Please join us for the next PEP Talk (as part of the seminar series of the Performance.Experience.Presence research group at Plymouth University):
“Bordering on anxiety: on the politics and ethics of unsettling the audience”
By Patrick Duggan (University of Surrey)
Wednesday, 9th November 2016, 4.30 – 6.00pm
Roland Levinsky Building room 207, Plymouth University
Through recourse to theories of fear (e.g. Svendsen, 2009; Virilio, 2012) and anxiety (e.g.: Critchley, 2009; Ronen, 2009), this paper investigates the political, ethical and socio-cultural implications of two contemporary performances that deliberately attempt to unsettle their audiences: Greg Wohead’s The Ted Bundy Project (2014) and Action Hero’s multimedia, immersive installation Extraordinary Rendition (2015). These pieces deploy aesthetic, dramaturgical and phenomenological strategies intended deliberately to place the spectators’ into a state bordering anxiety. This paper considers how contemporary performance can create an anxious (spectator’s) body as a means through which to perform and scrutinise pervasive ideologies and structures of fear that operate in/as the contemporary structure of feeling.
Dr Patrick Duggan is Director of the Institute of Performance & Director of Research at Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey. He is Series Editor of Intellect’s Playtext Series and has recently published Performing (for) Survival: Theatre, Crisis, Extremity (Palgrave, 2016), co-edited with Lisa Peschel.
The PEP Talks organising team: Chris Green, Teri Bailie, James Harper, Katheryn Owens & Beth Emily Richards
Twitter: @PlymUniPEP