[Sci-tech-public] CMS Colloquium Tonight! 2-105 5PM/ JOHN BELL/Playing with Stuff: The Material World in Performance

[meinbres@MIT.EDU]

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    Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:28:46 -0400
    From: Generoso Fierro <generoso at MIT.EDU>
 Subject: [Cms-anno] CMS Colloquium Tonight! 2-105 5PM/ JOHN BELL/Playing with
Stuff: The Material World in Performance

WHEN: THURSDAY 09.18.08 | 5-7 PM |

WHERE:  2-105

Playing with Stuff: The Material World in Performance
John Bell

This presentation / lecture / infomercial examines the nature and implications
of object performance both as a global cultural tradition and as a contemporary
medium that dominates our culture. While performing objects traditionally
include puppets, masks, icons, and other "things", the more recent innovations
of film, television, and the internet can also be seen as aspects of our need
to play with stuff. In all cases, the central dynamic of this form involves a
focus on the material world instead of humans. The talk will be accompanied by
images from 20th-century avant-garde film and performance work. John Bell began
his performance work with Bread and Puppet Theater, after which he earned a
Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University. He is a founding member of the
award-winning Great Small Works theater company of Brooklyn, a fellow at the
Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and Director of the Ballard
Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut. This spring
he will be directing a "Living Newspaper"-style production about the politics
of global healthcare with MIT students. His latest book, American Puppet
Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), examines particular moments of puppet,
mask, and object theater in the United States over the past 150 years. He is a
trombonist with the Somerville-based Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure
Society Brass Band, and organizer of the upcoming October 12th HONK! Festival
Parade from Davis Square to Harvard Square.

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