In this Meet the Makers Conversation, Ira Brand will discuss her experience in making live, inter-disciplinary performances: from solo stage shows to one-to-one pieces, from duets to participatory work. Her process is one of using personal starting points to speak to wider social, political, and formal concerns. In recent years Ira has been exploring power,…

by Jenny Chan What does it mean to expand theatre studies into space? With this provocation, Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) initiated an interdisciplinary and explorative conversation with Felipe Cervera (UCLA), Vivian Appler (University of Georgia), and Xiao-Shan Yap (Utrecht University). The conversation began with the speakers’ individual presentations of their work, followed by an open-floor…

During the Transmission in Motion session on “Theater, Moon Studies, and Interplanetary Entanglements,” one sentence, spoken by Dr. Felipe Cervera, immediately activated me: “Why is theatre only about land politics?” The question lingered long after the session ended. It was striking not because it dismissed existing theatrical engagements with geopolitics, but because it exposed a…

Treating space as an object of inquiry within the Humanities may initially appear abstract (not to say absurd) – particularly when the focus shifts from science-fiction representations toward outer space itself: that is, toward our concrete interactions with and entanglements in the universe beyond Earth. However, as has been widely demonstrated, performances and performative actions…

How can a tiny model of the solar system reveal the responsibility involved in knowing? This question stayed with me after the Transmission in Motion seminar on Theatre, Moon Studies, and Interplanetary Entanglements. Planetary knowledge is often imagined as distant, even though it is always grounded in specific materials and forms of mediation. Charles LeDray’s…

When we hear the word extraterrestrial, we often think of aliens, visitors from another planet, another galaxy, another world. But as humans explore deeper into the vastness of space the question arises, are we not, to some extent, also extraterrestrial? Thinking about ourselves as extraterrestrial beings dissolves the false separation between Earth and outer space…

In his new book, Forty-Four Esolangs (MIT Press), Daniel Temkin challenges conventional definitions of language, code, and computer, showing the potential of esolangs—or esoteric programming languages—as pure idea art. The languages in this volume ask programmers to write code in the form of prayer to the Greek gods, or as a pattern of empty folders,…

In the workshop “Frogs and Clowns: An Object Orientation of Protest Today”, Anneke Jansen (Theatre Programming, SPOT Groningen) and Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University) introduced ‘object orientation’ as a collaborative method that initiates interdisciplinary conversations. By using an object as a starting point, researchers collectively reflect on what kinds of perspectives arise from their…

  What is a clown nose? Is it a nose or, rather, something that conceals your nose? Does this concealment make you a clown? My second coffee of the day has just kicked in, and I am ready to “unpack” the small spongy sphere in front of me. Soon enough, I am reminded of Dumit’s…

What do you think of when I mention a frog? A slimy green creature? A silly-looking jumping creature? A cute little dude on a leaf? Unless frogs are particularly scary to you, the idea of someone in an inflatable frog costume would probably be a mood-lifting sight, a welcome bit of silliness added to your…