Event overview
Performance Research Forum hosts a range of events, talks and presentations by established and early career researchers and practitioners in theatre and performance.
Dr Sozita Goudouna's ‘Mediated Breath: Performance, Liveness, and Pneumatic thinking’ will present art practices and discursive positions that focus on respiration, examined as a strongly debated biological process with political and social potential.
The focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to art and politics is highly pertinent to the studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expression. Air, the most necessary and common of all living resources, becomes a material signifier for the invisible political bonds that constitute a society. The “inability to breathe” and social “breathlessness,” are considered in the context of post-COVID-19 contemporary art practice.
The socio-atmospherics of power affects our bodies, but also non-human or more-than- human creatures. Through the presentation of art historical and contemporary performances, strategies, and artworks on the theme of respiration, the paper examines the ways the recognition of the current “shared vulnerability” and the aesthetic “collaborations with the atmosphere” can also respond to environmental mourning and provide social opportunities. Humans deoxygenate themselves, and other species. Nevertheless, the metaphor of respiration can hold the potential for expanding climate and social change discourse in politically and ethically creative ways.
Dr Goudouna is a professor, curator and author of 'Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts' (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism/OUP) and forthcoming co-authored 'Among the Ends.' She has published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, GPS Global Performance Studies, Theater Topics, Seismopolite Art & Politics Journal, BST Body Space & Technology Journal. She is visiting professor at Goldsmiths where she teaches the MA on Breath Studies: Breath in the Performing and Visual Arts. In 2022 she was the winner of the British Council Culture and Creativity UK Study Award.
She holds a PhD in Beckett and American high-Modernism (UoL) and an MA (King’s/RADA). She taught at the New School, SUNY, Roger Williams, University of the Peloponnese, CUNY, Pace, and since 2015 at NYU as inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curator fellow at Performa Biennial. International projects include director of “Greece in USA” for the promotion of contemporary Greek art, participations at the New Museum as head of operations at Raymond Pettibon Studio, Documenta, Onassis Foundation New York, French Consulate NYC, Hunterian Museum, Benaki Museum, Byzantine Museum, EMST Contemporary Art Museum, MET Metropolitan Museum of Art. She served as treasurer of the board of directors of AICA Hellas International Art Critics Association and as a member of the board of directors at ITI International Theatre Association UNESCO.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 18 Oct 2022 | 6:45pm - 8:15pm |
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