives, and sublimated aesthetic ideals. At least I find that these theoretical ghosts and visual landmarks combining positivist ideas of good, healthy and beautiful can gain almost religious authority in the society where the God is proclaimed dead (Nietzche) but humans cannot cease to  embody gods, and to reintroduce deus ex machina, whenever there is a potential for slowing down,with danger of representaional…