Lectures & Events

Studio Set at Fall Free For All
September 30, 2012
2pm & 4pm
Bancroft Studio
Free

TDPS acting and dance students, along with the UC Jazz Ensembles, will present a program of informal performances as part of Cal Performances’ annual free day of the arts, featuring a Brazilian music and dance grand finale!

More Fall Free For All information »

New Play Reading Series
Durham Studio Theater
August 30, 2012
September 20, 2012
October 18, 2012
November 15, 2012
January 24, 2013
February 21, 2013
March 14, 2013
April 11, 2013
5pm
Free

Hear new work by up-and-coming playwrights in an intimate setting, read by our student actors. Each semester, we’ll have a launch event followed by a set of Thursday evening readings and discussions. Don’t pass up this opportunity to engage with the theater of tomorrow, read by the actors of tomorrow! Presented in partnership with the Townsend Center Contemporary Drama Working Group.

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Stanford University
“Precarious Performance”
Dwinelle Hall, Room 370
October 4, 2012, 4pm
Free

In what ways can we think about performance as a precarious venture? How does performance address the socio-political movements of precarity? Is there a relationship between the vicarious and the precarious? Professor Brody (Stanford) explores these questions with reference to recent world-historical events such as the Occupy Movement among other artistic performances.

Virtual Venues: Exploring materiality and gesture within live streaming events
Zellerbach Rooom 170
November 9-10, 2012
Free

For two days, Friday November 9th and Saturday, November 10th, two campuses within the University of California system will be showcasing the Virtual Venues concept and hosting a symposium to discuss the future of networked real time collaboration within the UC System. The two participating labs are the Embodied Media and Technology Lab (UC Irvine, within the Department of Dance), and The Z-Lab (UC Berkeley, within the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies). NYU is also participating in networked performances between the UC Irvine site in conjunction with the symposium. Each site has worked extensively over the past two years to create an enlivened and participatory virtual/real space that utilizes video and audio data shared and layered in real time.

November 9th Performance and Discussion
Location: Z-Lab (Zellerbach Room 170)
5:30pm Reception and Open Studio
6:00-8:00pm Four multi-site performances streaming in real time between UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. Choreographers are MFA students from the UC Irvine Department of Dance working with TDPS undergraduate students. Discussions take place after each piece is performed.
November 10th Demonstration, Discussion, and Workshop
Location: Z-Lab (Zellerbach Room 170)

11am Renee Rhodes shares work on mapping and interactivity in real time.
12-1pm Brown bag lunch and discussion between participants located at UC Irvine and UC Berkeley.
1-2pm Workshop utilizing real time video layering techniques between multiple sites.

Amir Baradaran – new media performance artist (NYC)
Lecture: FutARism: The Possibilities of Augmented Reality in Art Making

Wednesday, November 14, 6 – 8 PM
Lecture will be followed by a reception
BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt Library
Free and open to the public

Amir Baradaran will discuss his past and current artistic works involving Augmented Reality (AR) and pose critical questions for the future of AR and art practice. AR as a form of new media offers a live view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. Under the title FutARism, Baradaran suggests that AR presupposes significant conceptual shifts, as it expands our definitions of ownership and trespassing while triggering dialogue about a new medium for interactive installations. The experiential, conceptual, and legal shifts presupposed by the advent of AR connect to Baradaran’s interest in radical subjectivities, failed utopias, and mysticism. His AR installations have included the commissioned work WeARinMOMA in the NY MOMA and a guerilla installation in the Louvre, Frenchising Mona Lisa.

Interactive Performance: Marry Me to the End of Love
U.S. Premiere
Thursday, November 15, 6 – 9 PM*
Subterranean Art House, 2179 Bancroft Way – Berkeley, CA
*Because of the nature of this interactive performance, audience members may come and go as they please.
Free and open to the public

Following its Paris premiere in June 2012 at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Baradaran’s performance of Marry Me to the End of Love will make its U.S. debut during his UC Berkeley campus visit. In this interactive performance, Baradaran will marry anyone he can convince to enter a temporary marriage. This playful, performative act of marriage draws from the Shi’a Islamic tradition of temporary marriage (Sigheh) and attempts to introduce these traditions into the performance art lexicon. This performance piece also critically questions the recent and perplexing push by “progressives” to “include” same-sex couples in the definition of marriage. Baradaran’s play with temporary marriage recognizes that love and desire are temporal, shifting, transactional, and always changing. Marry Me to the End of Love builds on past projects such as Frenchising Mona Lisa, which was critiqued by Forbes magazine for using “guerrilla tactical maneuvers” to cover the daVinci painting in a digital “augmented reality” hijab made of the French flag. The paradox is that Amir Baradaran reintroduces the progressive concept back into the queer conversation by way of “backwards” Islamic customs and costumes, such as hijab and temporary marriage. Baradaran first introduced the idea of Sigheh when he infiltrated Marina Abramovic’s live sculpture, The Artist is Present at the New York MoMA, thereby creating his own guerilla performance, The Other Artist is Present, and proposing marriage to her: “I love your bodies of work… and I would love to be wedded to this body, here and now.”.

Co-sponsors:
Townsend Center for the Humanities
Berkeley Center for New Media
Center for Race and Gender
Arts Research Center
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Muslim Identities and Cultures Working Group
Program in Comparative Ethnic Studies
Dept. of Gender & Women Studies
Dept. of Art Practice

Qing Qing lecture
“The State of Contemporary Dance in China“
January 25, 3pm
Dwinelle Annex, Room 126
Qing Qing, Associate Research Fellow at the Dance Research Institute, National Arts Academy, China & Visiting Scholar in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley. Chinese contemporary dance is increasingly gaining attention in the international dance world. In this presentation, Chinese dance scholar and critic Qing Qing gives an introduction to the state of contemporary dance in China, with screenings of selected video clips for a range of examples. Discussion and Q & A follow. Possible reading, TBA.

Chinese Contemporary Dance Festival
January 31, 2013
Contemporary dance in China is flourishing. Two emerging choreographers, nunu kong (AKA Wu Yan Dan) from Shanghai and Dai Jian from Beijing, will lead workshops at UC Berkeley and present their work in a free public showing. This event is co-sponsored by the Dance Studies Working Group, the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, Arts Research Center, and Center for Chinese Studies.

Please email chiayijessiec2@gmail.com to reserve a spot to attend any workshops. Note: There will be five spots for physical participation, and ten spots for observation in each of the workshops listed below.
Workshops:
11am-12:30pm, Zellerbach Hall, room 170: in SanSan Kwan’s course on Choreographies of Space, nunu kong will lead a workshop
1-3:30pm, Bancroft Studio: in Lisa Wymore’s Choreography class, Dai Jian will lead a workshop
Public Showing:
4-6pm, Bancroft Studio: nunu kong and Dai Jian will present a free public showing of their work

Panel: Moving Time
February 1, 2013, 12:50pm
Museum Theater, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2621 Durant Avenue (access via the Sculpture Garden)

nunu kong and SanSan Kwan will discuss Chinese contemporary dance in relation to nunu’s and other art practices, moderated by Chia-Yi Seetoo.

Part of the Arts Research Center’s Temporal Shifts: Time Across Contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese Art Practices symposium. For more info please see http://arts.berkeley.edu/events/temporalshifts.html

Stan Lai in conversation with Philip Kan Gotanda
February 6, 2013, 5:30pm
Durham Studio Theater

Leading Asian-American playwright Philip Kan Gotanda will speak with Avenali Resident Fellow Stan Lai about his creative process, and the influence of his years at Berkeley – both as a graduate student in the 1980s and as a Regents Lecturer in 2000 – on his artistic development.

UndocuNation
February 15, 2013

9am-5pm, Symposium, campus Multi Cultural Center
The Center for Race and Gender (CRG), CultureStr/ke and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies (TDPS) is thrilled to announce this upcoming year’s UndocuNation at UC Berkeley. We will be bringing together artists, community members, students, faculty and staff from California and the nation focusing attention on critical issues affecting undocumented immigrant communities.

9-9:30am Registration, breakfast and mingling (MCC) [Breakfast]
9:30-9:45am Welcoming remarks by Prof. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (Director, CRG)
9:45-10am Spoken Word Performance
10-11:15am Panel #1: Building Resistance: The Politics of the Immigrant Rights Movement (MCC)
Invited panelists: Cecilia Menjivar and Leisy Abrego (legal violence), Kathryn Abrams (SB1070 and Arizona; law and emotions) and Hiroshi Motomura (DREAM Act youth as Americans in waiting); Arely Zimmerman (use of social media and undocuqeer activism)
11:15-11:30am Performance
11:30-12:15pm Lunch
12:15-1:30pm Panel #2: Insurgent Migrations (MCC)
Invited panelists: Evelyn Nakano Glenn (insurgent citizenship and the DREAM Act movement), Juana Maria Rodriguez (queerness/sexuality), Trinh Minh-Ha, Laura Perez (performance art/spirituality), Paola Bacchetta, Martin Manalansan (queer diaspora)
1:30-1:45pm Performance
1:45-3pm Panel #3: Higher Learnings: Undocumented Student Experiences on and off campus (MCC)
Invited panelists: Veronica Terriquez and Caitlin Patler (USC survey); Kevin Escudero (UC Berkeley Haas Innovation Grant), Roberto Gonzales and Shannon Gleeson (differences in the socialization of undocumented,,adults and youth) 3-3:30pm Break (mingling, give folks a chance to take a look around the exhibit, etc.)
3:30-5pm Panel #4: Institutional Social Change: Campus/Community Roundtable (MCC)
Invited panelists: Graduates Reaching a DREAM Deferred (GRADD) student members; Immigrant Student Issues Coalition (ISIC) – Jere Takahashi, Alberto Ledesma and Lupe Gallegos-Diaz; SLAS/EOP office – Fabrizio Mejia and Meng So; AB540 Coalition Reps – Ju Hong, Beto Ortiz, Kiki Vo, May Liang
5:15-5:30pm Performance

7pm-10pm, Performance , International house
Hosted by Bay Area artist Favianna Rodríguez, UndocuNation is an evening of culture jamming, visual art, and performances addressing the devastating consequences of our country’s broken immigration system. Artists from different racial and sexual backgrounds, immigration history and documentation statuses will be sharing artwork and cultural interventions about the current immigration crisis through performances, film excerpts, installations, music and readings. The collaboration of these creative artists attempts to use images and stories to facilitate dialogue that can inspire. UndocuNation is also part of a series of workshops that have been taking place nation-wide has been presented in major U.S. cities, including at our own Bay Area Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC.

The event itself is comprised of a collage of artistic performances that allow creative cultural workers to speak about their art to shift today’s understanding of what “America” looks like. The UndocuNation event at UC Berkeley will have a particular focus on undocumented immigrant communities and the connections between the politics of immigration, education and creative expression.

Diana Taylor: “Saving the ‘Live’: Re-Performance and UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage”
March 11, 2013, 4:30pm
Durham Studio Theater
“It’s a widespread fantasy— one shared by individual artists such as Marina Abramović and world organizations such as UNESCO—that specific performances (or ICH, ‘intangible cultural heritage’) can be kept alive, separated from their moment of knowing and being, and safeguarded, protected, for other audiences at another moment. What does safeguarding performance entail? Is re-performance different from performance, always “twice behaved behavior” according to Richard Schechner, “never for the first time”? How does the now of one particular performance extend beyond its own initial temporality and context? Why attempt it? For whom? Who selects? Who decides? This talk looks at what it might entail to consciously ‘preserve’ performance and keep specific acts ‘alive’ by looking at two projects— UNESCO’s Intangible Culture Heritage convention of 2003 and Marina Abramović’s blockbuster show at MoMA in 2010, The Artist is Present.”

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Lecturer Dr. Diana Taylor is Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. Her visit is made possible by Phi Beta Kappa and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

6th Annual Performance Studies Speaker Series
“An Academic Mixtape: Roshanak Kheshti and Tavia Nyong’o on Performance”
March 21, 2013, 5pm
Durham Studio Theater

We made you a mix-tape. Hopefully you’ll like it! Join esteemed professors Tavia Nyong’o (NYU) and Roshanak Kheshti (UC San Diego) for an improvisatory dialogue on the concepts and issues underlying the globalized production and circulation of music. Profs. Nyong’o and Kheshti are both on the cutting edge of contemporary debates about queerness, globality, sound, race, performance and affect, so there’s bound to be a lot in the mix.

Special Performance Event:

Anna Halprin at BAM/PFA
February 15-17, 2013, 7:30pm
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

World-renowned postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin returns to UC Berkeley to present a weekend of dance, including the final performance of her revolutionary 1965 work “Parades and Changes” as part of BAM/PFA’s L@TE program, as well as a showing of her community-empowering “Planetary Dance” featuring TDPS dance students. Check the BAM/PFA website for schedule and updates: bampfa.berkeley.edu

Tickets: $7 general admission; free for UC Berkeley staff, students, and faculty
BAM/PFA: 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley

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