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- Convenors:
-
Hannah Wadle
(Adam Mickiewicz University)
Denis LABORDE (CNRS - EHESS)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/005
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In this panel we invite papers that address the experiences of uncertainty and the creative challenge of producing performing arts settings in the light of political interventions, scarce resources, and states of exceptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Long Abstract:
While most recently many cultural performance spaces experienced disruptions through the global health emergency and its political consequences, uncertainty and anticipated closure has been a well-known subject to many performing arts' contexts long before the pandemic.
Adapting proactively to vulnerable performance sites through spatial, temporal, and financial improvisations belongs to the core skills of all involved protagonists from producers, to performing artists, to audiences. If for the different parties these improvising capabilities manifest in different skillsets, they yet demand high levels of trust and flexibility from all involved.
In this panel we invite papers that address the fragilities, the temporalities, and creative experiences of producing performing arts settings in the light of political interventions, scarce resources, and states of exceptions - such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We ask about the socio-political conditions that underlie the stronger fragility of some performance spaces over others. This leads us to critically assess the politics and practices through which those spaces materialize, crumble, or reemerge.
We encourage ethnographic papers that zoom into the processes that create the spatial conditions for performative events and that ask about the spatial practices involved in it. We also call for papers that reflect on specific moments, in which transformation, learning and innovation occurs around fragile performance settings. What did it take in these specific instances for change and resilience to happen? Presenters may choose to discuss concrete subversive cultural settings, music festivals, ad-hoc performance sites, traditional music performances, public cultural institutions, or a specific performing arts scene.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Bringing together tradition, popular culture and contemporary forms of protest in the Basque Country, Irrikitaldia closes the Pirates’ week long alternative to Donostia's official fiesta. Under its joyful appearance, this harsh critique of local politics has proved to adapt to the pandemic context.
Paper long abstract:
Produced as an entertainment for the elite tourism in the 19th century Donostia the Semana Grande or Big Week, unlike other fiestas, was primarily considered a fiesta for outsiders and as such has long been despised by local youth. At the end of Franco’s dictatorship, many social movements included fiestas as part of their agenda and were bitterly repressed, especially in Donostia. After several decades of inaction, the Pirates, a group of politically active young people started to organize an alternative fiesta program in 2002. Performed as a masquerade in the old part of the city, with improvisations and a joyful defilé, Irrikitaldia (Laugh and protest) embraces a long-standing tradition in popular Basque culture combining critical and political theatre as well as contemporary imaginative acts of protest and performances. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork on the summer fiestas of Donostia, this paper intends to address the relationship between popular culture and protest. Focusing on contemporary forms of contestation and critique I address the way grassroot movements have been able to adapt –adopting fragmented forms- to the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemia. The ethnographic case of Irrikitaldia analyzes the capacity of resilience of festive rituals and their spatial inscription, both in social media and in the urban cityscape, appealing to cohesive function of festive forms and its potentiality for transgression, a feature particularly relevant to understand the social responses to the constraint and control measures implemented during 2020-21 Summers.
Paper short abstract:
Investing in collaborative and process based approaches, we will address Buffer Fringe Festival’s enactment of a new understanding of space that can enable resistance and co-creation beyond the liminal fragility of a post-conflict buffer zone and the pandemic in 2020/ 2021.
Paper long abstract:
The Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival has born out of a rather contested and fragile space in between borders, the buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus. In this paper, we will address the Festival’s enactment of a new understanding of space that can enable resistance and co-creation beyond the liminality of a post-conflict buffer zone and the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Since it’s establishment in 2014, the festival laid the ground to establish a creative, critical and performative space with consistent presence all across the Island. However, 2020 brought along the pandemic and the closure of crossing points in Cyprus which created a split in all planned activity and demonstrated the fragility of contact between communities and artists. Notwithstanding, this split was also a moment of questioning and perseverance which produced other possibilities. Buffer Fringe 2020 was one of the few artistic platforms in Cyprus and globally to have adapted and materialised a festival amid the Covid-19 pandemic also developing interdisciplinary and innovative methodologies which enable exploring the relationship between arts, resistance, solidarity and peacebuilding, investing in collaborative and process based approaches. Encouraging a decolonizing agenda and embedding creativity into a social process, we will firstly question the role art and co-creation can play at a moment and a space of transition to produce alternative subjectivities to dominant ideologies. Secondly, we will discuss how the Buffer Fringe 2020 and 2021 responded to the pandemic and the potential that liminal spaces like a buffer zone or a pandemic may produce.
Paper short abstract:
The Three Kings Festival is a rite brought from Portugal to Brazil with African and other influences. The research focuses on challenges of that urban rite inside a favela in Rio de Janeiro - poverty, crime rates, religious intolerance. It explores how resistance to these makes the group stronger.
Paper long abstract:
The Three Kings Festival (Folia dos Reis) is a traditional rite brought from Portugal to Brazil with influences from African and Indigenous cultures and other European immigrants that reached Brazil during five centuries.
My research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focuses on the favela of Santa Marta, where the masters and conductors of that urban rite always tried to resist different problems and challenges to keep their performance alive. That rite was brought to this favela sixty years ago by migrants from the countryside of Brazil.
Some of the performance groups live in favelas and very poor areas with gang wars and high crime rates. While music and art can help a lot of young to not be exposed to illegal activity, one of the hardest wars remains the one against poverty.
The work of the festival directors includes rehearsals, the making of clothes, masks, musical instruments. Knowledge is passed from family to family for generations. It is part of our most important connection with the formation of country and culture. While the Folia has survived crises and is increasingly influenced by new generations, it is still facing the problem of religious intolerance, crime, and police violence. The support of the Brazilian government to the artists is close to zero, yet those groups manage to survive and to keep their traditions. And more: nowadays the number of kids participating is growing as school are creating opportunities to new participants. My research shows how despite the challenges, this rite is kept strong and alive.
Paper short abstract:
My contribution aims to showcases the ways in which contemporary dance participates in the construction of spaces where an alternative Palestine is lived, shared, and imagined. Dancing becomes a "politics of disobedience", through which the existence of a futurity is affirmed against the odds.
Paper long abstract:
In Global Palestine, John Collins (2011) pointed that, paradoxically, the more visible Palestinian situation became at a global scale, the more Palestinian actual territory shrank at a local scale. During the last ten years, this tendency has increased, and the existence of a geographical Palestine seems more and more endangered. However, Palestine is more than territorial islands in the West Bank, or the narrow Gaza strip; it is made of social relationships, desires and imaginations, and this existence has been built, affirmed and performed in the creations of many Palestinian artists all around the world.
My contribution aims to showcase the ways in which contemporary dance participates in the construction of spaces where an alternative Palestine is lived, shared, and imagined by diverse actors. Similarly to the Matsutake growing in the ruins of capitalism (Tsing), this Palestine is built in the interstices of the Zionist project and the military occupation, but also in those of (neo)colonial relationships with European countries and their international cultural programs. Dancers and choreographers create against the odds. They oppose movement to the immobility generated by physical and administrative constraints, and build creative connections against Palestinian political and geographic isolation. They finally refuse to be confined in the past through dance and movement innovation. Dancing becomes a "politics of disobedience", through which the existence of a futurity is affirmed (Vergès, 2021: 22-23). My contribution builds on a five-year long ethnography among Palestinian dancers and choreographers in the West Bank, Israel, and Europe.