Seminars

Tina Post’s present research concerns coziness as an aesthetic category—that is, (after Sianna Ngai) as a socially informed perception of form that is wedded to a judgement about that form. Said differently, she’s interested in how we (culturally) come to name something as cozy in the first place, and what—and whom—comes to be written into or out of that category as a consequence. This talk will suggest some of the ways that coziness comes to be constituted, and propose some problems that inhere in that category.

In this talk, I present my forthcoming book, Viscous Performances: The Persistence of Creative Resistance in Neoliberal Chile, which theorizes viscosity as a conceptual lens for understanding the slow, adhesive, and cumulative qualities of creative resistance. I discuss two case studies, the 1,800-Hour Race for Education and the playful yet defiant figure of Tía Pikachu, attending to how these performances stick bodies together, thicken gestures through reiteration, and bring human and more-than-human agents into contingent assemblages. Through these cases, I examine the prefigurative function of viscous performances in materializing alternative forms of coexistence and operating as an antidote to neoliberalism’s relentless erosion of public life and the fragmentation of social bonds. I conclude by interrogating the political efficacy of creative resistance, proposing that, like the gradual movement of viscous substances, it operates as an enduring force that sustains the continuity and momentum of activist labor.

The Outdoor Museum, in Joshua Tree, California, is an assemblage of the assemblages made by the artist Noah Purifoy between 1989 and 2004. The Museum provides an exemplary site for thinking about theatrical assemblages, the topic of this paper and of a larger project in its early stages. From Theater Piece No. 1 or “Untitled Event” presented at Black Mountain College in 1952—the collaboration between John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, Charles Olson, M. C. Richards, and others—to the present, performance and theatricality have been central to the history of artistic assemblages; the aesthetics of assemblage, meanwhile, have been central to experimental theater. What happens where assemblages verge on theater and theater takes on assemblage? How are assemblages legible, especially when they insist on discreteness of and the non-relation between the things they gather? The Outdoor Museum provides an example to think through these questions concretely. The curators supply a map of the grounds of the museum, with the names of the separate pieces, but there is no prescribed way to move through the assemblages. One striking path a visitor may follow through the Outdoor Museum links a set of theatrical sites. Most strikingly, one of the assemblages is called “Adrian’s Little Theater”; this assemblage does have the structure of a small theater. Other assemblages contain groupings of chairs for spectators, and so on. One of the final pieces is simply called “Gallows”: in this context, the scaffold, inspired by a Clint Eastwood movie, is distinctly organized for spectators, as potential theater. That is, these pieces constellate around theater and spectatorship. This theatrical path produces one way of understanding the Outdoor Museum. The argument of this paper will be that the Outdoor Museum invites interpretation of a kind that acknowledges its own permanent provisionality without surrendering a claim to importance as interpretation.

In my monograph-in-progress, Making Broadway Harder: How Virtuosos Reshaped Musicals, I argue that the long 1970s—loosely from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s—were a pivotal era for cementing the hold that virtuosity has on Broadway. Broadway musicals became harder to perform eight times a week during this era. Virtuosity reshaped Broadway musicals: what they are, what audiences expect of them, and what they demand of performers. In Making Broadway Harder, I address the material conditions of performers’ virtuosity and labor. The aims of this project are threefold: to define virtuosity in musical theatre, to recover the labor of virtuosity in the areas of acting, dancing, and singing, and to argue that virtuosity remade the Broadway musical in the 1970s due to a confluence of developments in training, talent, technology, and dramaturgy. Making Broadway Harder offers a performance centered materialist history of the musical to complicate the usual historiography of musical theatre as the terrain of creative geniuses.