Performance in a Posthuman Age, January 29

Dr. Caroline Edwards - Posthuman Eroticism: The Foundations of Wangechi Mutu's Counter-Poetics This talk explores the mixed media collages and sculptures of the Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu. Mutu is known for her violent, unnerving juxtapositions of human, animal, vegetal, and mycelial forms into arresting hybrids. In these works, the Black female body is repeatedly ripped apart and reassembled within fantasy landscapes that speak of death and decomposition but also of regenerative regrowth. Critics liken her use of collage to the grotesque hybridity of Octavia Butler’s aliens in the Xenogenesis trilogy or Mary Shelley’s Creature, sutured by Dr Victor Frankenstein out of multiple exhumed corpses from Bavarian graveyards. Biography: Dr. Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London where she is Director of the Centre for Contemporary Literature. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (2019), co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2015) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture, 1945-2020. Caroline’s research has featured in the New Statesman, the Guardian, SFX Magazine, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3, and BBC One. She is currently writing her second monograph, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe, which examines strangely hopeful moments of inhuman collaboration within elemental contexts. https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profi... Beatriz Cabur - Different Forms of Digital Theater What are we talking about when we say: “Digital Theatre”? We will walk through the concepts that were established before the pandemic and how they shifted and exploded into a myriad of options during and after it. So, what are the different forms of "Digital Theatre" now and how are they called? I will show examples of these forms, and then we will expand on how to approach them as creators and as audiences through an open discussion. In the last part of this talk, I will give them tools and software to create with and we will talk about how to use them best in their specific practices. Biography: Beatriz Cabur is an awarded, innovative, and multi-faceted theatre professional who started he career in the year 2000 as a theatre director and playwright. She has written and directed over forty theatre plays in Spain, Mexico, Italy, Austria, the UK and the USA. In 2012 she started working in digital and online theatre, directing and creating plays for twitch, tiktok, zoom, facebook, twitter, skype and livestream channels. In 2020 she started teaching how to make Digital Theatre in several universities around the world and how to teach GenZs to make Digital Artivism. https://beatrizcabur.com/ Performance in a Posthuman Age and The Circus of Freaks is the second research project of digitalLABperformans. The project posits the theories of ecocriticism and ecofeminism in the context of posthuman and focuses on the intersection of these theories and theatre and performance art. The project is supported by the British Council Creative Collaborations Grant Program and started with a four-month dramaturgy laboratory in November 2022, will share the outputs of the laboratory process with the public through seminars and open rehearsals in January and February. Two open rehearsal presentations which include dramaturgy laboratory outputs and eight different seminars will be shared with the audience within the scope of the project, which is conducted with the partnership of Şule Ateş (Dijitallabperformans) and Seda İlter (Birkbeck Center for Contemporary Theater). The physical activities of the program will be held in Salt Galata as part of Salt's Open Rehearsals program.