´All the
world ´s a stage and all the men and women merely players´ is the famous phrase
from Shakespeare in As You Like It. Today Shakespeare´s observation
seems to be truer than ever. We are constantly staging ourselves at work, in
school, on Facebook and You Tube and in the ever expanding number of TV shows
that promise us a total makeover or 15 minutes of fame as star, cook, model or
designer (provided that we manage to convincingly perform being one).
Self-design has come to be the mass cultural practice par excellence. At the
same time, all kinds of design, including self-design, are often considered to
be suspicious. They are regarded as ways to hide things, to seduce us, and
therefore such practices easily get rejected for being ´just theatre´.
However, now
that it is commonly accepted that our identity is a performance and now that not
just movie stars, celebrities and politicians, but everyone is expected to be
his or her own author, it is about time that we move beyond such easy
condemnation and take a closer look at what is actually at stake. To this end we
have invited three prominent guests from the international field. Two of them
are scholars. These are Helen Freshwater (Birkbeck College, London) and
Branislav Jakovljevic (Stanford University, USA), both invested in
research that deals with the complex relationships between theatrical staging
and real life and Bojan Jablanovec (Slovenia), the director of Via Negativa, one
of Europe´s most radical avant-garde theatre companies.
We will have three seminar meetings in which we go deeper into the work of each of our guests. If you would like to participate in the seminars, please send an email to Maaike Bleeker (m.a.bleeker@uu.nl).
More information (pdf) about the lectures and the seminars.
Helen Freshwater wrote a book about censorship and how the theatricalisation of real life events meets with resistance and attempts at silencing (Theatre Censorship in Britain: Silencing, Censure and Suppression, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her current research is about the ways in which childhood is staged and what theatrical staging reveals about the construction of this supposedly innocent and authentic state.
Branislav
Jakovljevic investigates the war in former
Yugoslavia and its aftermath in (among others) the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia in The Hague through the lens of theatre (as part of his forthcoming
book Trial and Rehearsal: The Theater of Yugoslav Crisis).
Bojan
Jablanovec trained as both an economist and a
theatre director. Combining a career as marketing advisor with running a
radical avant-garde theatre company, he is the embodiment of a set of remarkable
similarities observed by cultural theorist Boris Groys, between strategies of
staging authenticity and sincerity in the arts and theatre and in daily life.