KHAS ERC Performance and Politics Webinars – Assoc. Prof. Milija Gluhovic

New Silk Roads and Performance

Speaker: Milija Gluhovic

Moderator: Berkem Yanıkcan

Time: Wednesday, December 8, 2021 at 7:30 pm Istanbul (GMT +3)

11:30 am New York, 4:30 pm London, 5:30 pm Central European Time

The webinar will be in English.

Please register in advance for this meeting:

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88677142380

Meeting ID: 886 7714 2380

Passcode: 234015

Launched in 2013 and hailed as the largest geoeconomics initiative in history, China’s Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road, also known as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aims to connect continents, and integrate Eurasia through collaborations spanning trade and infrastructure, culture, and finance. While until now the BRI has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomics project, my presentation asks: what does it mean to ‘revive’ the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century and how could this geopolitical chronotope be productive for theatre and performance studies? As part of my talk, I will address a large-scale outdoor performance spectacle Dark Things (2018), which was directed by Anuradha Kapur and Deepan Sivaraman as part of a musical theatre course offered to students at Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. Based on a script for an oratorio by South African poet and academic Ari Sitas, the performance explores the dark underbelly of contemporary Silk Roads and linkages between the circulations of peoples and desires, the global spread of the capitalist market and economic globalization, and the human and environmental catastrophes they unleash.

Milija Gluhovic is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. His publications include A Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory (Bloomsbury, 2020), Performing European Memories (Palgrave, 2013) and co-edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (OUP, 2021), International Performance Research Pedagogies (Palgrave, 2018), Performing the Secular (Palgrave, 2017), and Performing the ‘New’ Europe (Palgrave, 2013). He is a member of the IFTR Executive Committee and the EASTAP Journal editorial board. Currently he serves as the Director of International Partnerships at the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at Warwick University.

This webinar series and the “Staging National Abjection” research project are sponsored by a European Research Commission Starting Grant (ERC-2019-StG, Grant ID: 852216).

Website: https://stagingabjection.com/

Twitter: @StagingAbject

Instagram: @stagingabjection

Facebook Page: ERC Staging National Abjection/ERC Ulusal Abjeksiyonu Sahnelemek