Public Events

Inside Story Festival & Symposium: Performance, Biography & Biology

December 4–12, 2010

A week of performances, films, workshops, presentations and seminars exploring the connections between biography and biology — the bodies we inhabit and the stories we tell about ourselves.

Featuring work from Helen Paris and Leslie Hill’s London-based theatre company, Curious, and students from their Autobiology course, as well as an international range of guest artists, speakers, and scholars including Lois Weaver, Suzanne Anker and Gretchen Schiller.

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Saturday, December 4 and Sunday, December 5

Performance: On the Scent, Curious, 3 p.m., 3:40 p.m., 4:20 p.m., 6 p.m., 6:40 p.m. & 7:20 p.m.

On the Scent explores the elusive connections between smell and memory. The performance takes place in a domestic setting through which four audience members at a time are invited on intimate and aromatic journeys. Scents mingle and intertwine in the living-room, kitchen and bedroom as three distinctly different performers exude haunting, darkly humorous and seductive essences throughout the house.

Paris and Hill made this piece in conversation with olfactory scientists at the National Centrex for Biological Sciences, Ban galore, India. It was first performed as part of the FIERCE Festival in 2003. On the Scent has toured extensively in the UK as well as the USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Europe, and Australia.

SOLD OUT!

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Thursday, December 9

Lecture: Laboratory of Art's Knowledge, Suzanne Anker, 6 p.m.

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Anker’s talk will address her interests in the cultural aspects of scientific images. Ranging from concepts in neuroscience to genetics to reproductive technologies, her work relies on metaphorical correspondences as they frame aesthetic propositions. As digital medias transform pictorial images into information data, visual art becomes a vehicle for the transdisciplinarity of knowledge. Akin to a form of research, Anker’s work addresses how images and objects forge new ways of thinking.

Town Center, Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, 330 North Orchard Street

Inside Story opening reception, 7:30–9 p.m.

Town Center, Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, 330 North Orchard Street

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Friday, December 10

Workshop: Hands-on Performance, Lois Weaver, 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

A practical workshop designed to create performance from the ordinary details of our lives and the extra-ordinary fantasies of our imaginations. This workshop is designed to give performers of all types — even non performers — the tools to create their own solo performance using both the exquisite and the mundane. In a relaxed yet structured environment we will explore impulse, objects, autobiography, found text, song, dance, fantasy, popular culture and, most importantly, the desire to make the things we never thought we could make and to say the things we always wanted to say.

510 Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Avenue

(Limited enrollment, advanced registration required, contact UW Arts Institute by e-mail, mlsolberg@wisc.edu)

Seminar: Picture Perfect: From Golden Rules to Golden Boys, Suzanne Anker, 10 a.m.–Noon

This seminar/workshop will explore new reproductive technologies and their effect on gender selection, reproductive politics and and same sex marriage. We will address cultural representations, reproductive law and reproductive tourism.

Readings: W.J.T Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book (University of Chicago Press, 1998) pages 215-219.
Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction" (originally published in Science and Culture 3.17, 1993) pages 522-61.

Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, 1300 block of University Ave

(Limited enrollment, advanced registration and readings required, contact the Center for Visual Culture by e-mail: cvc@education.wisc.edu)

Performance: the moment I saw you I knew I could love you, Curious, 6 p.m., 7:15 p.m., & 8:30 p.m.

Designed for life-raft sized groups of audience members at a time, the piece is about ‘gut feelings’; fight, flight and freeze reactions; impulse, love and undefended moments. Performed by members of the original UK cast Helen Paris, Leslie Hill and Claudia Barton with local Madison performers Barbara and Don MacCrimmon.

Hemsley Theatre, Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue (ticketed event*)

Performance: Rupture, Natasha Davis, UK performance artist, 7:30 p.m.

A series of episodes exploring life in a spasm, personal histories, liminal spaces and the body as a permanent site of trauma. Davis was a participant in the pilot Autobiology workshop run by Paris and Hill in London in 2008. This piece draws from material generated in that workshop.

Mitchell Theatre, Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue

* Note: Admission is free but tickets are required. Visit campus box offices in the Memorial Union or Vilas Hall. For a $3.50 fee, you can reserve online at www.arts.wisc.edu or by phone at 608-265-ARTS.

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Saturday, December 11

Performance: the moment I saw you I knew I could love you, Curious, 6 p.m., 7:15 p.m., & 8:30 p.m.

Hemsley Theatre, Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue (ticketed event*)

Performance: Autobiology showcase, 2 p.m.–5 p.m.

Work by students from Paris & Hill's Autobiology course.

Mitchell Theatre, Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue

Film screening. 6–7:30 p.m. & 8:30–10 p.m.

The US premiere of, Sea Swallow’d, a film by Curious and Andrew Kötting (18 min), followed by UK Live Art Compilation reel with excerpts and interviews from leading British artists working with autobiography and the body (60 min.) Curated by Live Art Development Agency, London, this artist showcase includes work by: Aine Philips with Andrew Mitchelson, Harminder Singh Judge, Pete Edwards, Bobby Baker, Oreet Ashery, Ernst Fischer, Kira O’Reilly, Aaron Williamson, Rajni Shah, and George Chakravarthi.

Sea Swallow’d charts the choppy waters of gut feelings, capturing the flotsam and jetsam of impulse, desire and fights to the death. A film by Andrew Kötting and Curious shot as a series of lapping and flowing, irregular chapters, which borrow their titles from Moby Dick.

Mitchell Theatre, Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue

* Note: Admission is free but tickets are required. Visit campus box offices in the Memorial Union or Vilas Hall. For a $3.50 fee, you can reserve online at www.arts.wisc.edu or by phone at 608-265-ARTS.

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Sunday, December 12

INSIDE STORY SYMPOSIUM, 10 a.m.–7 p.m.

An interdisciplinary symposium exploring connections between biography and biology in the arts, featuring presentations and discussions by the UW faculty from Art, Dance, Theatre and Music, Artists in Residence Paris and Hill, and guest speakers Gretchen Schiller, Lois Weaver and Ciara Murphy.

Coffee & light breakfast provided from 10 a.m.

UW faculty panel featuring professors of Art, Theatre, Dance, and Music, 10:30 a.m.–Noon

• Rebecca Holderness, Assistant Professor of Acting, UW–Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts
• Jessica Johnson, Associate Professor of Piano and Piano Pedagogy, UW–Madison School of Music
• Li Chiao-Ping, Professor of Dance, UW–Madison Dance Department
• Douglas Rosenberg, Professor of Video/Performance/Installation, UW–Madison Art Department

Wisconsin Idea Room, Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall

Student keynote: Biology and Performance: The Lives of Helen L., Ciara Murphy, 1 p.m.–1:30 p.m.
Ciara Murphy, PhD candidate at Stanford and theatre director examines the scientific and artistic uses of the HeLa cell line, the first "immortal" human cell line. How does the project of biography change when the subject is immortal? In what ways does scientific research write/biography life through research? Does bioart partake in this project of biography writing, or does it sometimes provide the space for life to author itself (autobiography)?

Wisconsin Idea Room, Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall

Lunch break

A Conversation with Paris & Hill , led by UW’s Michael Peterson, 1:45 p.m.–2:30 p.m.
Paris and Hill speak in a Q&A session chaired by Michael Peterson from the UW Department of Theatre & Drama about their current projects, which developed from work with neurogastroenterologists on ‘gut feelings’ leading to a performance, a film, and a course called Autobiology which they are teaching this fall at UW–Madison.

Wisconsin Idea Room, Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall

Afternoon refreshments provided

Keynote: The Body Library, Gretchen Schiller, 2:45 p.m.–3:45 p.m.
Choreographer and media artist Gretchen Schiller (Paris) shares her choreographic approach of drawing together physical responses to mnemonics, migration and metaphor in her talk The Body Library: collecting, indexing and recalling kinesthetic inscriptions.

Wisconsin Idea Room, Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall

Performative plenary: The Long Table, 4 p.m.–5:30 p.m.

Artist and activist Lois Weaver (New York/London), experiments with participation and public engagement by re-appropriating a dinner table atmosphere as a public forum, and encouraging informal conversations on serious topics.

"The Long Table experiments with participation and public engagement by re-appropriating a dinner table atmosphere as a public forum, and encouraging informal conversations on serious topics. It is literally a very long table set up with chairs, microphones and refreshments where anyone and everyone is welcome to come to the table, ask questions, make statements, leave comments, or simply sit, listen and watch.”

Harrison Parlor, Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Avenue

Inside Story closing reception, 5:30 p.m.–7 p.m.

Harrison Parlor, Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Avenue

All events are free and open to the public.