Acts of Memory: Act 21

Performance Research Vol 6. No. 1. Spring 2001

Departures

The first of three related issues which engage with the migrations of people, performance and performance cultures, generating writing around differing geographies and histories of travel and travelling performance in a diversity of written and visual forms.

Leaving Berlin : On the Performance of Monumental Change

Nicolas Whybrow

pp. 37 – 45

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert-the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves-Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

This title offers the gender-bending performances of Dlane Torr, creator of the Man for a Day workshops. This book documents and contextualizes the development of Torr’s internationally celebrated workshops, as well as her own ongoing experiments in performing gender-play in theaters, galleries, and clubs.

This article presents the research and performance practice behind ‘The Performing Solidarity Project’.

Based on real events, The Island Nation is a visceral, revelatory new play by Christine Bacon, artistic director of the pioneering human rights theatre company ice&fire.

Featuring conversations, essays, drawings and photographs, Bodies of Knowledge(Ed. Laura Purseglove) reflects and builds on an interdisciplinary project involving artists, amateur and professional dancers, wrestlers, members of a trans community group and academic researchers interrogating how our bodies are both produced by and productive of knowledges.

We need to talk about racial injustice in a different way: one that builds on the revolutionary ideas of the past and forges new connections.

In this incisive, radical and practical essay, Emma Dabiri – acclaimed author of Don’t Touch My Hair – draws on years of research and personal experience to challenge us to create meaningful, lasting change.

Video documentation of the book launch, as part of LADA Screens. Includes 4 videos.

Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture.

The first substantial survey of its kind, the publication brings together documentation of performances, drawings, videos, installations, and sculptures, as well as writings, interviews and visual essays by the artist. A series of commissioned critical essays show her to be a prolific maker of acts, objects, and multiple ‘selves’.

Delves into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered “doors”—entrances to visibility and recognition—that are actually “traps,” accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

Follows two nurses, both named Jackie, who create biographical slideshows for patients as a tool for reflection on posthumous digital legacies, withdrawal, friendships, cultural and social loss, and memory as identity.

Part of LADA Screens 11. The film was available online 16-29 May 2016 on the LADA Screens Channel. Includes a  compilation of episodes 1 – 7, split into two files.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041).