Keynote 1
Bojana Kunst, Justus-Liebeg University Giessen, Germany
“(Un)settling lines of care: braiding virtuosity and precarity in the work of the performance artists”
Zoom link: https://brocku-ca.zoom.us/j/89392181405
Abstract:
I approach care as this irrefutable, continuous transversal line of life, which cannot be separated from the ontological precariousness of life itself. At the same time, care is also related to virtuosity, and it is in this way an ambivalent capacity, which needs to be constantly demystified and linked to the practices and material processes through which it is established as an ethical and political relation. Care places us in an asymmetry of bodily and material responsibilities, where sympathies and corporeal states are always dynamic and, precisely because of their interdependence, often unjust and unequal. It seems that in the last decade the interest for care and caring in art field becomes boundless, almost infinite: it is possible to empathize in an invested way, to connect with others, to braid with life, to create worlds, to be inspired by the liberatory practices of others, just think of an engaged international festival or a biennial exhibition. At the same time, the ways in which art is produced, how do we work in art, create and circulate is values, are deeply contradictory: with boundless care, somehow the precarious relations in the life of artists are becoming even stronger and the acceleration of labour and production gets another drive. This creates a number of asymmetries: between the infinite concern of art for the world and the intensification of its production and economic conditions, between its openness to the braiding with life and its subordination to projective models of working and creating, between its concern for persistence, preservation and temperance and its violent accelerations and unsustainable dynamics.
In my lecture, I would like to reflect on this problem from the perspective of analyzing the entanglement of precarity and virtuosity in the life of artists. My start will be a short film of Helke Sander, a german feminist filmaker from the year 1978, where we can observe a woman climbing on the top of the crane with her two small kids, to protest against the precarious conditions of her life. With the help of some additional feminist art practices, organized around the unsettling of the notion of care on the one side and the call for the urgency of its reimagining, I would like to travel through the changes in the understanding of virtuosity inside a world of extreme inequalities. The virtuosity is not so much related to the ways, how we produce, work and create, but much more to the capacities to survive. Because of its precarity, the (more than human) body becomes a key site of the contemporary political struggle for the invention and practice of life. How to describe the virtuosity of this struggle then, what is the body capable of when caring and unsettling care?
Keynote 2
Susan Nance, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
"Trained animal acts and circus arts beyond the circus"
Zoom link: https://brocku-ca.zoom.us/j/89961132832
Abstract:
Circus arts can be found in modes of live entertainment well beyond the big top or village square. This presentation describes that influence in the world of rodeo. Rodeo is a sport and art form that brings together competitive events, plus professional performers who work with specially-trained horses, cattle, and other animals in shows of skill, like trick riding, and interspecies comedy acts derived from circus arts. To explore that tradition in the North American West, during the presentation, we will take a trip to the San Angelo Rodeo and Fat Stock Show in the moments just before the US entered World War II to visit some of the performers who worked the rodeo show circuit in the mid-twentieth century. Human-animal comedy teams at rodeos were styled Western, but their satire on the misunderstandings between species drew on older, international circus traditions. They both satirized the human condition by giving animal performers the upper hand in some skits, while offering a fantasy of human-animal cooperation and understanding that rural Westerners who worked with horses and cattle everyday found compelling and amazing.
Keynote 3
Jane Nicholas, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
"History in three rings"
Zoom link: https://brocku-ca.zoom.us/j/83196981718
Abstract:
Using the short exhibition of a child nicknamed “Pookie” at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1973, this keynote traces interdisciplinary frameworks in historical interpretations through three rings: event, experience, and myth.
Keynote 4
André Lepecki, New York University
"Gimme shelter: sociality in the nest"
Zoom link: https://brocku-ca.zoom.us/j/86094627852
Abstract:
On July 21st, 1973, at exactly 11.15pm, the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, then living in New York City, typed the following sequence of letters at the top of a white sheet of paper: M U N D O – A B R I G O (world-shelter). Calling it a “proposition for experimentality,” Oiticica thought of world-shelter as a way to solve the conflict between subject and object, between artist, audience and oeuvre. The solution offered by world-shelter required a new function for art, which would no longer be interested in creating and exhibiting works, but rather in promoting modes of living that mattered non-conditioned and intimate sociality. Paradoxically, in this experiment, living together implied the construction of inhabitable isolated cells, which Oiticica called “Ninhos” (Nests). In my talk, I will address the particular sociality implied in Oiticica’s Nests. I will do so by taking into account two other referents: The Rolling Stones’ 1969 song “Gimme Shelter” (which Oiticica particularly loved); and the 1977 seminar by Roland Barthes on “How to live together” (whose emphasis on nests and cells are uncannily similar to Oiticica’s). In our contemporary times of compulsive and policed neoliberal gregariousness, of ever more virulent anti-queer, anti-black, anti-south violence and violations, Oiticica’s experiments on life and art seem as urgent as ever.
All eleven panels as well as the conference opening and closing events, and the performance talkback will take place at this link:
http://tiny.cc/caio2021-panels
Panel 1
Vibrant Objects
Chair: Marie Andrée-Robitaille, Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden
Presenters:
Michael Eigtved, Copenhagen University, Denmark. “Juggling your way to Utopia”
Morgan Anderson/Dawn Dreams, York University, Canada. “How to do Words with Things”
Sarah Plummer, Virginia Tech, USA. “Puppet Circus: Amplifying Disempowered Voices in Performance”
Magali Sizorn, CETAPS, University of Rouen, France. “When the Performer Keeps Power Power: A Case Study Focused on Cadavre Exquis by the Circus Company Ama”
Panel 2
Circus and Racialization
Chair: Olga Lucia Sorzano, independent scholar, Colombia
Presenters:
Tim Reid, New York University, USA. “A History of Silence in the Makings of Pierrot”
Veronica Blair, independent artist, USA. “The Uncle Junior Project”
Maud Achaempong, independent artist, USA. “The Legacy of Blackface Minstrelsy: How Blackface Shaped the American Circus”
Panel 3
Circus audiences
Chair: Aastha Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Panelists:
Kate Holmes, University of Exeter, UK. “Just Dangerously Other Enough: Jules Léotard's ‘Flying’ Body”
Katharine Kavanagh, Cardiff University, UK. “Spectator Subjectivities: What worlds do our words paint?”
Maddly Guillaume, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France. “Culture and Health with Circus Arts”
Kate Hartoch, Handstand Arts, Bristol, UK. “Circus and Class”
Panel 4
Being with the non-human other
Chair: Dana Dugan, Concordia University, Canada
Panelists:
Denise Rogers Valenzuela, York University, Canada. “Material relations: Lessons in uprising from the potato people in Bread and Puppet’s Diagonal Life Circus”
Ante Ursić, East Tennessee State University, USA. “Being Bête of the Human in Baro D’Evel’s Bestias”
Franziska Trapp, Université Libre de Bruxelles and Freie Universität Berlin. “(De)center. A (non-)human-oriented perspective on circus”
Panel 5
Practicing disobedience and deviance
Chair: Alisan Funk, Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden
Panelists:
Jordana Greenblatt, York University, Canada. “Flying Freaky: Gender and Sexual Deviance in Contemporary Aerial Performance”
Mathilde Perahia, Concordia University, Canada. “Montreal's Alternative Circus: An Embodied Expression of the Queer Paradigm”
Dana Dugan, Concordia University, Canada. “smells like (dis)obedience: a CUNT-fabulation”
Melissa Caminha, University of Girona, Spain. “Cunt Clown Show: A Posthuman Approach on an Arts-Based Research on Female Clowning”
Panel 6
Circus bodies in/of pain
Chair: Hayley Malouin, Carleton University, Canada
Panelists:
Ayal Prouser, Columbia University, USA. “Performers’ Pain and Allodynia as Ecstasy in Circus: Investigating Erotics of Pain and Pleasure in Traditional Circus Performances”
Keely Whitelaw, Concordia University, Canada. “Pain as a Mode of Self-Expansion and Creation in Circus”
Marie-Eve Skelling-Desmueles, University of Ottawa, Canada. “Training towards Versatility: Multiple Challenges for Circus Students”
Panel 7
Transcultural and intercultural circus, past and present
Moderator: Veronika Štefanová, Cirqueon, Czech Republic
Panelists:
Aastha Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. "Mapping global circus: across Postcolonial Networks, Cold War, and a Globalized World".
Olga Lucia Sorzano, independent researcher."Circus at Strike: the body politics of solidarity at Colombia’s 28A"
Sabine Hanke, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. “Cultural Difference in the Interwar Circus in Britain and Germany, 1920-1939”
Camilla Löf, Malmö University, Sweden. “An Act of Balance: A Didaktik Analysis of Circus Education”
Panel 8
Circus, practice, embodiment
Chair: Michael Eigtved, Copenhagen University, Denmark
Panelists:
Gaia Vimercati, Quattro Laboratorio di Circo, Italy. “Let Bodies Speak for Themselves: Circus as an Utopia for Somatic Communism?”
Hayley Malouin, Carleton University, Canada. “Body Truth: Towards a Circassian Inaesthetics”
Sebastian Kann, artist and independent researcher, Belgium/Canada. “Critical approaches to improvisation in circus performance (and some examples): unpacking the ideological with a detour through dance studies”
Panel 9
Different worldings: Circus, utopia, and the carnivalesque
Chair: Marion Guyez, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
Panelists:
Roy Gómez-Cruz, Northwestern University, USA. “Hablemos de Circo Latinoamericano: Utopian Feeling, Identity Formation, and the Collective Circus Body”
Cyrille Roussial, Lyon Lumiere University, France. “Jugglers and the Juggling Community-ies: Towards a Mapping of Different Utopian Modes of Being in a Social World”
Michael Stokes, Michigan State University, USA. “The Circus at the End of the World: Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque in Catastrophic Science Fiction”
Panel 10
Circus, perceptions, publics
Chair: Jennifer Miller, Circus Amok, USA
Panelists
Madeline Hoak, Pace University, USA. “The Circus Spectator as Documentation in the Experience Economy”
Amy Cohen, Circus Culture, USA. “The Most Contemporary: Devising Meaningful Circus with Teenagers”
Doyle Ott, Sonoma State University, USA. “Aging Circus Bodies”
Panel 11
Circus, genre, and identity: Challenging borders and definitions
Chair: Franziska Trapp, Université Libre de Bruxelles and Freie Universität Berlin
Panelists:
Kelsey Blair, McGill University, Canada. “What's in a Genre? Performance, Physical Practice, and Interpretation in Contemporary Circus”
Victor Bobadilla Parra, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. “How Chilean Contemporary Circus Practice Evolves and Adapts to Different National Settings”
Rémi Baert, University of Rennes II, France. “Crossing Lines: Clown as a Trans Figure. The case of dragclowns on Instagram”
Alisan Funk, Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden. “Can institutionalized circus education avoid the reciprocal othering of circus and academic knowledges?”