Movement in the pause: choreopolice, “expressing oneself,” and the pandemic. A conversation.
“In the lockdown, in the pause, in the suspension, as our movements, gestures, and actions endure radical transformations, compressed as they are to the limits defined by our walls, we soon realize that nothing has really stopped—not inside our homes and not in the external world, where the homeless survive at the mercy of more or less planned neglect, more or less police brutality, more or less charity. Home-sheltered, we realize that what the current state of emergency declares, above all, is not respect for life given that in the emergency; the death of disenfranchised populations is not even a question for capital and power to contemplate for even a second. Mostly, what the emergency allows is the issuing of permissions to move: who, when, how, and where. A choreopolicing that certainly prepares already the terrain for the kinetic future of populations, in a supposedly “post-pandemic” world.”
André Lepecki is Full Professor and Chairperson at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University. Editor of several anthologies on dance and performance theory including Of the Presence of the Body (2004) and Dance (2012). He has curated projects for HKW-Berlin, MoMA-Warsaw, MoMA PS1, Hayward Gallery, Haus der Künst-Munich, Sydney Biennial 2016, among others. Selected lectures include the Gauss Seminar at Princeton University, Brown University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales – Paris, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Freie Universität – Berlin, Universidade de Lisboa, Roehampton University. Author of Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement (2006, translated into thirteen languages) and of Singularities: dance in the age of performance (2016). AICA-US award “Best Performance” 2008 for co-curating and directing Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. In the 1980s and 1990s he was dramaturge for Vera Mantero, João Fiadeiro, Francisco Camacho and Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, with whom he learned to think about dance and performance. Since 2003, he collaborates with several actions by Eleonora Fabião.
Open Call for Participation
The event will be held in Portuguese and have a limited number of participants. To register, applicants should send an e-mail to unsafeseries@gmail.com, from which they will then receive the final instructions to join in the online talk.
Organization: Maíra Santos & Gustavo Vicente (Centro de Estudos de Teatro – Universidade de Lisboa)
Date: 5 May 2021, 17h30-19h30/Lisbon time (WET, GMT+1)
Online conference platform: Zoom
(Un)safe Conversations is a series of online talks with invited artists, scholars, and free thinkers about the study of the arts. This is one of the Centre for Theatre Studies’ strategies to look for new forms of togetherness and collective thinking in the current social situation while maintaining a provocative stream of academic discussions.
