This seminar series brings together artists, scholars, researchers and organizers from South Africa, Mexico, U.S., Iran, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Botswana, Peru and Sweden, to share the interdisciplinary, aesthetic and transcultural nature of Black Study.
Saul Garcia-Lopez
The talk will focus on reflecting the methods implemented in the Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges research, uncovering the challenges of transmitting performance legacies across generations based on some of the encounters with "elder" artists. We will also explore the role and presence of the "elder" artists in contemporary art and deconstruct the meaning of levelling a person as an "elder" from the Eurocentric and North American Indigenous perspectives.
Please read these questions and attempt a written answer sketching from your personal experiences as an artist, scholar or person. Try to focus on those questions that resonate more with you (it could be one or more questions or all, you decide). Bring your answers to the talk.
- What strategies do you implement or can be implemented as an artist or scholar to contest the generational and cultural isolation between performance artists of newer and older generations?
- How can artistic research in performance art transmit, question and share artistic legacies?
- How can performance knowledge from different geographies, indigenous and otherwise, coexist and co-create across bodies, materials and spaces?
- What is the relevance of knowing different artistic legacies from different artists when making art?
- What strategies can be implemented to contest the generational and cultural isolation between artists of newer and old generations in institutions and the art industry?
Saul Garcia-Lopez aka La Saula is an active performance artist, professor in performance and the program director for the MA in Performance at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. Saula is former co-artistic director (2013-2023) of the interdisciplinary art organization La Pocha Nostra, with around 400 international collaborators in all types of productions such as performances (physical and virtual), artistic international workshops, and writing creation. Saula´s specific areas of development and research interest are related to theater, directing, performance theory and pedagogy including indigenous perspectives, gender, ethnicity, national identities and stereotypes, postcoloniality and decoloniality, and Latin American/Chicano performance art and theater. Saula is currently the research leader of the externally funded and international artistic development project Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges, supported by Hk-dir/PKU. La Saula is co-author of the book La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for The Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society, published by Routledge in 2021. Saula is also the author of A Meditative Rant on the Importance of Addressing Ethnicity While Teaching Eurocentric Performance Methods, an essay part of the book Latinx Actor Training edited by Cynthia Santos-DeCure and Micha Espinosa, Routledge 2023.
Read more about the research project: FutureBrownSpace
Read more about the Seminar serie: A Season of Black study II
