Research Seminar, Wednesday 10 June 2024, 4.00-5.30 pm, Rehearsal Room

Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal and Shane Boyle, ‘One for the money, two for the show’:Taylor Swift as Commercial Infrastructure

Show business is big business. Nothing exemplifies this truism more today than the industry that is Taylor Swift. But what kind of business is show business exactly? What does the business of putting on a grand performance, like Swift’s ongoing international “Eras Tour,” share with other capital-intensive commercial undertakings? This talk proposes a definition of commercial performance as a form of show business geared, first and foremost, to circulation. Commercial performances, we contend, have the capacity to move but are also defined through the particular way they abet and depend on the circuit of capital.

Our paper considers what Swift can tell us about how commercial capitalism operates today. To do this requires taking seriously both the role of performance in the “Eras Tour”, but also all of the material infrastructure it demands—the trucks, the planes, the stadiums, the workers, the supply chains, and more. In addition, this paper will explore how the profitability of huge musical tours like Swift’s are increasingly reliant on fan-maintained digital and physical infrastructures which aid their continued success and circulation. Contrary to those who emphasise the ephemerality and dematerialised quality of performance commodities, we insist on attending to the significance of the capital-intensive infrastructure on which commercial performance depends.

While written and presented by Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal and Shane Boyle, this talk draws on conversations and collective writing with colleagues who, for the past 18 months, have been collectively researching commercial performance.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 24 April 2024, 12.00-1.00 pm, Microsoft Teams

Soo Ryon Yoon, “Crazy Dance” in Cold War Inter-Asia:Ch'angmuhoe and Temporality of Korean Dance in the 1986 Hong Kong Festival of Asian Arts

This talk explores temporality in the choreographic experimentation of Korean dance company Ch’angmuhoe (창무회) and its 1986 performance in Hong Kong. Analyzing administrative documents, magazine and newspaper reviews, interviews, and dance movement descriptions, I discuss how the potential for inter-Asia relations manifested during the late Cold War years through the question of what defined post-Cold War contemporary Korean, Hong Kong, and Asian dance.

Korean dance company Ch'angmuhoe’s 1986 performance at the Hong Kong Festival of Asian Arts was hailed by the local media as a “crazy dance” for its original styles. While it was certainly not the first nor the last time for a Korean dance company to visit Hong Kong, Ch’angmuhoe’s presentation ofch'angjakch'um(창작춤) or “tradition-based choreographed dance” (as opposed to a reproduced traditional repertoire) for the first time in Hong Kong and Asia warrants a closer look. The political implications of this go beyond the formalistic significance: Ch'angmuhoe’s new style of traditional movement-based choreography raised a question of what defined contemporary Korean and Asian dance different from the essentialist representations of the folk and tradition. As such, Ch'angmuhoe’s show exemplified late Cold War ambivalence in cultural practices. A Cold War liberal democracy “alliance” was activated through promoting the “progressive” arts against the “outdated” aesthetic expressions of the Communist Bloc. Yet the political affinities with Euro-American hegemony were complicated by the efforts to seek new forms of expressions away from cultural essentialism frequently mobilized as an important repertoire in the US-sponsored Cold War campaigns in Asia.

I argue that studying these late Cold War dance exchanges and policies helps us revise the existing narrative of how contemporary Asian dance and its transnational relations came about only after the mid-1990s. In light of this, I also demonstrate that Ch’angmuhoe’s case of the Hong Kong performance interrogated contemporaneity of Korean dance beyond the binary opposition of the Western and the Eastern Blocs, laying a foundation for imagining a future inter-Asia dance network.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Wednesday 28 February 2024, 12.00-1.00 pm, Microsoft Teams

Ameet Parameswaran, Theatricality, Passion and Tragic: Thinking though Theatre in times of Authoritarian State

The two-year national Emergency (1975-77) that curtailed the fundamental rights of people and the contemporary period in India are often seen in relation to each other. Both periods are marked by the excessive authoritarianism of the state, with the contemporary often said to be the period of ‘undeclared emergency’ or a continuation and intensification of the processes inaugurated in the earlier period. One of the key political issues that such authoritarianism presents is censorship in the form of banning and arrests or unleashing of physical violence on performers and spectators as well as the saturation of the public sphere by state rhetoric that erases and prohibits in complex fashion the representation of oppression and suffering. Foregrounding theatricality as a complex site for engagement with authoritarian regimes, the paper interrogates the ‘productive’ aspect of censorship even as it is prohibitive. Drawing on examples across the two time-periods, the paper explores the strategies of engagement with and the new aesthetics emerging from this condition, and how these works necessitate a complex conceptualisation of passion and the tragic.

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk