Is theatre Still There?

 

The Performing Arts Department and the Office of College Events and Cultural Planning at Bunker Hill Community College presents

“Is Theatre Still There? — I Tell You My Story…”

A theatre symposium featuring a simulcast of Proshot Kalami's new play, I Tell You My Story, You Tell Me Yours, and panel of a international Theatre & Performance Arts Scholars and Practitioners

Moderated by Arianna Maiorani, Senior Lecturer, Loughborough University

With opening remarks by Lori Catallozzi, Dean of Humanities and Learning Communities, Bunker Hill Community College

 

Friday, January 29, 2021

2 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time, USA)

Panel Participants:

Erik Brown, Senior Creative Producer, Stanford University

Dr. Proshot Kalami, Professor, Bunker Hill Community College

Cam Perridge, Sound Engineer and Guitarist

Dr. Shezad Khalil, Independent Researcher and Dance Scholar

Lee Santos Silva, Director of Center for Equity and Cultural Wealth, Bunker Hill Community College

Kevin Wery, Director of College Events and Cultural Planning, Bunker Hill Community College

Join by zoom: https://zoom.us/j/93815078973?pwd=SEgzSWVWSTUwOWdLMHJFZ0k3dTFRZz09

Meeting ID: 938 1507 8973

Passcode: 514236

 

Join by phone: +1 929 205 6099 US (New York) 

Meeting ID: 938 1507 8973

Passcode: 514236

Using Proshot Kalami’s new play You Tell Me Your Story, I'll Tell You Mine as inspiration for discussion, this symposium considers possible re-configurations of theatre in the times of COVID-19 that have removed performance from its usual space and its dedicated places.

 

• What is the new space of theatre? 
• How are the different entities involved in performance re-located? 
• If the hyperspace of online streaming is the new real, has the old real become hyperreal? 
• What is the new performing body and what does it preserve of the old one?
• What is the body's interaction with the new space and what impact does this have on audiences?  
• How does the removal impact on different forms of performance? 
• How do students react to performance re-configuration? 
• How does the interplay between different modes of performance change in re-configured theatre? 

A brief introduction to the evening will precede the broadcast of Dr Kalami’s play, which will be followed by a panel-led discussion and brainstorming session that welcomes contributions from the audience.

 

About the Moderator:  Dr. Arianna Maiorani is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Loughborough University, UK. A former dancer and choreographer from the Opera Theatre in Rome, she holds an MA in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and a PhD in Cultural Sciences from the International School of High Studies of the San Carlo Foundation in Modena, Italy. As a specialist in Multimodality, her research focuses on communication in complex environments and she has recently created a new interdisciplinary research area, Kinesemiotics, in collaboration with Professor Massimiliano Zecca (engineering), Dr Russell Lock (computer science) and the English National Ballet, with whom she conducted experiments on the nature of dance discourse in relation to performance space. In 2014, she created the community cast choreography for Michael Pinchbeck’s Bolero. Her most recent publication is Kinesemiotics: Modelling How Choregraphed Movement Means in Space (Routledge 2021) and she is currently leading the project “The Kinesemiotic Body: a pragmatic account of the local discourse organization of dance” funded by the AHRC and the DFG in collaboration with Professor John Bateman from Bremen University (co-leader) and the English National Ballet.

About the Playwright: Dr. Proshot Kalami, a Professor at Bunker Hill Community College, Boston, MA, has received her PhD in Comparative Literature with two designated emphasis in Performance Studies and Film Studies from UC Davis in 2007. She has taught World Literature, Film Studies, and Theatre at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz & UC Davis before moving to Loughborough University in the UK continuing to teach World Cinema, World Literature and Theatre. Proshot is also a certified Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) facilitator and has worked as an artist educator at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston. Before returning to Boston, she served a few fellowships at the Interweaving Performance Cultures, FU Berlin and at JNIAS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her scholarly publications are in theatre and performance studies and world cinema in form of books, book chapters, and articles. Proshot sits at the editorial board of "International Journal of the Humanities" and "International Journal of the Image". She is also the recipient of many research grants and fellowships. She has translations published in Farsi in the field of Visual Arts and Philosophy.

Her creative works are in Theatre, Documentary Filmmaking, Video Installation, Visual Arts and Creative Writing. Her works have been featured internationally at performances, festivals & academic conferences across the US, UK, Europe, and India. In 2009, her dramaturgy of Death of Yazdgerd was featured in the BBC Persian. As a videographer she has worked with the Asia Society (NYC), Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM, NYC), Cal Performances (UC Berkeley), Mondavi Center (UC Davis), Chorus Repertory Theatre (Imphal, Manipur, India), and the Barbican (London). She has published two poetry books in Farsi in addition to her English poems and those which have been translated into Italian, Hungarian, and Serbian and have been presented at international poetry festivals. Her poems have been featured in two poetry anthologies in Serbia and Iran. Proshot speaks, writes, and conducts her research as well as creative works in 5 languages. As a visual artist, she has won prizes for her pastel and watercolour painting as well as her installation inspired by #MeToo movement, titled “The Invisible Women”.

About the Play: I Tell You My Story, You Tell Me Yours is an excerpt of a longer play written by Proshot Kalami. Delving into unspoken memories of performers, each actor enacts the impossibility of telling, embarking on a journey towards healing and transformation. The text of the performance is informed through a collaborative process of telling and co-writing. A process that troubles the notion of the “other” by allowing performers to be the “other” and thus defying it at the same time. By performing everyday life realities, the play triggers both the individual and the collective to emerge. The “uprooted” then begins to live in the liminal space of tensions between the familiar and the unknown, the native and the foreign, us and them.

 

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Dr Arianna Maiorani PhD FHEA
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, School of Social Sciences and Humanities

Loughborough University