Performing rituals

Perfformio Defodau/Performing Rituals/Rituels en Action

Aberystwyth University is hosting an international conference on literature, anthropology and performance and their relationship with ritual on 5-8 September.

The international symposium, Perfformio Defodau/Performing Rituals/Rituels en Action, is a collaboration between the departments of European Languages and Theatre, Film and Television at Aberystwyth, and the Department of French at Kings College, London.

The four day symposium is taking place in Penbryn and in the Parry-Williams Building, home of the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.

Ritual and performance offers rich material for thought concerning human interaction with the world and in particular the processes of artistic creation. 

Some themes to be explored concern sacrifice, transgression, death, the sacred, divinity, excess, violence, everydayness, therapy, politics and identity.

The four day conference has attracted a number of interdisciplinary and international contributions from leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and thought, comparative literature and film studies, theatre and performance studies, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and visual arts.

More than 40 papers will be presented in both French and English. They include a workshop from Dead Good Guides (John Fox and Sue Gill) on how to construct your own funeral, a performance of Jill Greenhalgh's The Threat of Silence and a plenary session by Myriam Watthee-Delmotte of the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, on “Literature’s Ritual Performativity: To Write and To Mourn”.

One of the principal aims of the conference will be to observe what the performance of ritual can tell us about the creative act and to focus, transversally and in detail, on creativity itself.

Full conference programme and further information about the sessions and speakers can be found at: www.performingrituals.com

All are welcome and if you have any questions, please contact the conference co-ordinator, Dr Bruno Sibona bms@aber.ac.uk or 01970 622556.

AU28712

Share