This year's virtual ASECS means different ways to connect with performance studies scholars and artists. The conference unfolds over two weekends (March 28-29 and April 4-5) with regular sessions in the 11:00-4:30 PM blocks, which make it easier for international participants to access conference events. Most sessions are an hour. Take a peek at the "lobby" here. Not registered yet? There's still time!
There are a number of additional events that our readers will want to consider. We're happy to promote:
Thursday, March 27, 6pm Eastern, the ASECS Theatre and Performance Studies Caucus hosts a reading of an abridged The Basset Table, Susanna Centlivre's 1705 comedy, featuring Valeria the scientist and plenty of sailor satire. Want to take part? Angelina Del Balzo is looking for a few good readers who aren't afraid of Zoom theatre. Email her at adelbalzo@uva.edu.
Saturday, March 29, 6-7pm Eastern. Meet creatives behind Philadelphia Artists' Collective's upcoming production of Cato (Remixed), including adapter Eli Lynn, in advance of its world premiere in May at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia, site of the 1774 Continental Congress. The event will include excerpts and discussion of Addison's play, its legacy in the U.S., and how PAC plans to meet it today in Lynn's searing, rambunctious, irreverent take. Come for the conversation and grab tickets now for the production at Carpenters' Hall May 1-18, 2025.
Guests for the ASECS session: Damon Bonetti (Producing Artistic Director, Philadelphia Artists Collective), Eli Lynn (Playwright and Artistic Associate, Philadelphia Artists Collective), moderated by Chelsea Phillips (Villanova University). Sponsored by Villanova and ASECS.
April 4, 6-7pm Eastern, Mercy screening and conversation. “The hands of the dancers are the hands of my mother and sister, the hands of our grandmother, the hands of their mothers.” These words of celebrated American poet Cornelius Eady serve as an anchor for the short film Mercy that weaves poetry and imagery, with gesture, movement and voice into an intricate meditation on black womanhood. Eady’s eponymous cycle of poems is informed by the work of Phillis Wheatley, the first enslaved person in the American Colonies to publish a full-length volume of poems. The poetic short, directed by Philip Szporer, Mouvment Perpetuel, voices issues of race, place, and identity, and dives into the double-voiced discourses of a particular Black literary tradition concerning the complication of the slave learning their captor’s language.
Preview the new 15 minute short film and then stay for a conversation with Eady and Szporer, who will talk about their process as artists actively engaging in the present moment with the long eighteenth century. Sponsored by the University of Tennessee and ASECS.
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