On Wednesday May 17th 2017, there will be a symposium entitled Mediating Immediacy: Choreographing Affect, which is being organized in the framework of the KU Leuven Cultural Studies course Theory of Contemporary Dance, in partnership with STUK. The symposium is free, welcomes all and will take place at STUK – Soetezaal (Naamsestraat 96 – 3000 Leuven), between 14:00 – 18:00.
A description for the event and details about the program and speakers can be found at:
Contact: Arne Vanraes – arne.vanraes@kuleuven.be
Photo credit: Twitter @trymainelee
Mediating Immediacy: Choreographing Affect
Our speakers Cécile Guédon (Harvard University), Erin Manning (Concordia University) and Ben Anderson (Durham University) will address the paradox of how the (presupposed) ‘immediacy’ of affect can be negotiated in performance praxis or in the broader social sphere. In short, ‘affects’ are often described as those basic, psycho-bodily intensities that emerge from encounters of lived bodies and environments. At a micro-perceptive level, they influence one’s capacity to act or move. While those energetic forces are frequently analyzed as being non-conscious and happening immediately, we will raise the question whether this implies that they are also unmediated. Is there a necessary contradiction between choreographic technique (which can suggest notions of mastery and reproducibility) and affect (so often associated with passivity and immediacy)? What can ‘structures of feeling’ tell us about structures of power and a politics of moving/feeling bodies? Does choreography carry the potential to critically research which energies appear between moving bodies in relation? And can such choreographies intervene to reconfigure affective production for the future?
Talks
Cécile Guédon – Articulating Modernity: Choreographing Abstraction
Erin Manning – A Manifesto for Immediation
Ben Anderson – Neoliberal Structures of Feeling
Concluding performance: Alma Söderberg, Nadita (http://www.stuk.be/en/program/nadita)
Cultural Studies Leuven 