NYC
Performative Workshop Shifting Weight – Jens Reuleckes conference input to
CITY-WIDE 2013

My site-specific and participatory project focuses on the inconspicuous as a means to question the power of what we take for granted.
My project seeks to construct a framework for radical experience that unsettles the ostensible clarity and certainty of everyday experience.

CITY-WIDE 2013 CONFERENCE
a collaborative, multi-modal conference of Theatre and Performance

Beyond the Institution: Theatre, Performance, and the University

Graduate students, scholars, and practitioners of theatre and performance in and surrounding the New York City area are pleased to announce a multi-day, multi-sited conference. The collaboratively-organized conference held October 31 – November 3 2013 will assemble an inter-university exchange to encourage questions, dialogue, and debate around and between the boundaries of theatre, performance, and academic institutions. It will question institutional borders that separate artistic, scholarly, educational, activist, and civic pursuits, making way for new modes of cooperation and coalition. How can art, theatre, and performance affect the urban space in the wake of social, cultural, and technological transformation? What is the role of the university in the city? Can the city serve as a bridge between artistic and civic institutions? How do scholarship and practice interact with the venues, archives, architecture, and living fabric of urban spaces? Where do we meet and how do we come together outside the walls of the institution?

In bridging both institutional and theoretical/practical divides, this conference aims to connect diverse communities, to spotlight the concerns and interests of the upcoming generation of scholars and artists, and to consider the viability and future cultural life in, around, and beyond New York City—a region that has undergone massive economic, demographic, and environmental transformations in the past two decades. This will be a chance for graduate students in MA, MFA, PhD, and DFA programs in theatre, performance, and related disciplines to come together in a unique environment at a specific moment in the history of the US university, asking urgent questions about the future of theatre, performance, the university, and the city.

“City-Wide” is an active collaboration between graduate students of Theatre/Performance at the following universities:
Brooklyn College
Columbia University
Hunter College
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
New York University
Princeton University
Yale School of Drama

Shifting Weight: the production of space as an act of trust

Date/Location:
October 31 – November 1, 2013
The Graduate Center, City University of New York,
Rooms 5409 and 5414

Concept

The workshop Shifting Weight experiments with a certain potential of intuition while getting in contact with public space. The process deals with that which is hidden rather than which catches the eye. There is no obvious or explicit performative attitude, since the center of the process is formed by an attitude of restraint.
The workshop leader supports participants in entering a state of mind where increased focus brings to the fore a force hardly noticeable to the public. That force develops a powerful presence with the result of shifting weight away from the spectacular and the well-known. The overall movement is a turning away from the familiar; it goes beyond mere understanding, like a removal from certainty, so that possibility moves beyond the present. This kind of production of space is an act of trust.

Shifting Weight_Flyer
http://shiftingweightny.wordpress.com/
http://opencuny.org/citywide/