West Hollywood Lecture Series: 'All Theatre, All the Time, Now'

West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers

CRITICAL STUDIES: Nicholas Ridout’s work is concerned primarily with a political understanding of the theatrical event as an instance of cultural production, an affective experience and a mode of social organisation. Current projects include a book on work in modern theatre. Provisionally entitled Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and
Love, this book takes the figure of the amateur --– understood as the person who makes theatre out of love --– as a way of developing a theoretical and historical account of the idea of community in twentieth and twenty-first century theatre and performance.

Kate Elswit is an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies combines cultural analysis, dance history, performance theory, German studies, and experimental practice. Before receiving her PhD in German from the University of Cambridge, she completed an MA in European Dance Theatre Practice at Laban, and undergraduate degrees in Dance and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. She came to Stanford University in 2009 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, and has taught courses listed in the departments of Drama, German Studies, Art History, and in the Dance Division. Between 2006-2009, Kate taught practical and theoretical courses in the graduate school at Laban, as well as interdisciplinary undergraduate topics at the University of Cambridge. She was also on the commission for MA Solo/Dance/Authorship, Germany’s first practice-led masters degree in dance.