About this Event
Please join Quorum for our penultimate event of 2023, where we will be joined by Dr Gareth White for a talk titled: Change, the normal, and audience participation.
Abstract
The pandemic made the contingency of audience practices very concrete, drawing attention to how we gather together, and raising questions about how this gathering is valued. It seemed, fleetingly, to inspire change; but a return to ‘normal’ socialising entailed a return to normalised conditions in which performance work is made, understood and engaged with, along with a determined re-assertion of other parameters of ‘normal’ life. Can a changing horizon of participation help us to imagine other kinds of change? While looking for a conceptual language to capture the historicity of audience participation – not just how it is changing, but how its terms of engagement might at some point become unrecognisable – I want to speculate on how this reflects a context of imminent, irresistible change, and how we adapt to, resist, and otherwise inhabit it. I expect to dabble with ideas of anthropotechnics and the memeplex, and to reflect on performances such as ZU-UK’s Touching Distance, among others.
Dr Gareth White is Reader in Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, he is a teacher, a researcher and a theatre director specialising in participatory practices. His writing includes Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (Palgrave, 2013), theorising the transformation of spectators into performers, Applied Theatre: Aesthetics (Methuen, 2015), exploring the idea of the aesthetic in performance practice with social aims, and the forthcoming Meaning in the Midst of Performance: Contradictions of Participation (Routledge, 2023).
This hybrid event takes place in person at Queen Mary University of London’s Mile End campus in ArtsOne, RR2 and simultaneously online. If you want to join us, please book a free ticket. For those attending online, we will send you a Zoom link on the day of the event. For those joining in person, you are welcome in ArtsOne from 17:30.
The event kicks off promptly at 18:00 and wraps up around 19:00, when in-person attendees are cordially invited to stay and chat over drinks and nibbles.
Find Quorum’s full list of upcoming events at: https://quorumqmul.wordpress.com
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Rehearsal Room 2, ArtsOne, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00