Chicago Cultural Center presents HUB conversations: “Friendships, Practices, and Mentoring”
Friendships, Practices, and Mentoring
Chicago Cultural Center, Garland Room
February 27, 2015; 10:30am – 1pm
Free and open to the public
Sara Jane Bailes is a writer, theatre-maker and performance teacher. Since 2009 she has been Head of the Drama Programme and Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies (University of Sussex, UK). She was an experimental theatre-maker/performer for a decade touring nationally and internationally and she lived in Italy for a few years. Her Masters/Phd are in Performance Studies from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. As a scholar she focuses upon contemporary experimental theatre practices and new performance strategies and methods developed in live art and performance since the 1960s. She is interested in cross-disciplinary dialogue amongst contemporary art forms – between literary, visual, choreographic and live performance practice, for example – and in collaborative companies whose work invents and extends those possibilities. From 2004-2009 she was Creative Advisor with the Bristol-based theatre collective, The Special Guests. More recently she has worked with the Belgian/UK performance group, Reckless Sleepers, as a writer and dramaturg. Prior to joining Sussex in 2007 she taught at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, Barnard, Columbia, and at the University of Bristol. Her first book, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (2010), focused upon and situated the practice of performance groups Goat Island, Forced Entertainment and Elevator Repair Service (ERS). Her co-edited book, Beckett and Musicality (2014), extended her interest in interdisciplinary conversation within and across art forms. She has worked as Artistic Assessor with Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is currently co-authoring a book with John Collins, Artistic Director of ERS, on a book about the company’s theatre within a broader history of New York downtown art practice.
Matthew Goulish is dramaturge for Every house has a door. His books include 39 Microlectures: in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2000), and The Brightest Thing in the World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure(Green Lantern, 2012). He teaches writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Kenneth Collins is the founder and Artistic Director of Temporary Distortion, a genre-bending performance group whose work explores the potential tensions and overlaps found between practices in visual art, theater, cinema, and music. He works across and between disciplines to create installation-based performances, visual art, films, albums, and works for the stage.
His work with Temporary Distortion has been seen in the United States, Canada, Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, South Korea and Australia.
Nora Taylor is Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History at SAIC. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii 2004) as well as numerous articles and exhibition catalogues on Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Modern and Contemporary Art. For the past 10 years, she has been researching performance art practices in Vietnam and Singapore. More recently, she spent a sabbatical year in Singapore on a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research on performance as site of memory and the work of Loo Zihan as the performance of art history.
The HUB is a place for the IN>TIME festival to gather and reflect. It is a series of discussion panels, a place for writers and thinkers to deeply engage in the performance work in the festival, and for the artists to expand upon their work. It is another way for us to be present with one another and come together for a moment in performance.
This panel discussion will focus on long-term relationships between artists, curators, and scholars including Sara Jane Bailes and Matthew Goulish who will will be in conversation about their long term friendship and practices of how they have worked together over the years.
