ResearchWorks: White Experiments- Performing Arts Research in Late Neoliberalism

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For those of us who have spent decades critiquing logocentrism, the present moment is full of contradictions. The rise of techno-fascist attacks on the arts and humanities, higher education, and critical thinking in general demand that we defend formerly hegemonic concepts like teaching and research, training and discipline, art and democracy, against this onslaught. Yet we do so at great peril if we thereby abandon the profound critiques of those same concepts that have been developed in performance studies and related fields. When logocentrism is being actively demolished from the right, how should critically oriented practitioner-researchers reorient ourselves?

This presentation draws on critical black studies, critical whiteness studies, and performance studies to rethink the role of the university in the current crisis of “white writing.” I will discuss three broad approaches, defined in my recent book, that are often taken by predominantly white institutions: inclusion, escape, and experimentation. While all three have value as part of a broad strategy, I will emphasise the need for radical formal experimentation informed by trans/queer, critical, decolonial readings of modernity. In this moment, every time we find ourselves defending the arts for their economic value and soft power, we must also continue the work of relinking them to that which has been abjected from the university and its forms of knowledge: the embodied practices, from urban kink and sex work to planetary ritual and culture, that are the essential source of what we might still call performing arts.

Speaker:

Ben Spatz (they/he) is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity. They are the author of several books, including What a Body Can Do (2015) and Race and the Forms of Knowledge (2024), as well as founding editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research. Ben is currently Assistant Professor in Creative Practice at University of Birmingham, Docent in Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki, and Creative Director at EcoGPX Limited. Their ongoing Judaica project explores decolonial jewishness through performance, writing, and video.