Seminar
Alan Read
The Dark Theatre: Conditions of the Irreparable
11.-13.03.2020
11 am - 1 pm, 2 pm - 5 pm

Auditorium Goethe-Institut, Lisbon

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La Vita Nuova, Director: Romeo Castellucci,
Text: Claudia Castellucci, Image: Stephan Glagla

This series of seminars will consider degrees of loss and modes of activism in and beyond the arts that may account for a political economy of suffering, damage and compensation. Taking its starting point from Alan Read's own direction of a neighbourhood theatre during the 1980s in London’s Docklands, and the subsequent bankruptcy and eviction from the building within the super-charged context of accelerated neoliberal gentrification, each session will consider conditions of the irreparable and manifestations of ‘cultural cruelty’. Such ‘cruelties’ are routinely made manifest in High Court proceedings, which uniquely expose the routine violation of scrutiny that arts institutions commit.

To activate each session, Read will open with an extended illustrated paper on the broad topic for discussion within a theoretical frame, moving outwards to consider associated legal proceedings in which irreparable states have been encountered, acknowledged and dismissed. In this way, all participants, whatever their life’s pressures outside the classroom, can rest assured that they will share the same knowledge base from which fruitful collective conversation and critical reflection can arise.

Open and welcoming to all those with a broad disciplinary interest in politics of the humanities and creative practice, this seminar will stretch those with performance and theatre backgrounds, while introducing literary and cultural theorists to current concerns in activism and the arts.

Alan Read’s new monograph The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss (Routledge) will be launched in London in May 2020 and provides the context for these seminars. This will be the first of a series of European and US engagements with the core themes of the book in a variety of artistic, public and academic settings.

Alan Read (1956) lives and works in London. Currently he is Professor of Theatre at King’s College, London. He has been Director of the Performance Foundation at King’s College since 2008, founder and curator of The Anatomy Theatre & Museum (2010) on the Strand, and the Inigo Rooms (2012) in Somerset House. Prior to working at King’s College he was Director of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in the mid 1990s, working closely with key cultural figures during ‘high theory’; an ethnographer working on street ceremonies of corre foc (fire run) in Barcelona in the early 1990s; and Director of Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop in the 1980s. His publications include: Theatre & Law (Palgrave, 2015), Theatre in the Expanded Field (Bloomsbury, 2013), Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Palgrave, 2008), Architecturally Speaking (Routledge, 2000), The Fact of Blackness (Bay Press, 1996) and Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (Routledge, 1993). Read is the founding consultant editor of the journal Performance Research.

Registration is free, but limited to the number of seats available. Please send an email with a short CV to info@maumaus.org until 01.03.2019. Confirmation of registration will be sent by email. The seminar will be in English.