DIALOGUE: PANDEMIC GRIEF AND OTHER DIGITAL FEELINGS

TRANSMEDIA ARTS

SPEAKERS: David Harradine, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama; Fintan Walsh, Birkbeck, University of London

Pandemic and post/pandemic performance requires us not only to address the formal innovations of theatre’s move onto digital platforms like Zoom, Telegram, or gather.town. In their dialogue, David Harradine and Fintan Walsh will explore how performance has or can address the new pecaraties and experiences of trauma, loss, grief and community that the pandemic has brought to the fore.

This event is part of the Symposium Viral Theatres: Pandemic Past/Hybrid Futures, which is taking place at the Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin and online from April 28- April 30, 2022.

David Harradine is an artist, and co-founder of Fevered Sleep (feveredsleep.co.uk), making performances, installations, films, books and digital art. He’s Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London and is a trustee of Yorkshire Dance. With Fevered Sleep and as an independent artist, his work is about creating new conceptual, creative and physical spaces that cultivate attentiveness and encourage connection: between people, between ideas, and between the human and the non-human. Born into a rural, working class community in West Yorkshire, UK he now lives in York and London.

Fintan Walsh is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London, co-director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, director of MA Text and Performance, and director of BiGS/Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality. Some of his recent work has explored grief in theatre and mediatized performance, including the article 'Grief Machines: Transhumanist Theatre, Digital Performance, Pandemic Time' (Theatre Journal, 73.3, 2021), and the chapter ‘Viral Hamlet: History, Memory, Kinship’ in his edited collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen, 2019). Some of these concerns are explored further in his forthcoming book Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions (Methuen, 2023). Between 2018 and 2021, Fintan was Senior Editor of the journal Theatre Research International, and he is Senior Editor of Contemporary Performance Texts, a new book series with Cambridge University Press.

How To Join

Please add your name and email address to this registration page. 

If you have any questions, please contact Magda Romanska at magda@metalab.harvard.edu

The Viral Theatres-Research Project, a collaboration of the Free University, the Humboldt University and Bard College Berlin, is funded by the VolkswagenFoundation. The Opening Events are co-financed by the research project “Extended Audiences” in the Research Area “Travelling Matters” at the EXC2020 “Temporal Communities” and take place with kind support from the metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard’s Transmedia Arts Seminar, and the Open Society University Networks.