Lecture Series – Senses in Performance

This lecture series takes the senses as a stage and performance as a way of sensing. It begins from the premise that both senses and performance are not fixed domains, but active, porous and contested fields of practice. Drawing on the 2007 publication of the same name by Sally Banes and André Lepecki, The Senses in Performance reactualizes their investigation into the “critical thresholds where the corporeal meets the social, the somatic meets the historical, the cultural meets the biological, and imagination meets the flesh.“ (1) The senses are inherently political. They organise what can be felt, seen, and known. Performance, in turn, offers a laboratory for their (re-)arrangement. From a decidedly multi- and intersensory perspective, we ask how cultural and artistic performances address the sensorium. How do the senses collaborate, compete, or fail one another? And which hierarchies – e.g., between seeing and smelling, rationality and intuition, body and mind – do we still enact, often implicitly, when we perceive, create, or study? The lecture series invites artists, scholars and curators to think and act through sensory methods: to approach vision, sound, touch, smell, or proprioception not as neutral channels of experience but as historically and culturally shaped knowledge regimes. Across disciplines, we ask how sensory hierarchies can be worked with, and how biases – of gender, ability, race, or technology – might be engaged productively, as material for critical invention.