Join us on 10th April at 5pm (BST) to celebrate the publication of Harriet Curtis' book Mess and Contemporary Performance: Complexity, Containment, and Collapse. Following an introduction and presentation of selected excerpts, there will be provocations from and conversations with some of the artists featured in the book: Emma Frankland, Daniel Oliver, and Eirini Kartsaki. There will also be time for a discussion and Q&A.
The book identifies and theorises mess in contemporary performance and argues that mess offers a site from which subjects might mobilise and find agency, even as the complexity (and indeed messiness) of everyday life conditions and contains. Whilst the materiality of mess provides a starting point and emerges in many of the works analysed, the implications of mess as related to vulnerability, shame, and resistance occupy a larger space in the book’s chapters. These performances are messy not only in content or style; they reveal critical readings of how perceived-as messy subjects and practices are shaped and regulated. In attending to the public, personal, and structural uses of mess, and emphasising the critical possibilities of what might otherwise be skipped over or cleared away, the book develops and opens out shared understandings of mess as creative chaos and as a practice of political action or change.
This is a DMU Dance, Drama, and Performance Studies Research Centre Borderlines event.
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81737114337 pwd=rnZAeZbMEUxz6eK2SlCdRB0bTzP7SO.1
Meeting ID: 817 3711 4337
Passcode: 709772
Harriet Curtis is Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Leicester, and is the author of Mess and Contemporary Performance: Complexity, Containment, and Collapse
Emma Frankland is a performer, writer, and artist: https://www.emmafrankland.co.uk/
Daniel Oliver is a performance artist, researcher, and lecturer: https://www.danieloliverperformance.com/
Eirini Kartsaki is a writer, performance maker, and lecturer: https://eirinikartsaki.com/
Image: Screenshot of Katherine Araniello's Share the Love II (2017). Araniello's work is discussed in chapter 4 of Mess and Contemporary Performance, which is titled 'Hot Mess: Vulnerability and Exhibitionism in Performance', pp. 82-113.
