Papers presented in Brighton, 17th September

As part of our week-long Following the Affective Turn Symposia, we are delighted to share a selection of the papers presented as part of the in-person event on the 17th September in Brighton, with thanks to the presenters who rerecorded their presentations to be uploaded here.

Abstract

My paper will offer preliminary reflections on interviews I am conducting with contemporary performance practitioners based in the UK. These interviews are exploring the links between affective moments of process (making of performances) and affective moments of performance (presenting of performances). The practitioners I am interviewing are Lucy McCormick, Christopher Brett Bailey, and three collaborative ‘companies’: In Bed With My Brother, Sleepwalk Collective and Nigel&Louise. These artists all established themselves, like myself, in a decade of austerity that saw increasing cuts to the arts, increasing labour precarity, and arguably a corresponding renewed interest in - and prevalence of - political protest both on stage and in wider society.

Some questions the paper will begin to address with recourse to interview findings:

How have the changes and climate of the last decade impacted the work of these artists?
What does it feel like to work on the margins of a marginal and increasingly marginalised industry/artform?
How does that affective working experience impact the work itself?
To what extent might this research suggest a new politics of theatre-making or even a new political theatre?
How do these working experiences connect with existing critiques of affect and labour politics in the arts, such as the critiques of Shannon Jackson, Jen Harvie, Nicholas Ridout, Bojana Kunst and Lauren Berlant? My hypothesis is that there are some nuances and patterns emerging through these interviews that the prevalent critiques in this field do not account for, even as these theorists’ methods and frameworks provide the basis for this ongoing research.

As Tim was unable to attend the in-person event in Brighton to present this paper, he has kindly recorded it to present virtually here.

Tim Cowbury is a theatre-maker, writer, and teacher. As co-founder of contemporary performance company Made In China, he has created acclaimed works performed across the UK and internationally. His playwriting has been staged at venues including Young Vic, Crucible Theatre and Royal Exchange Theatre, and is published by Oberon Books. Tim teaches in community and education settings across the UK and is currently working on his Techne AHRC funded PhD into the politics of alternative theatre at Royal Holloway University of London.

'"Sitting in a rehearsal room looking at fucking little bits of paper and just feeling sick" as politically generative affect? Interviews with contemporary British theatre-makers'

Tim Cowbury (Royal Holloway)

'Clarifying the amorphous rhythms of Tourette Syndrome'

Daniel Jones (Newcastle University)

Daniel Jones (he|him) is an artist and PhD researcher at Newcastle University, who is conducting research into the embodied experiences of public space through the lens of Tourette Syndrome. Drawing upon emotion, affect, and non-representational theory. Other academic interests include creative methods, crip studies, and post-phenomenology. He has been an activist and facilitator within the UK Tourettic community for many years, with his work including the facilitation of online safe-space forums, educational guest speaking, and mentorship.

Abstract

Characterised by uncontrollable vocal and motor manifestations referred to as tics, Tourette Syndrome is something viewed by many as a disability that renders the individual’s body abundant with chaos, lacking any rhythm and order upon first glance. Movements and vocal outbursts may not initially appear to make sense or to have any logic grounding, but what does this supposed lack of order bring to light about bodily rhythm and impulse when considering the tourettic tic? Drawing upon the work of Manning (2009), particularly that found in Relationscapes, this paper seeks to consider her approach to ideas surrounding the elasticity of almost in relation to bodily rhythm, attempting to assess the extent to which the supposed amorphous rhythm of Tourette Syndrome is one that is valid in its staccato and anti-metric nature. The paper concludes by considering what the implications are for the consideration of other, non-tourettic amorphous rhythms of the body as a result of approaching bodily rhythm and chaos from the perspective of Tourette Syndrome.

'Feeling and Writing in Suspension: Waiting in COVID-19 Shopping Queues'

Victoria J. E. Jones (Durham University)

I am a conceptual artist and Cultural Geography researcher currently undertaking a non-practice based PhD in the Geography department at Durham University. My study, ‘The New Spaces of Waiting: A Geography of Feeling’, examines how the practice of waiting is embodied, with a particular focus on the new forms of waiting created by the COVID 19 pandemic. It attempts to move forward conceptualisations of waiting as an interruption, towards considering waiting as a form of affective-sensorial-material feeling. It is intended that the study will have impact within and outside the mobilities literature.

Abstract

The COVID-19 virus and subsequent UK national lockdown were a catalyst for new practices of waiting, influencing how people interacted within retail shopping queues. Social distancing created new forms of affective, bodily and material presences. This paper focuses on a phenomenon, a particular form of waiting observed in twenty two shopping queues during lock down in the North East of England, UK. Waiting practices formed through the COVID-19 lockdown, opened new forms of feeling, requiring new forms of articulation. As such the paper is an experiment with language and form speculatively describing feelings, sensations, materialities and temporalities, through a metaphor, fluid suspension. Initially the paper outlines what waiting is and does in order to provide a touchstone when considering the feelings shaped within new forms of waiting. It will then outline and consider what fluid suspension can open as a writing device. Then working with fluid suspension and the work of queer and cultural theorists, the paper elucidates concepts of surface and viscosity in order to describe the morphologies of mood and sensation felt and shared whilst waiting within COVID-19 shopping queues.

'The Cultural Politics of Rurality: towards emotional space'

Joe Jukes (University of Brighton)

Joe Jukes is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender, University of Brighton. Their research investigates both rural and nonsexual forms of queerness, and hence questions how one can feel ‘queer’ differently.

Joe is interested in queer theory, queer ethnography and becoming-based understandings of space. As such they co-convene the Queer Geographies PGR reading group, as well as the AHRC-funded research project Following the Affective Turn. They co-chair the forthcoming PGR conference Outside/rs 2022, have curated the exhibition Queer Constellations (2021) at the Museum of English Rural Life, and can be found on Twitter @jsdjukes

Abstract

The rural is a tough place to pin down, especially for the purposes of research. As discussed by Gray et al. (2016), the countryside is simultaneously everywhere (a vast expanse) and (the middle of) nowhere, it is quintessentially English yet also consigned to its past, and it shrinks (as a proportion of the population) at the same time that it grows (in raw population). This contradictory character lends the rural an ill-defined, we might say queer, ontology.

This paper explores the categorical limits of ‘rural’ when it comes to research, and posits an affective and emotional approach to rurality. I experiment with ‘rural feelings’ and ‘a sense of rural’ as alternatives for understanding non-metropolitan space, belonging and relationality. By extension, I suggest that an emotionally-attuned approach to space is important for understanding how space itself ‘becomes’.

Following Ahmed’s (2014) Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explore a selection of emotions which might comprise a rural mode of feeling, and further elaborate upon how a sense of rural ‘becomes’ out of the mobilities, circulations and queerings (Ahmed, 2006) of these given affects. I do this to underscore how spatial becoming is an erotic and affective process that is non-teleological, rooted in the gesture of ‘surprise’. Hence, emotional spaces theoretically exceed the limits of purely representational or phenomenological definitions of space.