Becoming Robert Morris. A Collective Lecture

The format of the lecture performance points to the elastic negotiations in the performances of and for academic and artistic publics. It highlights an artistic attempt to interrupt academic logocentrism and points to the desire to formulate an embodied mode of critique. This presentation starts from the assumption that the contemporary lecture performance is directly invested in one of the questions raised in this CfP: ‘How does performance resist systems of mastery and subjectivisation that perpetrate the dominance of normative cultures and knowledges?’ Interrogating the lecture as a normative performance of knowledge, the lecture performance as a genre is interested in critiquing its investment in mastery and the performance of intellectual labour by contrasting them with questions around artistic agency, non-dominant epistemologies and lecture’s investment in the theatricality of knowledge.

This collective lecture performs a withdrawal of the lecturer in order to examine the modes of relations between lecturer and audience as well as the lecture’s institutional and theatrical contexts. The presentation tries to unlearn known dramaturgies of the performance of knowledge by questioning the lecturer’s performance of the self as a performance of mastery. At the same time, it’s theatrical construction faces different dramaturgical constraints and might itself be in danger of falling into the trap of showcasing ‘agencies prone to singularity to come to the fore’. The performance tries to hold this tension and ultimately aims to answer the question whether lecture performances can encourage an affective and imaginative negotiation of the theatrical contradictions around agency the performance of a lecture entails.

Clio Unger is a PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, where she works on lecture performances, the performance of knowledge and forms of embodied criticism. She holds an MA in theatre and performance from The Graduate Center (CUNY) and an MA in dramaturgy from the University of Munich. Clio is co-editor for Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts and the editorial assistant for Contemporary Theatre Review.