Re-Playing Bodies and Gestures

This panel starts with a performance lecture by scholar, choreographer and dancer, Farah Saleh in which she thinks of how one can re-play an archive of lost Palestinian gestures. Artist Simon Starling and theatre maker Graham Eatough continue the theme by constructing a playful dialogue to reflect on a series of theatrical re-enactments they have worked on together in past decade or so; and Lee Hassall performs a strange, ekphrastic hommage to Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1803 text, Recollections of a Tour Through Scotland. There will also be a special screening of Kathryn Elkin’s film Why La Bamba? (2015) in the Theatre.

Running Order

Opening | Kevin Leomo | Sound Space

11.00 - 12.00 | Farah Saleh | What My Body Can/t Remember: Body Memory as Archive


12.10 - 12.30 | Kathryn Elkins | Why La Bamba


12.30 - 14.00 | Simon Starling and Graham Eatough | Prefix as Process: Some Re-s, Some Thoughts, Some Works


15.00 – 15.45 | Lee Hassall | More Than a Passing Pleasure: Re-playing Dorothy Wordsworth, a Reverse Ekphrasis Tour

Closing | Kevin Leomo | Sound Space

Re-playing It Again Symposium

What does it mean to re-play something - an event, a film, a history, a politics, a building, a body, a set of gestures, an earth, a life, a landscape? Why the hyphen in the word ‘re-play’? How does re-playing co-exist with established strategies of re-enactment? Where does the difference lie? And why are artists so drawn to re-playing as both method of working and catalyst for production?

These are some of the questions that this symposium looks to investigate at a time when there is so much clamour from progressive thinkers and activists to abandon the past and imagine the future, to leap beyond the nightmare of the long twentieth century - the one that seems so impossible to exit, that weights on the minds of the living like a tumour. But what if the future was already in the past, lurking radioactively in roads not taken, in failed appointments and missed opportunities? Perhaps artists, of all people, are the ones most keenly attuned to this disjunction, aware, as they often are, that there is nothing new under the sun, that everything is a recycling of something else.

If this is the case, then it seems crucial to explore how contemporary artists engage with the idea of re-playing, talking with them about their practices, experimenting with their diverse findings. The artists and thinkers in the symposium have little truck with modernist and colonialist notions of ‘originality’ – a kind of scorched earth policy, a spurious, imperialist venture into terra nullius. Instead, they look to re-play the past, stopping and stilling it, so that new possibilities can emerge from the ‘shock of the old’. In this ethics of ruin, this politics of abandonment, it may become possible to reconfigure how we ‘do’ the present so as to contest the progress myths of modernity and imperialism. This would be a perverse and playful mode of contestation that moves forward by going backwards. In this ‘tactics of the re-play’, one uncovers the power to resist all those reactionary notions of heritage and history that look to attribute everything to its proper time and place. And through that - who knows? - it may even be possible to breathe new life into that most seemingly defunct of all concepts: the idea of revolution, conceived now as a geometric figure that, like a compass, creates the new by rotating back on itself, coming full circle.

Artists and thinkers who will be responding to these questions and showing work include Gerard Byrne, Delafontaine Niel, La Compagnie Dodescaden, Sarah Browne, Conor Carville, Minty Donald and Nick Millar, Graham Eatough, Ashanti Harris, Luke Fowler, Lee Hassall, Emmanuel Grimaud, Kevin Leomo, Sarah Neeley, Vincent Rioux, Farah Saleh, Simon Starling, Gabriele Rendina Cattani, Kathryn Elkins, Morgan Quaintance, and Mischa Twitchin.

The Re-playing It Again symposium is the culmination of a 4 year research project led by Baptiste Buob, Christophe Triau, Carl Lavery and Nathalie Cau and is part of a larger LABEX research programme, Les Passés dans le présent. We would like to thank Ghislaine Glasson-Deschaumes and Emmanuel Grimaud, the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (CCA), the Goethe-Institut, Glasgow, and Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow for all their support.

The symposium has been organised by Carl Lavery, Dominic Paterson and Melanie Lavery.