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Workshop 2

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Remnants, Revenants, and Remembrances - A Workshop with Margrit Shildrick and Richard Gough

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Location: CACSSS Seminar Room ORB (O'Rahilly Building), room G27

Date and time: 31st October -     9am - 10:30am - A workshop with Professor Margrit Shildrick

                                                    11am - 1pm - A workshop with Professor Richard Gough

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This second workshop in the series Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland will begin by returning to some of the themes explored in the September workshop, Social Imaginaries of the Dead, and especially the paper presented by Margrit Shildrick (University of Stockholm). In this paper, (available at https://livingwithdead.wixsite.com/website/events), Margrit proposes a response informed by Derridean hauntological ethics to the current public disquiet in Ireland about the dead from so-called Mother and Baby Homes, who are not resting in peace.   

 

This will be followed by a highly illustrated presentation by Richard Gough (University of South Wales) that will seek to tease some skeletons out of the closet with regard to performance and death; refocusing a late 20thcentury obsession with ‘live performance’ to a reconsideration of ‘dead performance’ and the performances of the dead. Emerging from the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo (site of his first encounter with skeletons), haunting crypts and graveyards, this talk will evoke a Commedia dell’morte, processional celebrations in Days of the Dead, the short life of a production he directed titled The Funeral (Death of a Fishmonger), and his installation work on Still Lives (Nature Morte,) and performative banquets in a series of Last Suppers. 

 

He will then consider the memorialization of life in granite, metal and marble, and the rise and fall of statues. First the permanent residents in some of the great cemeteries of Europe, the game of statues (with and without music) and then the decline and fall of civic statues, (effigies, figures, icons). The revisioning of history, the regime changes, revolution and repudiation, that bring about the dismantling and destruction of monuments that embody the dead, that have out-lived their moment. He will attempt to breathe life into Holbein’s etchings and once again dance with The Dance of Death.

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Richard Gough Biography

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Richard Gough is Artistic Director of the Centre for Performance Research (CPR) and Professor of Music & Performance in the Faculty of Creative Industries at the University of South Wales, Cardiff, Wales, UK. He has dedicated the last forty years to developing and exploring interdisciplinary, experimental performance work.

 

As Artistic Director of CPR and its predecessor Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, he has curated and organized numerous international theatre projects including conferences, summer schools and workshop festivals, and he has produced nationwide tours of experimental theatre and traditional dance/theatre ensembles from around the world. He has directed over seventy productions, many of which have toured Europe, and he has lectured and led workshops throughout Europe and in China, Japan, USA, Colombia and

Brazil. He was founding President (1997-2001) of Performance Studies international (PSi) and directed the 5th PS Conference in 1999. He is the General Editor and co-founder of Performance Research (The Journal of Performance Arts published eight issues annually by Routledge, Taylor & Francis), and is publisher and series editor of Black Mountain Press and Performance Research Books. He has written several chapters in recent publications and co-edited A Performance Cosmology – the 30th year anniversary book of CPR published by Routledge (2006).

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Margrit Shildrick

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Margrit Shildrick is currently Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies at Stockholm University, and Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto. Her research covers postmodern feminist and cultural theory, bioethics, critical disability studies and body theory. Her books include Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, (Bio)ethics and Postmodernism, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self and Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Sexuality and Subjectivity, as well as edited collections and many journal articles.