#lecture performance

New Genres: X + Y = Z Work-in-progress Show 2020: White City Royal College of Art 31 January 2020, 3–5pm

HQI, The Rotunda, W12 7FQ

Performance lectures on whispered absorption, human playing, immaterial labour, public larping, collective rain, the circulating image, double meaning, otherwhere, virtual gifts and synchronised heartbeats…

George Dutton, Thomas Hedger, Danyang Liu, Ping Mu, Ewa Poniatowska, Julia Renning, Emily Schofield, Julia Van Ijken, Yayuan Xue, Yuhui Zhou 

New Genres is a research group for emergent practice at the RCA, led by Joshua Trees and Chris Michael

Open to RCA staff, students and registered visitors

Performance Society is a compilation of critical and performance writing on Performance.

Experience has moved to the centre of cultural, economic and political action. Technology, its catalyst. Fantasies, Feelings and Fun, its currency. Postdigital selves enact the Aesthetics of Existence. Art as Life. Work as Play. Sign as Reality. Welcome to Performance Society.

Artists and designers revisit notions of performativity and myth-making in relation to contemporary society and current affairs, drawing new parallels between theatre, performance art and graphic design.

Contributors: Vicky Carr, Jack Clarke, Karolina Cialkaite, Loes Claessens, Georgia Cranstoun, Josiah Craven, William Fairbrother, Jurate Gacionyte, Léa Gallon, Paul Haworth, Lars Høie, Tom Joyes, Halima Olalemi, Elisa Raciti, Jakob Rowlinson, Alberto Ruiz Soler, Tereza Ruller, Oliver Smith, Kirsten Spruit, Merve Ünsal, Bryce Wilner

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Ho Rui An says that he became interested in using lecture as performance because they exploded cinema:

"The first medium that I was deeply engaged with as an artist was film, and I still make videos and work in a moving image context. The move into the lecture as a performance medium came about because I was interested in exploding the form of film toward a kind of paracinema. One form that fascinated me when I was researching cinema history is the cinematic lecture. This is the form in which most films were presented in the early days of cinema, where cinema meant a semitheatrical experience involving a live body. There was almost always a live body either introducing the film or even directly participating in the narrative itself. In Japan, there was the benshi narrator. In Thailand, there were the versionists who would travel in troupes in the provinces, where they would present films accompanied by a live aural performance that served to supplement the projected image in various ways, from narration to dubbing, commentary or even critique. I thank the Thai film historian May Adadol Ingawanij for introducing this history to me. She shared that sometimes the versionist would even replace the names of the characters with the names of villagers. Given that many of these films were made in Hollywood or India, you can read this practice as an extreme localization of the foreign or generic.

In engaging with this history, I was fascinated by the positionality of the live body beside the screen, sometimes speaking about the film being projected, sometimes speaking inside of it by voicing the characters, sometimes speaking around it, or sometimes speaking back to it. It was very refreshing for me to see how the apparatus of cinema changes in these different contexts, because if you were to go to the cinema today, you would have the impression that the apparatus hasn’t really changed since the 1930s. Even with 3D today, it’s still pretty much a single-screen experience. The unicity of the experience continues to be valorized despite all the other innovations that have happened within the parameters of the screen itself. Compare this to contemporary art, where the material form of the artwork has completely exploded. I think one reason is that some of these more vernacular understandings of cinema that took the medium beyond the single screen were so deformalized that even the people who were effectively bringing the film to life were not seen as artists or innovators in their time. They thus remain paracinematic in relation to what is held up to be “cinema proper.”"

Paulien Oltheten