Performing Thought, Thinking Performance – one-day public symposium

A one-day public symposium devoted to testing the potential and limits of the reciprocal engagement between theory and artistic practice. Reflecting on recent research on musical and theatrical performance, the symposium will ask whether the presentation of theory in performative terms might be matched by an understanding of performance as a mode of thought, a way of thinking.

Performing Thought, Thinking Performance features keynote presentations by composer and writer David Toop and theatre theorist Jennifer Parker-Starbuck. Cork ensemble The Quiet Club joins David Toop in a lunchtime performance of his piece FLAT TIME/sounding.

David Toop is Professor of Audio Culture and Improvisation at University of the Arts London. A composer/musician, author and curator, he has published five books, released eight solo albums and curated exhibitions Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, London, Playing John Cage at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Blow Up at Flat-Time House, London. He is currently writing Into the Maelstrom: Improvised Music and the Pursuit of Freedom.His opera Star-shaped Biscuit was performed as an Aldeburgh Music ‘Faster Than Sound’ project in September 2012.

Jennifer Parker-Starbuck is Reader in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University. She is author of Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and numerous articles and reviews inTheatre Journal, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory,International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and others. She is an Assistant Editor ofPAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.

Performing Thought, Thinking Performance is supported by a CACSSS Cross-School Initiative Award from the School of Music and Theatre, UCC.