Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for PMAPS Colloquium with Andy Colpitts and Lexi Turner on Friday, November 8, 1:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m., in the Reading Room 124, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. The event is free and open to the public.
This talk will feature works by two PhD candidates in Performing and Media Arts, Andy Colpitts and Lexi Turner.
One of Andy's dissertation chapters, entitled: "The Fool's Golden Age of Bread and Puppet Circuses", investigates the nostalgic framing and imagery employed in Bread and Puppet's yearly Domestic Resurrection Circuses to understand its political possibilities and pitfalls.
In a section from Lexi’s dissertation chapter “Thanatology of the Photographic Image: Ritual and Redemption in the Cinematic Avant-Garde,” Lexi engages with Luther Price’s controversial queer video piece Sodom, re-editing degraded and discarded gay pornography together with religious iconography and his own sculptural mutilation of the film itself.
*Please be advised that the film screening includes scenes with sexual content and violence.
Andy Colpitts is a theatre artist and scholar from the hills of New Hampshire. He holds a BA from Brown University in Theatre & Performance Studies and Comparative Literature and an MA from Cornell University in Performing and Media Arts. He is a PhD candidate in PMA where he is working on his dissertation "Backcountry Onstage: Rural Theatricality and the Performance of Nostalgia." As a theatre maker, Andy is a puppeteer, director, playwright, and burlesque dancer (stage name La-Di-Da). He trained at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris and has toured nationally with the Bread and Puppet Theatre.
Lexi C.M.K Turner (she/her) is a PhD candidate with the department of Performing and Media Arts, in affiliation with the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Her research engages with apophatic mystical theology and pessimism as comparative philosophies of mediation—which she has named decreativity—in analysis of sound, literature, and visual arts at the margins of culture. Outside of academia, she is best known as a musician and sound artist—above all under the name Prayer Rope—having released almost 40 albums, EPs, splits, and compilations.
This colloquium is organized by the Performance and Media Arts Presentation (PMAPS) series. Inaugurated in Fall 2021, PMAPS is the latest iteration of a colloquium series within the Department of Performing and Media Arts. Its greatest vision lies in offering graduate students a space to present their work to students, faculty, and professionals of similar fields and interests. The content of its presentations ranges from media studies to dance, and such diverse nature has earned the attention of related communities both within and outside Ithaca, NY.
