In this inexplicable state, this year's performance conference will be held as a condensed, internal event. Teachers, students and graduates will gather according to Home Front Command instructions and will learn together during the three planned days of the conference. Ticket holders for the conference events will be refunded.
The School of Visual Theater’s Performance Conference is returning for the 11th time. The conference is a platform for in-depth, collaborative thought and practice for artists, students and thinkers. Its goal is to explore and articulate key issues in the field of performance and live art. It includes three days of talks, workshops, tours, and nine premieres by the New Department artists at SVT. This year’s conference will take place around the theme of “Our Place.”
Our place is made of relationships and actions. Unlike the term “place”, which suggests a stable and absolute location, independent of us, in the concept of “Our Place” the dependence is the point of origin.
We think and speak about our place through actions that arise from our relationship with the place: leaving or abandoning a place, nurturing and putting down roots in a place, belonging to a place, estranging oneself or missing a place. The actions are conscious, emotional, physical. They are enacted upon us and upon the place, driven by relationships, creating relationships.
Our Place is the theme and reference point of this year’s Performance Conference. Performance is an opportunity for an action in Our Place, an invitation to think about it, and an invitation to create it. Together, we awaken the personal and emotional bonds that connect us to a place, allowing us to locate ourselves within it. We ask what emerges and accumulates in our relationship to it. We search for shared blind spots that exist in space and often relieve its burden. We cast doubt on the necessity of being in a place in order to define it as our own. We observe it from afar and up close, from a sense of estrangement and with a nostalgic gaze, through inner exile or migration from here to there.
We will wonder why Our Place holds onto locality and whether globality is possible. We’ll attempt to see a place through its layers and within its circles.The concrete, tangible, and realistic aspects of Our Place relate to the vitality and materiality of our own bodies. We will examine in what ways the body “takes place,” situates itself and moves, absorbing the components of the place, reacts to them, and shapes them. We will ask what is accomplished and continually redefined through the relationship between the body and place.
