Postponed to the Winter Semester - STIBET | The Virtual Lecture-Performance

As we are intimately aware, the novel Coronavirus pandemic has forced educational institutions across the globe to suddenly move their teaching almost exclusively online, in many cases without a pedagogical ‘gameplan’ as to how to ensure continued cognitive and affective stimulation and active dialogic participation of students. Academic conferences have also been greatly effected by this shift to virtual space, making an already dry format barely palatable. Consistent with furthering investigations into digitization in the study of culture - this course will explore the innovative methodologies and formats offered by the lecture-performance, as a potential model for students. The aims in adopting this visual-centered approach is to improve knowledge production, reception, and retention; to help avoid ‘zoom fatigue,’ the mental exhaustion tied to extended hours in web meetings; and to create more captivating paper presentations both for the classroom and conference settings. Virtual learning and videoconferencing doesn’t have to be bland and tedious, nor do lecturers need to have access to expensive audiovisual equipment and technologies or be trained theater actors or performance artists to benefit from lecture-performance techniques.  

Lecture-performance is by nature a hybrid practice, routinely experimenting with and challenging normative configurations and relations between presenter and public, as well as disciplinary boundaries. The lecture-performances incorporates dramaturgy, discursive narration, voiceover, and montage, includes physical materials, objects, archival evidences, and documents, and may be categorized as self-reflexive, situational, participatory, and interactive. Critical both of traditional rubrics of knowledge production and dissemination and constrained institutional structures, its origin can be traced historically to the video essay and cine-essay, as well as conceptual and performative arts of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary dance discourse of the 1990s. From the perspective of theater studies, the lecture-performance descends from J.L. Austin’s concept of the speech act, as presented in his 1975 lecture and subsequent publication How to do Things with Words. Within art history circles, early practitioners of lecture-performance include: John Cage’s Event (1952) and Lecture on Nothing (1961), Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Robert Smithson’s slide lecture called Hotel Palenque (1969-72), among many others. The format, additionally, shares traits with Happenings as introduced by Allan Kaprow (1959), the Event as philosopher Alain Badiou defines it, or even the Spectacle as in Guy Dubord’s notion (1967).

Prior to our session, participants will be assigned a 1-hour contemporary lecture-performance to watch independently in preparation for our collective discussion. The session will begin with 30 minute expanded introduction to the lecture-performance genre, followed by an open dialogue. Our main objective will be to explore how we can use lecture-performance methods to enhance our own research.

Bibliography

• Austin, J.L. How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Blumenstein, Ellen. “What is Lecture Performance: An introduction to an extend investigation.” artmap.com. Accessed 01.03.2021. https://artmap.com/ellenblumenstein/text/what-is-lecture-performance-an-introduction-to-an-extended-investigation.
• Cerezo, Belén. "How to open my eyes? The performance-lecture as a method within artistic research.” Networking Knowledge Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 9(3), April 2016. Accessed 01.03.2021. DOI: 10.31165/nk.2016.93.439. 
• Fischer-Lichte, E. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. New York and London: Routledge, 2008.
• Frank, Rike. "When Form Starts Talking: On Lecture-Performances." Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 33, pp. 4-15, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Accessed 01.03.2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/672015.
• Giménez Calpe, Ana. "The Lecture-Performance: Implementing Performative Pedagogy in Literature Class." 6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’20), Universitat Polit`ecnica de Val`encia, Val`encia, 2020. Accessed 01.03.2021.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAd20.2020.11186.
• Ladnar, D. “The lecture performance: contexts of lecturing and performing.” Doctoral thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2014. Accessed 01.03.2021. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.606507.
• Milder, Patricia. "Teaching as Art: The Contemporary Lecture-Performance." PAJ A Journal of Performance and Art, 33(1):13-27, January 2011. Accessed 01.03.2021. DOI: 10.1162/PAJJ_a_00019.
• Sklar, Julia. “‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here's why that happens.” National Geographic, 24 April 2020. Accessed 01.03.2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/coronavirus-zoom-fatigue-is-taxing-the-brain-here-is-why-that-happens.
• Tan,Kai Syng. "Power, Play and Pedagogy through the PowerPoint Performance-Lecture." International Journal of Management and Applied Research, 2020, Vol. 7, No. 3, September 2020. Accessed 01.03.2021. DOI: 10.18646/2056.73.20-028

// Candace Goodrich

Candace Goodrich is an artist/curator, director of ArtSci Nexus, and a PhD student at GCSC - IPP at Justus Liebig Universität Gießen, Germany. Her teaching background is in art education in contemporary art spaces. Notable lectures include: “Anthropocentrism: The Failure of Modernity – How do we decolonize the sciences through ecovention?” at the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle, Germany, invited by the Global Youth Academy and National German Academy of Sciences – Leopoldina (April 2019); “The Aestheticization of the Anthropocene – A discussion about terminology, periodization and imagery” at Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania (March 2019); and “Can robots end class struggle? A second chance for Autonomia” – Hamburger Bahnhof, as part of the “Festival of Future Nows” (September 2017).