Dr. Christel Stalpaert
About the Artist
Christel Stalpaert is Professor of Performance Studies at Ghent University. She completed her PhD in 2002 with a dissertation about a post-semiotic method of analysis, based on Gilles Deleuze's aesthetics of intensities (aesthesis) and Luce Irigaray's philosophy of embodied cognition and corporeality. Stalpaert has published numerous articles on theatre and performance in books and journals (Documenta, Ballet-Tanz, Arcadia, Eighteenth-century Life, a.o.). She is a member of the editorial board of Documenta, Theatre Topics (Amsterdam University Press) and Studies in Performing Arts & Media. She co-edited, among others, No beauty for me there where human life is rare: on Jan Lauwers' Theatre Work with Needcompany (2007) and Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and the Contemporary Performing Arts (AUP 2012). She is co-director of the international research group S:PAM | Studies in Performing Arts & Media, and founder of the research group for Postdramatic Aesthetics since 2007. (supplied)
You can read more about Dr. Stalpaert here.
TOWN AND GOWN
(Co-hosted by University of Alberta, Department of Drama, BWDC, Mile Zero Dance Co.)
March 22 | 7–8:30pm | Timms Centre Lobby
Contemporary Dance and Performance as Social Activism
Christel Stalpaert joins a panel with Brian Webb (Brian Webb Dance Co.), and Gerry Morita (Mile Zero Dance Co.) for an illustrated talk on how contemporary theatre and dance performance in Western Europe has become not only a catalyst for political action but often becomes the political action itself. Christel Stalpaert observes the social activism in the work of the Arkadi Zaides, Peter Aers and Maria Lucia Cruz Correia with regard to migrant deaths and climate change.
Noon Talk
March 23 | 12:30–1:50pm | Timms Centre Lobby
Interview with Christel Stalpaert
Piet Defraeye hosts an Interview with Christel Stalpaert on what is happening in contemporary Theatre and Dance in Flanders. She observes a growing desire of performing artists to activate awareness of current ecological issues and to activate actual change in society. Their “art-science-activist worldings” (after Donna Haraway), not only have an impact on society at large, but also in pedagogical institutions in particular, such as Ghent University. Amanda Piña’s School of the Jaguar, Building Conversation’s Parliament of Things and Correia’s Flotation School and Natural Contract Lab is installed within the structures of a university and hence challenges traditional modes of knowledge transfer. This particular mode of knowledge production calls for new modes of activism.
The interview will be alternated with video fragments of some remarkable performances.