Full Schedule and Abstracts now online.
Keynote Address
Professor Gay McAuley: Haunting Places: On Not Finding Closure.
Some places are haunted, others are haunting. In so many places in this world, atrocities have been committed and people must nevertheless try to continue to live their lives in places marked by trauma. This paper, drawing on my experience as a migrant in Australia, deals with the ways in which people in that country are beginning to remember the violence committed in the places they now occupy and with the responsibilities people in the present bear for violence committed in the past. I am interested in the role of place in these processes of remembering (and forgetting) for it is both an inconvenience to those who would prefer to deny and forget and, potentially, a source for reconciliation and healing.
I describe a number of instances of what can be termed ‘memory work,’ photographic installations, performance works and community memorialisation projects, and extend my analysis with some reflections on the kinds of remembering that are appropriate in the face of great suffering. Between denial and depression (two of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief that I suggest are equally applicable to collective grieving), these works suggest possibilities of social action that permit the past to resonate in the present without imposing closure where no closure is morally possible.
Gay McAuley is Honorary Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. She is a leading figure in the development of Performance Studies in Australia, and has made significant contributions to performance analysis, rehearsal studies, documentation and performance, and reception studies. Her recognition of the importance of space and spatial function in theatrical meaning-making has been especially influential, and her book Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre was published in 1999. It won the Rob Jordan Prize awarded by the Australasian Drama Studies Association. Between 2001 and 2005 she convened an interdisciplinary research group on Place and Performance, and edited the collective volume emerging from the group’s work (Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place, 2006). Her current research concerns the relationship between place, performance and collective memory. Her new book is entitled Not Magic But Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process (Manchester UP, forthcoming May 2012).
The program also includes a variety of panels, interviews, performances (on- and off-site), and discussions, as well as social events. Download the draft schedule and booklet of abstracts for full details.