PENZANCE, FRIDAY 26th MAY 6.30pm At the Digital Peninsula Network centre on Bread Street

A FREE PRESENTATION !

‘Animal acts: or the difficulty of being a dog’

This presentation will explore representations of animality in a range of contemporary art practices, and their implications for the ways in which we constitute the ‘human’. Focusing on real dogs and human dog-impressionists, the presentation will consider work by Joseph Beuys (Coyote: I like America & America likes me), Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik (the Zoophrenia series), Forced Enterainment (Showtime), Nobuhira Narumi (the Dog-Cam projects), Langlands & Bell (Zardad’s Dog), as well as the Russian canine cosmonaut Laika.

BIOGRAPHY

Over the past 20 years, David Williams has worked as a performance maker, writer, translator and teacher in Australia, England and the USA.

As writer, director, performer, dramaturg or teacher, he has collaborated with e.g. the Lightning Brothers and Ex.T.C. (Australia), Insomniac Theatre/Pete Brooks, Goat Island, Emilyn Claid, Forced Entertainment and Lone Twin. He has just completed a 6-month collaboration with Lone Twin on the development of a new narrative theatre work, Alice Bell, which premiered in early May 2006 at the Kunsten Festival des Arts, Brussels, before an international tour.

David has published widely about contemporary performance. Books include Director’s Theatre (with David Bradby, Macmillan), Peter Brook & The Mahabharata: Critical Reflections (Routledge) and Collaborative Theatre: Le Théâtre du Soleil (Routledge). He has contributed to many books and magazines, including Performance Research, New Theatre Quarterly, TDR (New York), and Frakcija (Croatia). For the past 10 years, he has been a contributing editor on the journal Performance Research, Recently, his published writing has focused on animals and/in performance – particularly horses, birds, dogs and the bestiaries of certain artists and philosophers – as well as other unpredictable events on the edges of performance: fire, water, weather, and an ongoing historiography of skies and the ways in which they have been conceived in art and other cultural contexts (skywritings).

He is currently Professor of Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, Devon.