Programme 2018-19

Wednesday 17 October, 5-6pm
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Hearing Hubbard: Charisma, Ethics and Musical Practice in the Church of Scientology
Dr Tom Wagner

Abstract
Scientology has, since at least 1955, sought to engage celebrities—who, according to the group’s founder L. Ron Hubbard, are ‘those to whom America and the world listens’—to further itself. This includes prominent musicians such as Dave Brubeck, The Incredible String Band, Chic Corea, and the late Isaac Hayes. The church has also produced seven commercial albums. Hubbard sought to leverage popular culture and its music to spread Scientology. But, especially with the rise of the internet, the opposite has occurred; its music and musicians are routinely mocked as ‘weird’, ‘crazy’, or just ‘bad’ in the media, in chat rooms, and on YouTube.
This presentation analyses the disconnection between the intention and reception of Scientology’s music. I will contextualize examples from Scientology’s musical output with field interviews, biographical information, Hubbard’s writings, and the organizational history of Scientology to suggest that group’s idiosyncratic musical output is infused with the charisma L. Ron Hubbard. Scientologists listen to and create music according to an ethics—a worldview and a way of thinking—shaped by the study of, and adherence to, Hubbard’s writings, policies, and procedures. In other words, they ‘hear’ Hubbard in their music, something that outsiders cannot.

Biography
Dr Tom Wagner is a Visiting Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway University of London, and an Associate Researcher on the ‘Music and Arts in the Anthropocene’ project based at Université de Bourgogne . His current research focuses on ‘ethical consumption’ in the music industries.


Wednesday 31 October, 5:30-6:30pm
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Rehearsals of the Wierd: Julia Bardsley’s Almost the Same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of culture)
Eirini Kartsaki

Abstract
How do we discuss difficult work that evades us? What is it about specific performance imagery that seems so hard to pin down? How could we respond to theatre work that demands its own vocabulary? In this talk, I seek to explore the performance work of British visual and installation artist, director and theatre maker Julia Bardsley, whose theatrical spectacles, fantastical personae and fictional worlds resist being known, even as they speak to us intimately and directly. I am proposing a re-purposed critical language drawing from literary studies, film and science fiction to address such difficult work and consider conceptual frameworks such as the weird, the monstrous, the perverse and the wild. These become tools with which not only to read the work but also to understand something of its making.

Biography
Eirini Kartsaki is a performance practitioner, writer and Lecturer in Drama at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex. Her writing is concerned with notions of desire, repetition and the unfulfilled. Her monograph Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces was published by Palgrave in 2017. Her performance practice has been presented nationally and internationally (Sadler’s Wells, V&A, The Basement, Whitechapel Gallery, Arnolfini, Soho Theatre, Palais de Tokyo, RichMix, Toynbee Studions, Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon). http://www.eirinikartsaki.com/


Wednesday 30 January, 5-6pm
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Being in the Midst: Per-forming Thinking-in-Action
Emma Cocker

Abstract
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to working with language.Operating under the title Not Yet There, her ongoing enquiry explores the process of creative endeavour and sense-making from within or inside, that affective realm of energies, emergences and intensities operating before, between, and below the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Cocker’s research often addresses practices that are alert or attentive to the live circumstances of their own processual production: the kairos of decision-making, the moments of knowing and of not knowing, the navigation of competing forces, of working with and through obstacles or of figuring something out. Her lecture will draw on some of these concerns with reference to her recent artistic projects and collaborations.

Biography
Emma Cocker’s recent writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling, 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016. She is key researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2014>, which stages an interdisciplinary encounter between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing to investigate those forms of feeling-thinking-knowing produced within collaborative exchange
Cocker is working on a forthcoming publication, Being in the Midst: Per-forming Thinking-in-Action. She is an Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. 

http://not-yet-there.blogspot.com/
http://www.choreo-graphic-figures.net/


 

Wednesday 6 February, 5-6pm
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Andrew Poppy
Biography
Andrew Poppy (born 1954) is a post-minimal composer, musician, vocalist, writer and record producer with a unique body of work and collaborations. He performs solo (piano/voice/electronics) (London, Dusseldorf, Lisbon, Oporto, Turin) sometimes with his own Sustaining Ensemble and recently as piano soloist in his work Almost The Same Shame with the BBC Concert Orchestra as part of ‘The Rest Is Noise’ Festival at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.


Wednesday 13 February, 5-6pm
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Dr Andy Smith

Abstract
Andy Smith is a theatre maker based in Lancaster. For the last 15 years, both as a solo writer/performer as well as in collaboration with Tim Crouch, he has been creating and researching what he refers to as a ‘dematerialised theatre’, a name originally inspired by writings around concptual art by the critic Lucy Lippard. This is a theatre that tries to explore the theatreness of theatre.  It is a work that tries to do ‘more with less’. That utilises methods of reduction and removal in its processes to reach for an essence. A theatre whose object may be on the stage but whose subject attempts to exist inside the audience. In this talk he will reflect on examples of this practice, his insistence in continuing to operate within these frameworks, and his stuborness in asking what can feel like both simple but essential questions about what it is and why we might be doing it.

Biography
Dr Andy Smith is a theatre maker whose recent works include SUMMIT (2018), COMMONISM (2017), and The Preston Bill (2015). Andy has collaborated with Tim Crouch since 2004, co-directing (along with Karl James) the award- winning plays An Oak Tree (2005), ENGLAND (2007) and The Author (2009). Tim and Andy also co-wrote and performed what happens to the hope at the end of the evening together at The Almeida Theatre together in 2013, and in 2014 Tim, Karl and Andy co- directed Tim’s play Adler & Gibb at The Royal Court. He lectures in Theatre Practice at The University of Manchester.


Wednesday 20 February, 5-6pm
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Addressivity in Online Platforms
Dr Emily Rosamund

Abstract
How do artworks, memes and messages address online audiences? How do online platforms reorient messages’ means of appearing, circulating, and mattering to their receivers? Drawing from diverse sources – from Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory to Benjamin Bratton on planetary-scale computation – this lecture considers how it might be possible to theorize online addressivity: the unique ways in which platforms orient and reshape the act of addressing someone (or something) through ‘like’ and share, meme and message.

Biography
Dr Emily Rosamond is an artist and writer working in the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research stems from an interest in how historically situated performances of self are intertwined with developments in financial and informatics infrastructures.


Wednesday 27 February,  5-6pm
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Selma Dimitrijevic

Biography
Selma Dimitrijevic is a playwright, director and artistic director of international touring company Greyscale. As a writer, she has been commissioned by companies including 7:84, The Traverse, Northern Stage and Oran Mor. She specializes in radical adaptations of classic texts, having recently adapted both Hedda Gablerand Dr Frankenstein, the latter of which is being adapted for film. She is also a librettist, working with composer Emily Howard on a chamber opera for Aldeburgh 2018.


Wednesday 13 March, 5-6pm
Venue: Digital Crit Room, Nicola de la Haye Building
Jeremy Millar

Biography
Jeremy Millar is an artist, and has curated numerous exhibitions and written extensively upon contemporary art. His work in all these fields is marked by extensive research, as suggested by each particular project, and has led to an extremely diverse range of research interests, from the works of WG Sebald to gift economies in Papua New Guinea. More generally, his interests lie in contemporary criticism, contemporary art, the history of photography, film, contemporary music, visual anthropology, inter-cultural performance, museology, and the notion of ‘place’ across various disciplines.