50 Jahre IKM - "What is the game, and how is it played?" Queer Approaches to the Archive, Performance and (Institutional) History
Termin: 17. Oktober 2025 um 18:30 - 19:30
Ort: IKM Gr. Seminarraum E0101
"What is the game, and how is it played?"
Queer Approaches to the Archive, Performance and (Institutional) History
Screening & Talk
The archive is a contested space, especially in the fields of the performing arts. Questions on the adequate form of documentation and archiving, for an art form frequently characterized by their ephemeral nature, collide with critical contestations of the archive, as a space of power and privilege. The IKMs anniversary gives us the chance to reflect on the ways and materials we tell our history with – and what other ways of accessing the archive and history there are. Prof. Gerard M. Samuel (University of Cape Town, UCT), visiting scholar at the International Research Center Gender and Performativity (ICGP) will introduce us to one way of doing this: A queer Performance of the Archive. In his short film Death and the Merrim, a choreo-diary, Samuel and Ebrahim Medell, two former professional, South African ballet dancers, mobilize archival material, props and costumes, but most of all their own embodied experience to stage excerpts from UCTs Dance Archive. Through their ageing bodies they excavate notions of (fr)agility and (in)dependence in dance, including its violent entanglements concerning race, sexuality and gender politics.
Gerard M. Samuel is Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town and former Director of their School of Dance (since 2008), a former Ballet dancer, turned choreographer, producer-director turned academic and published author. His PhD examined Contemporary Dance in South Africa and the nexus it offers for reimagining notions of Other and Body. His (research) interests encompass Ballet, Contemporary Dance and Dance Pedagogy in South Africa (post-apartheid histories), Disability Arts and the contested histories found in Dance archives that expose interstices of the Black experience.
Philipp Hohmann's (Dr. phil.) research is situatedbetween Theatre Studies, Media Studies and Queer Theory. Since March 2025, he serves as a university assistant at the International Research Center Gender and Performativity (ICGP), where he is developing a research project on affirmations of bodies, corporeality and their epistemic potential in emancipatory theory and aesthetic practice. Previously, he worked as aresearch assistant at Ruhr University Bochum where he wrote a dissertation on queer collectivity, mediality, performance, and (self-)documentation in/with the works Antonia Baehr, Boudry/Lorenz and others.
Date: 17 October 2025 at 6:30 p.m.
Location: IKM Large Seminar Room E0101
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