"Performance Architectures, Wearables & Gestures of Participation"

International Metabody Forum/Artaud Forum 5

Brunel University London

Antonin Artaud Performance Centre

Thursday, 7 April: Symposium 16:oo - 2o:oo

International  Laboratory

Friday and Saturday, April 8- 9, 2016

Call for submissions and enrolment in artistic–research workshop & symposium, followed by performances, exhibitions and screenings, and training classes in immersion performance

Please send abstracts (300 words plus bio) or proposals for installations, provocations, film, or performance, by 25 February 2016, to

Johannes Birringer 


johannes.birringer@brunel.ac.uk

The context for this international workshop, the fifth Artaud Forum held at Brunel University, is the collaborative European project “Metabody” which works to redefine bodies in media, performance and design. Over the past few years, ‘Metabody’ has developed new architectures and immersive environments which behave like living organisms that have an auditory, visual, and tactile sensory quality, with subtly changing states and affordances, they can be worn and breathed, felt and imagined, transported and taken off.

We invite participants to join us and work with these concepts of integrative tactile experience, kinetic atmospheres, multiperspectival space, and unconscious perception.

‘Metabody’ counteracts dominant technologies and their prevalent tendency to negate differences by reducing bodies and movements to prescribed forms in current surveillance culture. ‘Metabody’ emphasizes openness, and indeterminacy of embodied expressions as a key factor for a sustainable society. This project also foregrounds the need for a new politics. The workshop & performance laboratory probes troubling interpretations of the increasing unrestrainment of capital, and capitalism’s impact on all social-economic, cultural, creative, and educational sectors in a shared developed world now expanded by massive migration and refugee movement. The sustainability of democracy is an urgent theme for all those in the performing arts/creative fields becoming intensely aware of the multiplication of realities (virtualization; networked infrastructures, diasporas) and the tightening of our bodies into technological environments. This is a call for peripheral perception in existential experience.

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Our theatre and studio spaces will be available for physical and conceptual workshop encounters over a period of three days (Thursday through Saturday, April 7-9), including public performances, exhibitions, screenings, and urban situations.

The fee for the three-day public event is £ 75  (£ 60 concession) for the whole, or £ 30 (£ 20 concession) per day.