Event overview
A British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS) talk from Dr Adam Alston (University of Surrey)
Decadence studies is a capacious field, but performance remains at its peripheries. Where it does make an entrance, it tends to be the written word – the play text – that draws attention, which raises an intriguing question: As a live art form, what might performance ‘do’ to how we think about and engage with decadence?
In this talk I’ll be promoting a shift in how decadence is theorised by focusing on how it is produced in and through a maelstrom of competing ideologies. While inspired by the queering of ‘decadence’ as fin de siècle writers responded to the normative horizons of a society’s beliefs, institutions and values, I will be framing contemporary performance as a fitting crucible in which to explore the dialectics of decadence, turning not to the long nineteenth century, but to the deployment of decadence in Marxist critical theory from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to inform the modelling of a critical theory of decadence in performance. By exploring trash, mess and excess in live artworks, this paper will position performance as an art of precarious action – an art well-suited to imagining the ruination of ruinous practices, habits and traditions.
Dr Adam Alston is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the GSA, University of Surrey. He has published extensively on immersive theatre, including a recent article on the aesthetics of decadence in the work the British theatre company Punchdrunk. He is the author of Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and co-editor, with Dr Martin Welton (QMUL), of Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre (Bloomsbury 2017).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Mar 2019 | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
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