TDPS at "In Play: Games, Aesthetics, Performance"

The UMD English Department is hosting the conference "In Play: Games, Aesthetics, Peformance" on March 4, 2016. A number of TDPS faculty and students will be participating with poster presentations from 11:30am-12:30pm in Tawes Hall.

The UMD English Department is hosting the conference "In Play: Games, Aesthetics, Peformance" on March 4, 2016. A number of TDPS faculty and students will be participating with poster presentations from 11:30am-12:30pm in Tawes Hall.

"In Play" is a one-day conference that explores play as the principle of innovation and experimentation that underwrites gaming, performance, and other cultural, social, and aesthetic activities.

• How can the study of computer gaming, in line with studies of other cultural forms and productions, contribute to culture studies in the academy?
• How have embodied performance and play historically enabled possibilities for both freedom and domination, for the making as well as unmaking of societies?
• How does a focus on play complicate recent scholarship on the global history of experimental art forms?

Katie C. Sopoci Drake, TDPS Dance Visiting Assistant Professor, will present her poster: "Telephone Dance Project: Playing with Structure in Collaboration"​

Long-distance collaboration as an artistic process is not only a fertile new ground for creation, but necessary for many practicing dance artists in the field today. Since 2013, Mountain Empire Performance Collective (MEPC) has explored ways of creating live dance-based performance work while separated by geographic location. The company utilizes both traditional and contemporary methods of communication including but not limited to video chats, telephone calls, letter writing, and working together face to face. These long-distance methods have revealed structures that promote experimentation and play to discover new ways of defining dance-making.

In this poster and demonstration, participants will be led through the process of the Telephone Dance Project (TPD), a long-distance collaboration that uses letter writing to create a dance. No previous dance experience is necessary in this process because it uses the participant’s own descriptive language and physical translation abilities to create movement. This process shakes up traditional methods of dance creation, challenges ideas of what bodies and techniques are “appropriate” for dance, questions the notion of leadership, and uses a well-known game as the structure to explore these ideas.   

Conference participants will be introduced to the TDP process as well as other structures MEPC has utilized to collaborate. They will be directed to follow simple directions to play with movements. Participants will then write a short letter describing their movements to pass along to another participant. They can either stick around or come back later to see how their creation has taken on a new life as others continue to translate their work. Each person’s letter will be left on display along with directions on how to start your own Telephone Dance Project. The poster and demonstration will conclude with a section about how the TDP structure can and has been applied to other collaborative processes to promote creativity and play in other fields. 

For more information about Katie Sopoci Drake, see http://katiesopocidrake.weebly.com/ and http://www.mountainempiredance.com/

Dan Dilliplane, Brittany Ginder, and Patrick Young of the TDPS MA/PhD program will present their poster: "Questions & Conversations on Play"

Play has been described variously by scholars as a “model of adaptive variability,” the “laboratory of the possible,” and “an occasion of pure waste.”  Rather than choose one from this diversity of descriptions we are proposing to set these descriptions in play with eachother by organizing a conversation on the subject of play. In Truth and Method philosopher Hans Georg-Gadamer suggests that the state of playing is a clue to understanding the ontological questions that haunt art. Gadamer also posits conversation as the basic model of human understanding and argues that the play of language between people — with all its limits and failures — is a key component of consciousness. Catching Gadamer’s observations and running with them, we propose to present a conversation between three Theatre and Performance Studies graduate students on the subject of play. Each of us brings one burning question on play to the group with the hopes of distilling it into a more explosive inquiry at their sites of intersection. The questions we are beginning with are:

Question (1) Invoking play scholars Brian Sutton-Smith and Victor Turner and their theories of structural and antistructural play, Daniel Dilliplane asks what factors determine whether a game effectively serves to actualize latent social possibilities or merely reinforces established relations. He argues that the political potential of games has less to do with the structure of the game itself and more to do with its capacity to incorporate the analysis and creativity that players bring to it. This question takes on additional significance when understood within the context of the work of scholars like Patrick Jagoda, whose work in the digital humanities explores the “gamification” of pedagogy.  Can a game teach players to think and act beyond the bounds constructed by its rules?

Question (2) Brian Sutton-Smith argues that play can be understood as a generating a potential for adaptive variation. With this broad description Sutton-Smith brings together understandings of play from developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, education theorists, and philosophers. Brittany Ginder examines how communities of players adapt and develop capacities specific to the games they play. This leads her to ask how play sharpens skills and creates new solutions to old problems. For example: How can Dungeons and Dragons help scholars understand how a game can create communities with shared skills in storytelling, narrative, and imagining? and how can scholars help valorize and democratize these communities of players?

Question (3) The Call for Papers for “In Play” begins by quoting Plato. According to Mihai I. Spariosu, Plato’s arguments about play should be understood as a maneuver against competing thinkers in the game of greek philosophy. Millenias later, the game continues with Friedrich Nietzsche challenging Plato on the grounds of his privileging the logical and rational. He does so with a body of thinking that expands the playing field of philosophy to include the — notoriously illogical and irrational — performing arts. Thinking about the implications of Nietzsche’s valorization of embodied and irrational forms of knowledge Patrick Young asks How can play problematize prevailing notions of mind-body dualism? How can the precarity for performing artists of the boundary between the categories of mind and body destabilize institutionalized ways of thinking about knowing? What does a body at play know?

With our combined artistic skills we hope to present a much distilled version of the ensuing conversation in comic book style.