The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center presented a book talk with Michael Kliën and Cory Tamler on A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography livestreaming on the global, commons-based, peer-produced HowlRound TV network on Monday 20 March 2023 at 9:30 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 11:30 a.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 12:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4).
Join us for a Zoom talk with Michael Kliën and Cory Tamler discussion the newest Segal Center Publication: A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography (2022).
Over the past decade, at least a thousand people (among them philosophers, office workers, professional dancers, scientists, students, artists, and the author-editor of this book) have participated in parliament sessions from Athens to New York City. For all its potency, parliament resists being written about, starting from any attempt to describe what it is. It resists authorship too.
Choreographer and artist Michael Kliën prefers to say he discovered it, or wished for it, from within “a felt urgency that things are just not sustainable.”
Artist and writer Cory Tamler holds the container, editing together her memories of her own experiences as a participant, excerpts from conversations with Kliën and from his personal archive, theoretical propositions for the way parliament could go to work in the world, and reflections from other participants in parliament over the years. An annotated bibliography makes visible the framework of ideas—from art and choreography to systems theory and political theory—within which parliament sits.
Michael Kliën is a choreographer and artist whose work has been situated worldwide. Kliën’s artistic practice encompasses interdisciplinary thinking, critical writing, curatorial projects, and, centrally, choreographic works equally at home in the performing and fine arts. He has been commissioned by leading institutions such as Ballett Frankfurt, Martha Graham Dance Company, New Museum, PS122, Volksoper Wien, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hayward Gallery, and ZKM. As artistic director/CEO of Daghdha (2003—2011, Ireland), Kliën developed a distinct movement aesthetic in correspondence with influential concepts of politically engaged choreography, performance, and dance. He received a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. After living and working in Greece, he was appointed professor at Duke University in 2017, inaugural director of the MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis in 2018, and director of the Laboratory for Social Choreography at the Kenan Institute of Ethics in 2020.
Cory Tamler is a writer, translator, and interdisciplinary artist working in Berlin, New York City, and Wabanaki/Maine. Her projects across disciplines act as containers for collective thinking through embodiment, using performance as a means, an excuse, for becoming intimate with other humans and nonhumans through collaboration. Together with In Kinship Collective, she has created interdisciplinary, research-based works in conversation and relationship with Wabanaki guides and watersheds since 2015. Cory is a PhD candidate in theatre and performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY and has been awarded Fulbright and DAAD fellowships to support
her academic work.
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