Ulas Aktas is cultural anthropologist and musician. Since 2009 he is
associate researcher at the Hochschule für Musik und
Darstellende
Kunst Frankfurt on the Main. He studied sociology at the Free
University Berlin. He completed his PhD on the concept of mood in 2009.
He pursues interdisciplinary scientific theory in tensional relation
with the following perspectives:
- in view of the importance of the body in the technological and social
transformation processes of present time (body thinking),
- with regard to the exploitation of 'nature' for the negativity of the
political (negative thinking),
- in view of the importance of audiovisual media for the cultural and
imaginative reproduction of the social (image thinking),
- in view of the importance of the "sex" for the reproduction of power
within society (gender thinking),
- with regard to the meaning of post-historical civilizatory processes
for the further development of the creature called "human" (creature
thinking),
- in view of the importance of critical social theory for the
maintenance of a thinking that assumes from the suffering (critical
thinking).
Selected recent publications: Stimmung: Die Ästhetik
kulturaler Sphären. Berlin: sine causa, 2010.
“In die Musik – um die Musik – im die
Musik herum.” Improvisation VI,
Ed. Walter Fähndrich. Winterthur: Amadeus, 2007. n.pag.
“Zu
Besuch bei den Zeugen des Anderen.” Plateau 4 (2008): n.pag.
Friedrich Balke (Weimar)
Friedrich Balke is Professor for the History and Theory of Artifical
Worlds at the Media Faculty, Bauhaus-University Weimar and spokesperson
of the DFG-Graduate Center “Media of History –
History of
Media”. His areas of teaching and research focus on the
cultural
history of political sovereignty, governmentality and modern
biopolitics, interrelations of media and forms of knowledge, aesthetic
theory and French philosophy. He has held visiting professorships at
Columbia University, in the Departement of Germanic Languages and
Literatures, and at the University of Konstanz, in the Research
Initiative “Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political
Imaginary”. Friedrich Balke’s books include Der
Staat nach seinem Ende: Die Versuchung Carl Schmitts.
Munich: Fink, 1996. Gilles Deleuze. Frankfurt: Campus, 1998.
Figuren der Souveränität. Munich: Fink,
2007 and Friedrich Balke, Harun Maye, and Leander Scholz eds. Ästhetische
Regime um 1800. Munich: Fink, 2008.
Gabriele Brandstetter (Berlin)
Gabriele Brandstetter is Professor for Theatre and Dance Studies at FU
Berlin. Her research focuses on the history and aesthetics of dance
from the 18th century to the present; theatre and dance in modernity
and avant-garde; contemporary theatre, dance and performance;
theatricality and gender difference; virtuosity in art and culture;
body -- image -- movement. Recent publications include: Bild-Sprung:
TanzTheaterBewegung im Wechsel der Medien. Berlin: Theater
der Zeit, 2005. Brandstetter, Gabriele, Bettina Brandl-Risi, and Kai
van Eikels, eds. Schwarm(E)Motion:
Bewegung zwischen Affekt und Masse. Freiburg: Rombach, 2007.
Brandstetter, Gabriele, and Christoph Wulf, eds. Tanz als
Anthropologie. München: Fink, 2007. Boehm,
Gottfried, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Achatz von Müller, eds. Figur
und Figuration: Studien zu Wahrnehmung und Wissen. München:
Fink, 2007. Brandstetter, Gabriele, and Sybille Peters, eds. Szenen
des Vorhangs – Schnittflächen der Künste,
Freiburg: Rombach, 2008. Brandstetter, Gabriele, Sybille Peters, and
Kai van Eikels, eds. Prognosen über Bewegungen,
Berlin: bbooks, 2009.
Ramsay Burt (Leicester)
Ramsay Burt is Professor of Dance History at De Montfort University.
His publications include The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle,
Sexualities.
London: Routledge, 1995, revised 2007. Alien Bodies: Representations of
Modernity, "Race" and Nation in early Modern Dance. London: Routledge,
1998. Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces.
London: Routledge, 2006. And, Briginshaw, Valerie, and Ramsay Burt. Writing
Dancing Together. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. In 1999 he was Visiting Professor at
the Department of Performance Studies, New York University. With Susan
Foster, he is founder editor of Discourses in Dance.
Bojana Cvejić (Brussels)
Bojana Cvejić is performance maker and theorist, working in
contemporary dance and performance also as dramaturg and performer. She
has published in performing arts, music, philosophy journals, magazines
and anthologies and is author of two books, most recently Beyond
the Musical Work: Performative practice. Belgrade: IKZS,
2007. With Jan Ritsema she has developed a theater practice in a number
of performances since 1999 (a.o. TODAYulysses,
2000), and has collaborated with X. Le Roy, E. Salamon, M. Ingvartsen
a.o. Her own performance work includes directing five experimental
opera performances, most recently Mozart’s Don
Giovanni
(BITEF, Belgrade). Cvejić has been active in teaching in a number of
European educational programmes (e.g., P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels), as well
as organizing independent platforms for theory and practice in
performance: TkH Centar (=Walking Theory Center in Belgrade), PAF
(performingARTSforum in St. Erme, France) and most recently
6MONTHS1LOCATION (CCN in Montpellier). She is currently writing a PhD
("Performance after Deleuze: Creating
‘Performative’
Concepts in Contemporary Dance in Europe ") at the Centre for Research
in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in London. Since
September 2009, she is teaching contemporary dance and performance at
the Utrecht University, M.A. program Theater Studies.
Mark Franko (Santa Cruz)
Mark Franko, Professor of Dance and Director of the Center for Visual
and Performance Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz,
is the editor of Dance Research Journal. He is a UC
President’s
Research Faculty Fellow in the Humanities for 2010-2011. In 2008 he was
Valeska Gert Visiting Professor for Dance And Performance at the
Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität
Berlin .
His publications include: Excursion for Miracles: Paul
Sanasardo, Donya Feuer, and Studio for Dance, The
Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s, Dancing
Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP,
1995 (1996 de la Torre Bueno prize Special Mention). Dance
as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1993, and The Dancing Body in Renaissance
Choreography. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1986. He
edited Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,
and co-edited Acting on the Past: Historical Performance
Across the Disciplines.
New York: Routledge, 2009. His choreography for NovAntiqua has been
seen since the 1980s at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, the
Berlin Werkstatt Festival, Getty Center, Montpellier Opera, Toulon Art
Museum, and Akademie der Künste (Berlin), and in New York and
San
Francisco venues. He is currently working on a book on Martha Graham.
Gabriele Klein (Hamburg)
Gabriele Klein, Sociologist, dance researcher, Professor at the
University of Hamburg, Director of
Performance Studies / Hamburg. Main research fields: dance studies,
sociology of body movements, sociology of culture and performing arts,
gender studies, urban sociology.
Publications include: Monographs (in german language): Klein, Gabriele.
Electronic Vibration: Pop Kultur Theorie. Wiesbaden:
VS, Verlag für Sozialwiss., 2004. Klein, Gabriele, and
Friedrich Malte. Is this real? Die Kultur des Hip Hop.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003. Frauenkörpertanz:
Eine Zivilisationsgeschichte des Tanzes. Berlin: Beltz
Quadriga, 1992. Anthologies: Ed. Tango in Translation: Tanz
zwischen Medien, Kulturen, Kunst und Politik. Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2009. Brandstetter, Gabriele, and Gabriele Klein, eds. Methoden
der Tanzwissenschaft. Modellanalysen zu Pina Bauschs “Le
Sacre du Printemps”. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007.
Bojana Kunst (Hamburg/Ljubljana)
Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, contemporary art theoretician and DAAD
visiting professor for Performance Studies at Hamburg University. She
was studying in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and currently works at the
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts. She began to work as a young
researcher in 1996 at the Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy -
Aesthetics. With the young researcher grant from the The Ministry of
Science and Technology of the Republic of Slovenia she completed in the
year 1988 her Master Degree in Philosophy with the thesis The
Problem of the Body in Theatre, Impossible Body. In the
year 2002 she complited and defended her Ph. D. dissertation with the
title Philosophy, Aesthetics and Art Between Organic and
Technological, Aesthetics of the Body and the Art of Postmodernism. She
has the Ph. D. from philosophy – aesthetics. Her primary
research
interests are the problem of the body in the contemporary performance,
theatre and dance, gender studies, philosophy of the body, art and
technology, art and science, theatre and dance studies, representation
of contemporary identities. For a number of years she has been
working as a dramaturg with different Slovenian directors and
choreographers, writing for numerous international journals (Maska,
Frakcija, TanzAktuell / Ballet International, Performance Research,
etc.) and books, participating at conferences and festivals around
Europe. She also participated as the guest lecturer in the Socrates /
Erasmus seminar at the University of Antwerp in February 2002. In year
1999 she published a book The Impossible Body - Body and
Machine: Theatre, Representation of the Body and Relation to the
Artificial.
Ljubljana: Založba Maska, 1999. From October 2002 to October 2003 she
was the research fellow at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and from
January 2003 she is the researcher at the University of Ljubljana -
Department of Sociology. In year 2004 she published a book Dangerous
Connections - Body, Philosophy and Relationship to the Artificial. Ljubljana:
Založba Maska, 2004.
André Lepecki (New York)
André Lepecki is Associate Professor in Performance Studies
at
New York University. Doctoral degree from NYU. Visiting Professor at
Williams College (2000), and Brown University (2004). Visting Fellow at
Institute Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universität
(2009). Independent curator for venues such as Haus der Kunst, Hayward
Gallery, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. Curator of the
festival IN TRANSIT -- Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2008 / 2009. Lectures
delivered include Tate Modern, Centre National de la Danse, Akademie
der Kunste, Museum of Modern Art, and Museo Reina Sofia. His writings
appear in The Drama Review, Performance
Research, Art Forum,
among others in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and the United
States. Received in 2008 the International Art Critics Association
Award for "Best Performance" for his co-curatorial and directorial work
on the re-doing of Allan Kaprow's "18 Happenings in 6 Parts." Edited
the anthologies Of the Presence of the Body.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2004. The Senses in Performance
(with Sally Banes). New York: Routledge 2006; and Planes of
Composition: Dance, Theory and the Global (with Jenn Joy).
London: Seagull Books, 2010. His book, Exhausting Dance:
Performance and Politics of Movement.
New York: Routledge, 2006, has been translated into 6 languages.
Currently working on a book titled Grounds of Performance and
co-curating an archive on dance and visual arts for the Hayward
Gallery.
Isabell Lorey (Berlin/Vienna)
Isabell Lorey, political scientist, 2010 visiting professorship at the
Humboldt University, Berlin (sommer term). 2009 visiting professorship
for Gender Studies, Biopolitics and Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty
for Social Science, and habilitation in political science at the Vienna
University. 2001-2007 assistent professor for Gender &
Postcolonial
Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin. Her book on Roman
struggles of order, the Plebeian, concepts of community and
immunization entitled "Figuren des Immunen. Elemente einer politischen
Theorie" will soon be published with diaphanes (Zurich, Berlin). Recent
texts on the topic of immunization: “Die Immunität
Jesu:
Lépra und Lepra von der Bibel bis ins
Mittelalter.“ Kritik des Okzidentalismus.
Eds. Gabriele Dietze et al. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009.
„Weißsein und die Auffaltung des Immunen: Zur
notwendigen
Unterscheidung zwischen Norm und Normalisierung.“ Epistemologie
und Differenz. Eds. Bettina Bock von Wülfingen,
and Ute Frietsch. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010 (for a different version
of the text see here).
Her publications also include: "Prekarisierung als Verunsicherung und
Entsetzen: Immunisierung, Normalisierung und neue Furcht erregende
Subjektivierungsweisen.“ Prekarisierung zwischen
Anomie und Normalisierung? Geschlechtertheoretische Bestimmungsversuch.
Eds. Alexandra Manske, and Katharina Pühl. Münster:
Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2010. Other recent texts on the topic
of
precarization: „Becoming Common: Precarization as Political
Constituting.” e-flux: Searching for the
Post-Capitalist-Self.
June-September 2010. Web. "Virtuosität zwischen Dienstbarkeit
und
Exodus: Postfordistische Öffentlichkeit, soziale Produktion
und
politisches Handeln" fkw. Zeitschrift für
Geschlechterforschung
und Visuelle Kultur 49 (2010). Find more here.
Randy Martin (New York)
Randy Martin is professor and chair of the department of art and public
policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University where he
directs the graduate program in arts politics.
He is author of Performance as Political Act: The Embodied
Self. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1990. Socialist
Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua. Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1994. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory
and Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. On Your
Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left. Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 2002. Financialization of Daily Life.
Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. An Empire of Indifference:
American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management.
Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
Gerald Raunig (Zurich)
Gerald Raunig, Philosopher, art theoretician; works at the
Zürcher
Hochschule der Künste (Departement Kunst und Medien,
Vertiefung
Theorie) and at the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural
Policies); co-ordinator of the transnational eipcp research projects (
republicart , 2002-2005), transform (
transform , 2005-2008) and
Creating Worlds ,
2009-2012); habilitation and venia docendi at the Institute for
Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt/A; member of the editorial board
of the multilingual webjournal and
transversal and the Austrian journal for radical democratic
cultural politics,
Kulturrisse . Recent books in English: Art and
Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century. Trans.
Aileen Derieg. New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2007.
Raunig, Gerald, and Gene Ray, eds. Art and Contemporary
Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique. London:
MayFlyBooks, 2009. A Thousand Machines. Trans.
Aileen Derieg. New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2010.
Petra Sabisch (Berlin)
Petra Sabisch is choreographer and philosopher. Besides her own
choreographic works (last conversation piece,
Berlin 2008), & diverse artistic collaborations in Paris &
Berlin (Antonia Baehr, Jérôme Bel, Alice Chauchat,
Frédéric Gies, Mette Ingvartsen et. al.) Sabisch received
her Doctor of Philosophy (London) in 2010 with her dissertation Choreographing
Relations: Practical Philosophy and Contemporary Choreograhy (in the
works of Antonia Baehr, Gilles Deleuze, Juan Dominguez,
Félix
Guattari, Xavier Le Roy and Eszter Salamon, forthcoming
2010). Since 2005 she is involved in the development of the Performing
Arts Forum PAF (St. Erme, France) & in the
application of open source-strategies for the Performing Arts with the
open platform Everybodys.
Sabisch has published internationally and is teaching since 2009, e.g.
in the M.A Choreography Stockholm (Univ. College of Dance), Kampnagel
Hamburg and the dance center HZT Berlin. See also
www.verandaproduction.net.
Ana Vujanović (Belgrade)
Ana Vujanović (1975 Belgrade); freelance worker – theorist,
manager, lecturer, dramaturge – in contemporary performing
arts
and culture. Ph.D. in Theatre Studies. Editor of TkH, journal
for performing arts theory,
and collaborator of TkH platform for performing arts theory and
practice, Belgrade (www.tkh-generator.net); from 2010 in residence in
Paris, working at Les laboratories d’Aubervilliers (
www.leslaboratoires.org). Lecturer at the Interdisciplinary
post-graduate studies at the University of Arts, Belgrade (Performance
studies and Theory of text/textuality). Engages in many artworks:
performance, theatre, dance, video… (as co-author,
dramaturge,
performer); and organizes and/or gives lectures and workshops at
symposia, conferences, and art festivals in Europe. Her particular
commitment is empowering the independent scenes in Belgrade (Other
Scene), ex-Yugoslavia (Clubture, The FaMa) and in Europe (PAF).
Publishes regularly in journals and
anthologies. Author of the books: Razarajući označitelji/e
performansa. Belgrade: SKZ, 2004. DOKSICID s-TIU/4.
Novi Sad: IKZS, 2006., and Jovićević, Aleksandra, and Ana Vujanović. Uvod
u studije performansa. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2007.
Elizabeth Waterhouse (Frankfurt on the Main)
Elizabeth Waterhouse was born in Albany (New York). She received her
first dance education at the Albany Dance Institute at the School of
American Ballet. After graduating at the Harvard University with a BA
in physics she finished her dance studies at the Ohio State University
with an MFA. After that she danced with the Marcus Schulkind Dance
Company in Boston (2001). Since 2004 she has lived and worked in
Frankfurt. She was a guest dancer with the Frankfurt Ballett and since
2005 a founding member of The Forsythe Company.