SEA/WOMAN

A new laboratory research performance by Anna Furse, Athletes of the Heart, UK) in collaboration with Maja Mitic (DAH Teatar, Serbia) and Antonella Diana (Teatret OM, Denmark) based on Henrik Ibsen's 'The lady from the sea' (1888). The project is an AHRC/ACE funded project as part of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing's Fractured Narratives project. It has been touring in the UK and to Beirut, Lebanon

Staying in Touch

In this paper – that draws from and elaborates on a 2011 chapter ‘Being Touched’ – explores the touch sense today in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, from its cultural, physical, social, psychological affects and meanings as well as the semantics of the term itself in the English language and what this reveals. If as Classen proposes, touch might be the “hungriest sense of post modernity” (Classen, 2005, p.2) in normal society, during the pandemic this reached levels of global famine. Introducing Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on ‘haptic’ space and how they comprehend space as ‘smooth’ or ‘striated’ , I use their metaphors to compare and contrast two diametrically differing dance forms; classical ballet and Contact Improvisation (CI). The latter opens to discussion of Asian martial art forms that influenced the development of CI. I conclude with my central purpose in this piece: to suggest that touch, when read from an interdisciplinary perspective, might register as a sense with far-reaching significance beyond either its physiological or psychological connotations; and when practised professionally offers an alternative social model to hierarchical power relationships on the one hand, and might counter the undermining affect of a technological capitalist society on individual experience

Don Juan Who?

DON JUAN.WHO?/DON JUAN.KDO? in 2007 with Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana, Slovenia. It premiered in Ljubljana in September and previewed at The Shunt Vaults in London on October 2007. Produced by ArtsAgenda, Executive producer Mik Flood, further touring, including to the UK is planned for 2008 with FeEAST and beyond. For further information visit: www.athletesoftheheart.org where a link to the original Don Juan site can also be found

Cyber Studio

From a project concept by Anna Furse with Zeljko Hrs. The term 'cyber studio' was used by Anna Furse, Artistic Director of Athletes of the Heart, UK, who commissioned this programme to facilitate collaboration across 3 countries by a company of dispersed performers for the purposes of creating a text for her production DON JUAN.WHO?/DON JUAN.KDO? in 2007 with Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana, Slovenia. The 'Cyber Studio' assembled by Marko Plahuta was conceived to mimic all the requirements of an ideal theatrical research environment ie a space for live practice, a space to record and store such practice, a space for reflective writing and a facility for collecting research in various media. We also wanted to have a public face during our two year research process, which was our blog. The manual explains basic procedures to create an interactive, multiuser computer environment for collaboration in groups with an emphasis on live performance creation ( though it may be used simply for collective research and/or cyber-performance). It also details main software requirements for setting up such an environment. The purpose of the environment we created was to enable a group of artists scattered around the world to collaborate on a theatrical piece. In our project anonymity was essential in our collaborative online writing process. As was the possibility of storing our live writing sessions for future editing. We found the open source 'Upstage' programme extremely user friendly, and eventually worked more in the dialogue box than the stage, though avatars did assist in our 'masquerade'. The Studio provided: * Components of collaborative environment: Upstage - a tool for writing the show/ live improvisation and/or rehearsal * Blog - a multiuser blog that worked as a publishing platform for the authors and actors to publish their thoughts, comments, questions and creative material. * File repository (wiki) – a multiuser environment to store Word documents, pictures, movies and all material that for various reasons (size, ease of publishing, creative reasons) was not suitable for the blog

Convulsive Beauty

Introduction to Nobody Knows But Everybody Remembers by Mark Long - a biographical book on People Show, the UK's first performance art company

Don.Juan.Who?/ Don.Juan. Kdo?: From Cyberspace to Theatre Space

Like so many things we make, this project began with the smallest of ingredients – a word and a hunch. In 1997 I was in Vienna with a production I had directed for the city arts complex Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana. An adaptation of Peter Handke’s Kasper (Speech Torture), created in an ex-Yugoslav country with the brutal Balkan conflict still rattling on in the east. Our project referred to the rape camps, ethnic cleansing, as well as the rapid modernisation and Americanisation of former communist countries such as was evident in Slovenia. In one of many conversations during the process with one of the actors, Zeljko Hrs, about men and war and sexual politics, I learnt the word inat that translates amongst other things as ‘pugnacious male stubborn pride’ – the stuff of warmongering, by which Zeljko would explain how his former country had fallen apart

When We Were Birds

When We Were Birds (2012-13) dance theatre collaboration with Esther Linley. Graeme Miller and Lucy Cash (Centre of The Body, Goldsmiths) This project was triggered by Bruno Bettelheim’s controversial memoir/analysis of the loss of self in mass society, based on his incarceration in Buchenwald, The Informed Heart: ‘[…] a group of naked prisoners was about to enter the gas chamber […] the commanding SS officer learned that one of the women prisoners had been a dancer. So he ordered her to dance for him. She did and as she danced, she approached him, seized his gun, and shot him down. […] isn’t it probably that despite the grotesque setting in which she danced, dancing made her once again a person?’ When We Were Birds is a memory work: Overlapping personal with historical memory it explores how the body might be understood as constituting memory – a contested idea – and how the sense of self is deeply tied into embodied experience; it investigates the instability of memory as fact, ‘psychophysical’ memory and political history as a mnemonic backdrop to a shared childhood training with the Royal Ballet, and conforming to and resisting gender culture whilst the swinging sixties rocked. Research is empirical and interdisciplinary. Key consultants include Cambridge Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Nicola Clayton (bird memory specialist) and psychotherapist/cultural theorist Susie Orbach, representing two inconsonant theories of the Mind: neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Their contribution has enlightened the research question: What actually occurs in the mind-body when the older retired dancer re-members movement sequences performed decades earlier? Conceived and directed by Furse, the project has culminated in a duet performance premiered at Cantieri Culutrali Zisa, Palermo (2013) with a co-producer in Ireland (Create Ireland) and producer Paula Van Hagen. A solo version was performed at the Live Collision Festival, Dublin and GIFT Festival, Newcastle in 2014. The project is funded by ACE and supported by Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa

Shocks (To the System)

SHOCKS (TO THE SYSTEM) (or Dulce et Decorum 1 ) 2018 is a new live PERFORMANCE INSTALLATION project, created and directed by ANNA FURSE for and with staff and students of Edinburgh Napier University, together with musician/composer David Coulter (http://www.davidcoulter.co.uk/), and actor Jack Klaff. It is produced by Lynnette Moran (Live Collision: http://www.livecollision.com/ for Athletes of the Heart (http://www.athletesoftheheart.org). SHOCKS (TO THE SYSTEM) starts from the perspective that shellshock is in essence a form of male hysteria, a psychophysical response to trauma in which the body produces reaction and symptom without organic base. Hysteric symptoms were, according to Freud, evidence of unsuccessful repression: in the case of males returning from the horror of the trenches, thus the inability to repress the trauma of what they suffered and witnessed. Elaine Showalter argues that this form of male hysteria is a form of protest – against being warriors – and she has written provocatively and controversially about similar cases in the Gulf War when veterans would return with inexplicable lesions, rashes and other physical signs. In fact, the whole idea of male hysteria is provocative. The condition is associated with femininity rather than masculinity, women who, as Freud at first argued and then disavowed, have typically suffered from sexual abuse. The point about hysteria is that it is a condition in which the body speaks distress that cannot be uttered in its own semaphore, a language written-on- the-body 3 . What is remarkable in the war poets, is that they were able to write poems about what they saw, in short, were able to voice their rage and distress, yet still suffered from mental illness in response to the war. One might argue that this was connected to the pressure to uphold the whole ideology of military heroism, in the face of, and despite, the atrocity of war. The project will be researched and developed in consultation with medical experts working with PTS and with former military with first-hand experience of the condition. SHOCKS (TO THE SYSTEM) will be sited at Craiglockhart campus, formerly an asylum renowned for treating patients with ‘shell-shock’ in WW1, the most famous being the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon

Keynote Address: Performance in the Medical Gaze

Professor Anna Furse, FRSA, director/writer, introduces ways in which she has worked in medical environments and with medical professionals to develop performance projects which have focused on the ‘body spectacular’ through representation of the body from Renaissance Anatomical Art to Imaging Technologies. Q&A chaired by Ailbhe Murphy, Director, Creat

Interiority: an exploration of the inward gaze 3 interdisciplinary talks

INTERIORITY an exploration of the inward gaze Prompted by the idea that Shakespeare's soliloquies may have been influenced by public anatomical dissections in Renaissance London, INTERIORITY brings together artists with influential figures in medicine and anatomy, history, curation, philosophy, visual and cultural theory in three public talks to discuss the relationship between body and mind: how we imagine and experience our interior selves, and how this affects our way of expression in the world. Speakers include Dr Jorella Andrews, Annie Cattrell, Joanna Ebenstein, Jack Klaff, Prof Roger Kneebone, Prof Jonathan Sawday, Jenny Sealey MBE, Prof Susan Standring, Suba Subramaniam, Chitra Sundaram, Dr Mark Vernon and Dr Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim. Co-curated by Prof Anna Furse (The Centre of the Body, Goldsmiths, University of London/Athletes of the Heart) and Dawn Kemp (Director of Museums and Archives, The Royal College of Surgeons of England). Funded by the Wellcome Trust. Produced by Athletes of the Heart. Anatomy and Self Imagination and Self Psyche and Self Old Operating Theatre Museum Fri 15 Sept, 7-9pm Freud Museum London Sat 16 Sept, 1.30-3.30pm Freud Museum London Sat 16 Sept, 6.30-8.30pm Additional free event for Freud Museum audiences, Sat 16 Sept, 4-5pm: artist Bettina Von Zwehl discusses her work in portraiture. Tickets £10/£6 concs per event or £18/£15 concs for all events (includes entry to the Museums) at Eventbrite XXX. Places strictly limited. Earliest booking advised. www.athletesoftheheart.or