[-empyre-] introducing week 4

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

we encourage all participants to stay with us actively for the remainder of this month's discussion on ISIS, Terror, Performance --- and wish to thank, especially, our guests last week and all those from the empyre community
who joined and sustained our searching dialogue. There are questions now on the table, raised over the past days, which I hope we can continue to parse and debate. 

Please join me in welcoming Ana Valdés, Sonja Leboš, Aristita Albacan, and Olu Taiwo:
(here are the bios)

*Ana Valdés   [see Saturday's introduction by Alan)


*Sonja Leboš has degrees in Cultural anthropology and Spanish language (University of Zagreb), Cultural Tourism (University of Bologna) and Education in Art (Freie Hochschule Stuttgart), and  has  been initiating artistic, educational, research-based and urban programmes, work-shops and projects since 1992. She was the editor-in-chief of Croatian edition of Bruno Latour’s ‘We have never been modern. An Essay in Symmetric Anthropology’ (2003). and has published in the magazines Man and Space, Pangea and for Croatian Television, as well as in peer-reviewed magazines in Croatian (Studia Ethnologica, eg.), English (bilingual Spanish magazine Los Pasos) and German (Raum: Konzepte. Stadt als Dialog, Struktur als Model, 2008.)  She is a PhD candidate at the University of Zadar, and has been teaching at Women's Studies Center in Zagreb.
As the initiator and concept-maker of the urban culture programme Space of Identity, Space of Interaction, Space of Alteration (supported by the Zagreb Council for Culture, Education and Sport 2006-2009), Sonja introduced the first interdisciplinary study of one city district in Croatia. She is the editor-in-chief of the publication under the same title published in 2010. Together with Saša Šimpraga she initiated the programme aRs PUBLICae, instigating art in public space in Croatia. Her interests are in the field of cultural studies, studies of memory and identity, urban and visual anthropology, as well discourse analysis, while she is active in public sphere cultural production at cross-border of narrative urbanism, everydayness, performance studies, film, new media and visual anthropology. Sonja established the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research in 2002. Since then AIIR has been working in inter-mediative field, connecting cultural theory and practice within different projects, investigating the institutions in public and non-governmental sector as well as vox populi in situ, creating various interdisciplinary research methods and building platforms for articulation of multilayered aesthetical, ethical, ecological and sociological issues. AIIR has been co-working with different societal organizations and diverse cultural forms.


* Dr. Aristita I. Albacan is a theatre practitioner, teacher and scholar with research interests/specialisms in notions of intermediality, contemporary spectatorship, and contemporary performance making processes, Robert Lepage’s theatre work and applied theatre. She lectures in Theatre and Performance at School of Arts and New Media, University of Hull, where she also acts as Director of Studies for Theatre and Performance. In 2010, she has initiated and co-coordinates the Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Practices Cluster (ICP Cluster link: http://icpcluster.org/index.php). As a practitioner/theatre director she has developed contemporary work in various settings in the past 15 years in Romania, Germany, US and UK.
 

*  Dr  Olu Taiwo is a dancer/choreographer who has experimented with multiple media and a comprehensive transcultural philosophy of rhythm based movement  and cognitive metabolisms. He graduated from the Laban Centre with an MA in Choreography and wrote his PhD on Performance philosophy. He teaches in Street Arts, Contemporary performance and Drama. He has a background in Fine Art and has professional experience in acting, Street and contemporary dance as well as Drumming. He has performed in national and international contexts. His main research interests are to propagate 21st century issues concerning the interaction between body, identity, audience and technology within site specific contexts. This includes research based on both his concepts of the Return beat (West African rhythmic sensibility), and the Physical journal (Embodied knowledge and memory). He performed in 'Ukiyo ' (2010), dance work conceived and directed by Johannes Birringer and Michele Danjoux, as well as in his own performative installation called interfacing… (2010). He created a street performance, together with his students, that was presented during the Olypmic Games. He just completed ‘Moving Gravity,’ a new a transmedia performance installation at the Art Centre in Salisbury. Publications include, The Return Beat in Wood (Ed.): The Virtual Embodied. Routledge (1998), Music, Art and Movement among the Yoruba: in Harvey (Ed.): Indigenous Religions Cassell (2000). The Orishas: The Influence of the Yoruba Cultural Diaspora’ in Harvey and Thompson (Ed.) Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations Ashgate (2005) The Physical Journal: The living body that writes and rewrites itself: in Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (Ed) Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance Palgrave Macmillan (2009).


thank you

Johannes Birringer