21st Century Research Group | 13th Dec

The final 21st Century Research Group of the semester is on Wednesday 13th December, 4-5.30pm, MB1019. This is a seminar hosted jointly with the Contemporary Playwriting Research Group.

We have an excellent external speaker from the University of Birmingham – Dr Cristina Delgado-García – speaking to us about ordinary people, labour and artistic practice. Full details below. All staff and students are very welcome to attend.

Title: Labours Lost: Aesthetic Populism and the Problem of Work in Contemporary Delegated Performance

Abstract: Scholarship on delegated performance has begun to unpick the complex relationship between work and this mode of artistic practice, particularly around areas such as emotional labour, outsourcing, voluntarism, or the valorisation of professional expertise (Austin and Bishop 2009; Bishop 2012; Harvie 2013). Building on these contributions, this talk aims to take a step back and probe the self-evident nature of labour in delegated performance. If this is a form of artistic practice in which ‘everyday people are hired to perform on behalf of the artist’ (Bishop 2012: 4), might there be forms of labour that are naturalised or occluded – just like in the everyday? What is the work involved in naturalising one’s work or the work of others? What work does that do? Examining recent instruction-based shows by European practitioners, this presentation considers the labours lost to our spectatorial experiences of delegated performances, and what these may reveal about labour, everyday life, and the contemporary penchant for what I call ‘aesthetic populism’.

Cristina Delgado-García is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Birmingham. Her first monograph, Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics, Subjectivity, was published in 2015. Cristina is currently working on a second monograph on the theatre of Tim Crouch, and collaborating on an international research project entitled ‘British Theatre in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis, Affect, Community’, funded by the Spanish government until 2020. She is co-convenor of the Political Performances Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR).