Aktualnie jesteś: Otwarty Uniwersytet Poszukiwań / Wykłady mistrzowskie / Rok akademicki 2010/2011
Performance as a Paradigm of Cultural Analysis
Wykład w języku angielskim w ramach OUP
16/09/2011 {piątek} 17:30
Sala Kinowa
ABSTRACT: We live in a media saturated world where our shrinking attention span privileges the photo opportunity, sound bite, and evermore inventive twitter-oriented delivery systems over considered argument or analysis. In such an environment, performance (or more accurately, performativity) is an important factor in how society shapes thinking and decision making. It has become what Michel Foucault identified as a discourse: a discourse of persuasion, ideology, power, and knowledge delivery. The ubiquity of television and the expanding use of the internet in politics, for instance, ensure that managed presentation is a decisive factor in political campaigns, voter choice, and influencing public opinion. This is a domain in which impressions trump substance and reasoned choice; a place in which ‘appearing’ presidential usurps the genuine attributes of leadership. Politics are but the obvious tip of the iceberg. Consider the role of the performative in pedagogy. The highly successful Sesame Street ‘method’, in which learning is driven by performance or the cognitive-affective school of thought that argues learning should be a combination of knowledge acquisition and emotional identification by incorporating applied problem solving in the learning process. Politics and education are but two examples of social behavior in which the performance/performativity dynamic influences the message, our perception of it, and subsequent behavior. Others areas where the dynamic is equally important include, at the very least: pop culture, civic power, community development and engagement strategies, advertising as well as consumerism, and in the application and uses of technology – most especially as it applies to social networking.
The lecture will introduce the notion of the performance/performativity dynamic, discuss its importance in contemporary society, and offer methodologies and strategies to analyze it.
Ian Watson teaches at Rutgers University-Newark where he is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Department of Arts, Culture and Media as well as the Coordinator of the Theatre Program. He is the author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993, 1995) andNegotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures(Harwood/Routledge, 2001). He has contributed chapters to over a dozen books, and published numerous articles in journals such as New Theatre Quarterly, About Performance, The Drama Review, Dialog, Issues in Integrative Studies, The Latin American Theatre Review, Asian Theatre Journal, Latin American Theatre Review and Gestos. He is an Advisory Editor for New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre, Dance and Performer Training and About Performance.
Professor Watson has worked in television, film and the theatre. He trained as a theatre director at the famed National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, Australia. He holds both a masters degree and Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. His current work investigates the ways in which performance has become an important factor in how media, civil society, politics and education shape learning, thinking and decision making.