Beckett's Spectral Silence: Breath and the Sublime

Of Samuel Beckett’s late plays, the one that most eloquently resists presentation, that retires from visibility, remaining almost completely hidden except for faint light and a brief cry over a glimpse of detritus is Breath. Though regarded as a ‘logical terminal point in Beckett’s writing for theatre’ when it appeared, it wrong-footed critical expectation, pointing instead to the much reduced plays of the 1970s. The paper examines Beckett’s Breath, theatre productions of the play––in particular that of Amanda Coogan––and the film version of Breath directed by Damien Hirst, in terms of Kant’s analytic of the sublime, in particular Kant’s idea of the sublime as that which is beyond the limits of size and representability. Drawing on Longinus, Lyotard and Derrida, the paper argues, through Beckett, for a reconfiguration of the sublime in terms of an absolute minimum

Vain Reasonings: Not I

A critical analysis of Samuel Beckett's play Not I that integrates the performative and the textual

Samuel Beckett and Sonic Art

The intermedial nature of Beckett’s corpus, and his innovative engagement with avant garde media––to the extent that his later prose and dramatic work compromise and transgress boundaries of genre and discipline––are significant determining factors that explain Beckett’s position as a key figure, and a vital force, for contemporary artists in the expanded field of visual and aural culture. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s “The Poetics of the Open Work” I argue that Beckett’s writing forms an opera aperta or “open” score for the compositional and performance strategies of contemporary sonic art, and that his engagement with sound and acts of listening complicates the relational and phenomenological interaction between bodies, objects and space which finds it most sustained exploration in contemporary sound art

Theatre and Installation: Perspectives on Beckett

The article explores the intersections between drama, live performance and the visual arts with specific reference to the aesthetics of installation art and the importance of site in selected productions and stage adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s drama for theatre and radio by contemporary Irish companies, Pan Pan Theatre and Company SJ. These productions extend the boundaries of theatre and engage with modalities of installation art that lend new perspectives to contemporary theatre. The intermedial condition of contemporary art, performance practice and theatre-making opens a new site for the production of theatre, and of art. By considering Beckett through the lens of installation we can better understand what is radical in his theatre, and consider the extent to which the strategies of installation art inform what is most complex and radical in contemporary theatre

Adjacency

Adjacency [the quality or state of being adjacent, or of lying near, bordering] What are the implications of a Hard Border for Northern Ireland? How will increased border controls affect the peace process? Adjacency takes materials from the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday 1972 to examine contested truths in the context of ‘adjacency’ understood as ‘lying near, bordering’. In a series of paintings the exhibition examines the uncertain relation between topography and cartography, between narrative and the event, within contested boundaries destabilised by an uncertain Brexit

Public Policy Engagement in the Arts and Humanities: Skills and Strategies

Public Policy Engagement: Skills and Strategies is an AHRC funded training course delivered by Goldsmiths, University of London, on behalf of CHASE, the Consortium of the Humanities and the Arts South-east England. Public Policy Engagement: Skills and Strategies will give participants an enhanced understanding of how public policy is developed and how research in the arts and humanities can influence and inform public policy. It is aimed at Doctoral Candidates and Early Career Researchers. Through a range of roundtable discussions with academics working in a broad range of the arts and humanities disciplines, non-HEI professionals working in the area of policy making and influence, and through action learning sets, participants will learn how they can develop the skills to effectively engage with public policy developments and understand how their research can be mobilised to impact on public policy, and to plan for, and evidence, that impact

Beckett, Feldman, Salcedo… Neither

Drawing together prose, music and sculpture, the paper investigates the role of nothing by way of three works called Neither: Beckett’s short text (1976), Morton Feldman’s opera (1977), and Doris Salcedo’s sculptural installation (2005). Columbian artist Doris Salcedo’s work explores the politics of absence, particularly in works such as Unland: Irreversible Witness (1995–98) which acts as a sculptural witness to the disappeared victims of war. Her installation Neither draws on both Feldman’s music and Beckett’s text, creating a sculpture that has much in common with the negative spaces of Beckett’s theatre. American composer Morton Feldman’s Neither has been called an ‘anti-opera’, a stripped down, minimalist monodrama. Feldman compares his opera with Beckett’s text as ‘really the same thought said in another way’. Taking Feldman’s quotation as a starting point, the paper explores the traces left in the move from one genre to another. It elaborates the minimalism of Beckett’s later work and explores the ways in which this aesthetic has significantly influenced contemporary music and fine art, arguing that Morton’s music and Salcedo’s sculpture make manifest Beckett’s ‘unheard footfalls only sound’