CONVENERS
Martin Bowen-Silva is Assistant Professor of History at NYU Abu Dhabi. Bowen studied at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he obtained his Ph.D. in History in 2014. His research focuses on the political and cultural history of Latin America; emotions; and the history of the body.
Nikolai Kozak is an Argentine multimedia artist based in Santiago de Chile. His work explores postmemory, lineage, trauma, repressive structures, and archives as applied to the body. He has developed projects in collaboration with the Museum for Memory and Human Rights, among others. He currently generates programs with the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende and the Partido Socialista de Chile.
Debra Levine is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her work focuses on political, feminist, queer, and archival performance in the 20th and 21st century; social practice art and social movements; and interactive media/digital humanities. Her most recent article“Trisomic Stages: Theater Hora and Jerome Bel’s Genetically Modified Theater,” appeared in Studia Dramatica.
Zeb Tortorici is Assistant Professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. His work focuses on sexuality in colonial Latin America, human-animal relationships, and historical archives. He recently co-edited Centering Animals in Latin American History and two issues of Radical History Review on the topic of “Queering Archives.”
LOCATION
Sala 23, DETUCH
DESCRIPTION
This work group will consider the potential of performing historical impossibilities. We look to contemporary and historical performers and to social actors who embrace crackpot, illicit and discredited methodologies in and of history in order to “werk” the past. What are the affective and political possibilities in creating what could never have happened and making it a fictive reality? This “werk” group follows performer and choreographer Trajal Harrell’s revision of Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto” to engage the potential of the “maybe” and the “what if.” We will debate how those allowances are necessary to expose the power/truth regime in relation to legitimated methods of historicity. How does performance become a privileged site to admit encuentros—meetings of bodies, times and places, separated in and by history?
This ‘werk” group will present performance scholarship and artistic practices that provide a stage for historical impossibilities as the capacious ground for political transformation in the present. With all due respect to Brecht and Boal—and following Harrell’s lead—it might mean saying ‘maybe’ to more illegitimate methods and practices of history and aesthetics: saying “maybe to spectacle, maybe to transformations and magic and make-believe, maybe to the glamour and the transcendency of the star image, maybe to the heroic, maybe to involvement of performer or spectator, maybe to style, maybe to trash imagery, maybe to camp, maybe to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer, and maybe to moving or be moved.”