The Last Dance Meets The Last Repast

The Politics of the Unconscious: HYSTERIA, SURREALISM, & AVANT-GARDE DANCE

Our Guide: Marija Krtolica
Winter 2019 Version

Presentation with discussion
The talk examines the historico-political relationships between: the psychiatric transformation of madness into mental illness, the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious, the surrealist anti-psychiatric art, and dance-theater’s embodied expression stripped of narrative development. Hysteria as one of the most theatrical of mental illnesses, presents a point of departure for a discussion of the ways in which since modernism the artists resisted psychiatric diagnosis based on a reductive reading of symptoms. The talk will place the artistic explorations from modernism and post-modernism in a dialogue with the ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Performance: Theorizing Symptomatic Expression
Group movement improvisation:  Hystero-Grotesque Mode
Intermission

A surreal meal à la Dalí will be served

Theorizing Symptomatic Expression

“The jaws of my mind are in perpetual motion.
The sensual intelligence housed in the tabernacle of my palate
beckons me to pay greatest attention to food.
I only like to eat what has a clear and intelligible form.”
—Salvador Dali, Gastro Esthetics

“The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which
the commodity completes the colonization of social life.”
—Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

MARIJA KRTOLICA (b. 1973, Belgrade) is an international movement artist, dance researcher and teacher (BFA NYU, MFA UC Davis, MA NYU, PhD, Dance,Temple University). Her current research focuses on the meanings and symptoms of hysteria in the nineteenth century, and critical re-investigation of hysterical scenes in Tanztheater. At the artistic residence in Spread Art in Detroit, the University of Arts, Belgrade, and at the Le Couvent artistic residence in Auzits, France.