Cancelled: The tree of performance knowledge
This event has passed
PLEASE NOTE: Due to planned UCU industrial action on 28 February over the threat to the USS pension scheme, this event, “The Tree of Performance Knowledge”, at King’s College London has been cancelled.
This Central@ Kings talk is presented as a dialogue between Adam J. Ledger (University of Birmingham) and Annelis Kuhlmann (Aarhus University, Denmark; currently a visiting researcher at the University of Kent, Canterbury) and investigates questions about methodology and collaboration that arose from their attempts to write about Eugenio Barba’s artistic practice as a theatre director.
Embracing Barba’s occasionally paradoxical approaches, the authors’ non-chronological, rhizomatic account unfolds from a central concern with Barba’s production The Tree (2016), which provides a point of connection to the various ‘branches’ of his work since 1964.
Given the metaphorical density of the image of the tree, how can we as dramaturg-scholars simultaneously embrace it as an image through which to write, deconstruct the performance-in-process, and treat it as a model for a ‘living archive’ within a multicultural theatre laboratory tradition? What was distinctive about this interaction between artistic methods, a performance, different cultural and academic agendas and constraints and the sheer practicality of two academics writing the same piece?
Kuhlmann and Ledger reflect on their digression into trees in order to write in a radically spatial way. Their collaboration of over two years resulted in a substantial chapter on Eugenio Barba in vol. 5 of Great European Stage Directors: Grotowski, Brook, Barba (ed. Paul Allain), part of a forthcoming series from Bloomsbury.
More info on publications, please visit our web pages:
Annelis Kuhlmann
Adam J. Ledger
Photo credit: Maciej_Zakrzewski