New College initiative flourishes along Florida’s creative coast
Funded by a five-year $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New College: Connecting the Arts and Humanities on Florida’s Creative Coast seeks to foster a deeper understanding of the arts and humanities through new programs at New College and with local arts organizations and the Cross College Alliance. Through the expansion of existing public programs and a new series of open seminars, the local community is invited to hear from — and speak with — faculty scholars and artists who are renowned in their fields.
As we pivot to an online platform, we invite you to register in advance to receive access to our event codes. Please check the website periodically for the addition of new events.
Unless otherwise noted all events are free and open to the public
June:
Vari(A)bilities V: Exhibiting Humanity;
Inhabiting the Body
June 10-12 // Hosted on Zoom
Email education@ringling.org to receive Zoom Info
We invite the public to attend these free public keynote,
workshop, and performance events associated with the conference.
Vari(A)bilities V is Co-Hosted by New College of Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum/Tibbals Collection, and University of Winchester
About Vari(A)bilities: The materiality of the body confounds us; it forces a reconsideration of the “linguistic turn,” perhaps even the “social constructionist” turn, by which we understand the world and identity as linguistically or socially constituted. But how do we look at bodies –our own, the first bodies exhibited to us as children, the bodies of clowns and circus performers, or even the bodies of everyday folks with impairments—people who are like us but also somehow different? And what knowledge do such encounters create or reify?
Co-Hosts New College of Florida and John and Mable Ringling Museum’s historical connection to the Ringling family and the circus, invites us to think about how the full range of humanity has been and is still exhibited and performed. We turn explicitly to the experience of specific and variAble bodies and their humanity.
Sometimes seen as inherently in conflict, the circus and its progenitors (collections of wonders and monsters, exhibits of exotics, carnivalesque fairs, freak shows) and the experiences of variously abled persons may be productively considered as intersectional. Not only have extraordinary-bodied persons been exhibited; they have also seized control over their own presentations under a variety of circumstances and historical moments. Both academic work on impairments and circus seek to reach multiple audiences—a general public, advocates and activists, historians and cultural critics. Institutions like circuses also provided a platform for performing the self and framing the action of looking—one that is complexly intertwined with the agency of the extraordinary body.
Linking embodiment, performance, self-presentation, and exhibition—circus studies provide another insight into the ‘impaired’ body, its applications and acceptances within the wider society. We are particularly interested in the knowledge and affordances of the variable body and the negotiated agency of variAble persons.
Images curtesy of the Tibbals Collection, Ringling Circus Museum
Public Keynote: “Revisiting Cultural Spectacles and Extraordinary Bodies in 2021”
Thurs, June 10 l 12:00-1:15 p.m. (US East Coast Time) l Hosted on Zoom
Rosemarie Garland Thomson
Professor Emerita of English and Bioethics, Emory University
Author of Staring: How We Look (2009) and Re-Presenting Disability: Agency and Activism in the Museum (2010); co-editor of About Us: Essays From the Disability Series of the New York Times
Michael Chemers
Professor of Dramatic Literature, Theater Arts, UC Santa Cruz
Author of The Monster in Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness (2017), and Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. (2009)
Analola Santana
Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese, Dartmouth College
Author of Teatro y Cultura de Masas: Encuentros y Debates (2010) and Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American Theatre (2018)
Public Workshop: “Inhabiting the Body: Gut Botany: A Poetry/Performance by Petra Kuppers”
Fri, June 11 l 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (US East Coast Time) l Hosted on Zoom
“Gut Botany charts my body / language living on Indigenous land as a white settler and traveler,” Petra Kuppers writes in the notes of her new poetry collection. Using a perfect cocktail of surrealist and situationist techniques, Kuppers submits to the work and to the land, moving through ancient fish, wounded bodies, and the space around her. The book invites the reader to navigate their own body through the peaks and pitfalls of pain, survival, sensual joy, and healing. “The collection embraces inclusivity and entanglement; nothing and no one here functions in isolation. Kuppers invites readers to consider their own somatics: what is it to be in this body, here, now? At turns beautiful and provocative, Gut Botany is a tonic against loneliness.” Addie Hopes: Books about Caring, from a Distance.
PETRA KUPPERS is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Her third poetry book, the ecosomatic Gut Botany (2020), was named one of the top ten poetry collections of 2020 by the New York Public Library. She is also the author of the queer/crip speculative short story collection Ice Bar (2018). She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective; teaches at the University of Michigan and at Goddard College; and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. https://petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com/
Public Event: “A Faux Memoir: Sex Work/Disability/Fetish/capital by Amber Dipietra”
Sat, June 12 l 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (US East Coast Time) l Hosted on Zoom
Amber DiPietra is a poet, performance artist, bodyworker, and organizer for disability and sex worker rights. Her book Waveform, with collaborator Denise Leto, came out from Kenning Editions in 2011. Other writings have been published in anthologies such as Poetry and Work (Palgrave) and Beauty Is a Verb: the New Poetics of Disability (Cinco Puntos). Her one-woman show, the “Opposite of Evolution Dance Studio” premiered at the Tampa International Fringe Festival in 2018. She is a founding member of two social justice collectives; the Tampa Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (2013) and the Disability and Sexuality Access Network (2016). Find out more about her work at thebodypoetik.com
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Vari(A)bilities V: Exhibiting Humanity; Inhabiting the Body
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A list of past events brought to you by “New College: Connecting the Arts and Humanities on Florida’s Creative Coast.”
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