A one-day symposium at the University of Sheffield in conjunction with the UK premiere of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties.

Location:

Theatre Workshop, University of Sheffield.
Friday October 4th, 2013.

Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said "I have a dream", he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. […] The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real.
Brian Eno, ‘The Big Here and Long Now.’

Panel 1.Imaging the Future/Perceiving the future

Imagination was described by Marx as that which ‘distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees… the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality’. The first panel will be organised around the prophetic possibilities of imagined worlds, their reflection and affect on the present, and the cognitive relation of the mind to making actual. A cross-disciplinary range of speakers will address ideas of imaginative world, determination and conceptual summoning.

Panel 2. Performing the future

Theatre has been persuasively described by Marvin Carlson as a ‘memory machine’ within which stage representation is inevitably bound up with processes of recycling and recollection. At the same time, as Thornton Wilder insisted, ‘on the stage it is always now’: in contrast to the literary arts, theatrical performance ‘takes place in a perpetual present time’. But can performance evoke/anticipate the future? How might it do so? By what means can theatre speculate, predict, conceptualise or otherwise open up a future space?

Tomorrow’s Parties by Forced Entertainment
Sheffield Crucible Theatre Studio: Thursday Oct 3rd and Friday Oct 4th 2013, at 19.45

www.forcedentertainment.com/page/144/TheatrePerformances/132