Join staff and students from Royal Holloway’s Departments of Drama, Theatre & Dance, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, History and English for three days of interdisciplinary performance and empowering art making.
Activities place emphasis on collaborative action and creative communities. Come along to explore and explode intersections between power and knowledge, creativity and cultural activism, and performance and political dissent. The aims for the programme are to:
- Repower communities to speak out against political disengagement.
- Perform in ‘play conversations’ devised by theatre-makers working with intergenerational performers.
- Empower young people to critique the status quo.
- Engage with the revolutionary potential of the avant-garde imagination as a means to ‘reconstruct the universe’ (Futurist Manifesto).
- Overpower dominant structures of memory.
- Imagine alternative cultures of commemoration by rethinking the visual performance of monuments in space.
Thursday 12 March
Repower: Town Hall Meeting on Participation and Performance
Perform in ‘play conversations’ created by playwright Caridad Svich and use the structure of the town hall meeting to forge connections against political disengagement.
14.00 – 15.15: Take part in one-to-one installations followed by a performance of fragments of Caridad Svich’s powerful play about eco-fragility and polarised communities.
15.30 – 17.00: How does interaction make us feel? Join with small intergenerational groups to create interactive installations.
Friday 13 March
Empower: Avant-garde Activism, Propaganda, and Rebellion
12.00 – 15.00: Learn more about Dada and Futurism in a pop-up exhibition curated by school students. Join a creative practice session led by Royal Holloway’s departments of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and History. Draw on inspiration to make your own collage about art and power in the present day.
15.00 – 17.00: Power and Text
How do artists and writers work with language to draw attention to the power of words? Come along to a workshop with staff and students from Royal Holloway’s Poetics Research Centre. Explore artworks in Tate Modern’s collection and develop innovative strategies for writing your own texts in response.
Saturday 14 March
Overpower: Alternative Cultures of Memory and Commemoration
Address the power to ‘re-member’ and the potential of arts and performance practices as means to construct and create alternative collective memories.
12.00 – 13.00: Becoming-Animal
Explore the power dynamics of human relationships and the slowly decaying connections we have to animals by engaging with filmic work through optional writing, drawing and moving.
14.00 – 17.00: MonHumant – Alternative Cultures of Memory and Non-Material Commemoration
No matter how hard you try to forget - you are implicated, you are part of the MonHumant. Join students and performance-makers from Royal Holloway's department of Drama, Theatre and Dance to create non-material counter monuments for marginalized histories in direct response to Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus in the Turbine Hall.
About Royal Holloway, University of London
Royal Holloway, University of London was founded by two social reformers who pioneered the ideal of education and knowledge for all.
Royal Holloway has an emphasis on creative subjects, with outstanding teaching and research across the Schools of Performing and Digital Arts, Humanities, and Life Sciences and the Environment. We welcome students and academics from all over the world, ensuring an international and multi-cultural perspective within a close-knit community and historic campus just outside of London.
