Performance, Possession + Automation (pp+a) brings together academics and artists to investigate the resistant power of ‘spirit possession’, the contemporary rise of automation, and their entanglement with histories of colonial slavery. How is contemporary performance shaped by and responding to these experiences?

anomalopteryx a work in progress performance by Eirini Kartsaki in collaboration with Nicol Parkinson.

Anomalopteryx is a flightless bird, known as a lesser bird, only slightly taller than a turkey. A play of movement in and out of sense, in other words, speeches and sounds.

Nicholas Ridout is Professor of Theatre at Queen Mary University of London(QMUL). His previous book, Scenes from Bourgeois Life, was published by University of Michigan Press in June 2020. As part of his ongoing historical materialist work on theatre, he is currently working on histories and theories of possession and automation in work, acting and performance.

Dhanveer Singh Brar is a Lecturer in Black British History in the School of History at University of Leeds. He has published two books, Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) with The 87 Press, and Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early Twenty-First Century with Goldsmiths Press / MIT Press.

Duration: 1 hour