Every-Body; Impacted-Body: Spectatorship, Carnival and Abramović

Every-Body; Impacted-Body: Spectatorship, Carnival and Abramović explored key question in how performative and participatory strategies may provide new insights into the experience of of spectatorship and the body. The event was centred around two projects, each focusing on the role of creative practice as a vehicle for research in this area of exploration.

In this online seminar, John Keefe and Richard Cuming examined the visceral impact and exchange between the performed body and the spectator’s body in two recent events curated by Marina Abramović in London. The first was the Marina Abramović Institute Takeover, (October 2023), the second the Royal Academy retrospective (September 2023- January 2024).

Drawing on an auto-ethnographic approach, Keefe and Cuming approached the events as spectators and as participants: as Augusto Boal’s (1973) “spect-actors”. Our bodies impacted by the artists’, the artists’ bodies impacted by the spectators.

This ‘impact’ was mediated by the ‘carnivalesque’. In essence, the takeover of the Queen Elizabeth Hall as an 'entire space’ became a carnival in itself, problematising the notion of ‘performance’.

Speakers:

Dr John Keefe is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University. His research centres on dramaturgies of physical theatres, of spectatorships, of ethics and theatres, of the ‘new’ and re-cycling, of the embodied mind. His latest publication is Qualified Empathy: The Spectator Looking/Not Looking Away (2024).

Dr Richard Cuming was formerly at the University of Winchester, now an independent scholar. His research focuses particularly on the synthesis of the practices of the clown with contemporary performance. He has published on the work of Jacques Lecoq, on clown training with acrobat Johnny Hutch, on Beckett’s ‘Film’. In these endeavours he adopts a ‘clown’s eye’ view.