3 Conferences: 3 Abstracts

Here's three conferences I'll be attending over the (northern hemisphere) summer, with the abstracts for the papers I'll be giving:

1. Living Landscapes (18th-21st June, Aberystwyth)

Terrains of Power: Performing Parliamentary Architecture

In The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964) Murray Edelman notes that, “The appropriateness of act to setting is normally so carefully plotted in the political realm that we are rarely conscious of the importance or ramifications of the tie between the two.” (99) This statement is nowhere more relevant than when considering the design, construction, and use of parliamentary buildings and precincts.

Such buildings and precincts perform various symbolic functions: they help to construct a sense of national identity, to represent the processes of government, and to assert the authority and legitimacy of the state. More immediately however, at the level of spatial program and built form, they also promote and entrench certain possibilities for movement and interaction whilst discouraging others. In this respect they exert a material influence on the way in which government operates and the way in which the public interacts with it.

In this paper I apply interpretive strategies drawn from Performance Studies to examine two recently constructed precincts: the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood (2004) and the Welsh Senedd on the shore of Cardiff Bay (2006). By focussing on the performative relationship between bodies and the environment I seek to build on existing studies of civic space and capital city design and, in doing so, to assess the extent to which the design of these new precincts might remain “closely tied to political forces that reinforce existing patterns of dominance and submission.” (Lawrence J. Vale 1992:10)

2. Performance Studies International: "Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading" (24th-28th June, Zagreb)

Duplicitous Sites: Misperforming Parliament

In The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964) Murray Edelman notes that, “The appropriateness of act to setting is normally so carefully plotted in the political realm that we are rarely conscious of the importance or ramifications of the tie between the two.” (99) This statement is nowhere more relevant than when considering the design and use of parliamentary buildings and precincts.

In this paper I investigate how the ostensive signification of modern parliamentary buildings can be undercut or exposed by practices that naively or deliberately misperform them. Viewed against a variety of protest actions, this paper focuses on the impromptu performance of the choral piece Lament in the foyer of Australia’s New Parliament House on the 18th March 2003. Performed by a choir of one hundred and fifty women who simply walked into the building unnoticed, Lament was timed to coincide with the then Prime Minister’s announcement of Australia’s commitment of troops to the imminent war in Iraq. Through a close examination of performers’ experiences of Lament I will consider the productiveness of this action in exposing how modern parliamentary architecture remains “closely tied to political forces that reinforce existing patterns of dominance and submission.” (Vale 1992:10)

3. International Federation for Theatre Research: Theatre Architecture Working Group (12th-18th July, Lisbon)

Architecture, Audience and Desire

This paper will argue that audiences are not only constructed through their interaction with theatre auditoriums and stages, but also through the relations between an auditorium and the other spaces known or presumed to exist. The popularity of ‘behind-the-scenes’ tours, ‘backstage’ musicals and plays and actors’ memoirs are all evidence of a western cultural fascination with the actual and imagined realms that lie hidden beyond the stage. Such a fascination derives in part from the spatial delineations that mark out theatre space from everyday social space, backstage from front-of-house, and auditorium from stage. The delineations that separate out the spaces used by spectators and practitioners in more traditional theatres are significant because they create what Alice Rayner has described as “a geometry of seeming difference.” This geometry, Rayner suggests, “carries a powerful affect that connects actual spaces to a more general form of aggression and desire.” (2002: 539)

In this paper I will examine how the geometry that Rayner describes is negotiated in the design and use of a number of more modern theatres in Australia and the United Kingdom. Through this I seek to map out dimensions of the relationship between theatre audiences and theatre architecture and suggest how being an audience to theatre involves a tension between a desire for access to the more hidden realms and operations that sustain a performance and a desire to be denied that access.