2013: Upside Down & Inside Out (Festivals as Transgressive Performance)

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Thompson Room, Barker Center
Harvard University
12 Quincy Street, Cambridge MA

performances * papers * discussions * refreshments
 

free and open to the public

Sponsored by: the Office of the Provost, the Committee on Degrees in Folklore & Mythology, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Committee on Dramatics, the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Department of Music, and the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University

Schedule:
 

9:15 am – Coffee & Welcome: Deborah Foster & David Guss
 

9:30 - 10:45 am - PERFORMANCE, PILGRIMAGE & TRANSGRESSION
 

Panagiotis Roilos (Harvard), “Festive Byzantines: Holy Days and Profane Rituals in the Greek Middle Ages”
 

Brenna McDuffie (Harvard), “Performance and Pilgrimage: Performative Displays of Faith at the Kumbh Mela”
 

Bruce Owens (Wheaton),  “Transgressing Transgression: Inappropriately Behaving at Buṃgayāḥ in the Kathmandu Valley”

        (read by William F. Fisher, Clark University)
 

Michael Witzel (Harvard),  “Two Nepalese Carnivals”
 

10:45 - 11:00 am - COFFEE BREAK
 

11:00 - 12:00 pm - FESTIVE IDENTITIES FOR A HYBRID WORLD

Maria Cristina Vlassidis Burgoa (Harvard), “Santos y Locas: The African Spirits of Loiza Aldea”
 

Grete Viddal (Harvard),  “Vodú Chic: Haitians and the Folkloric Imaginary in Socialist Cuba”
 

Kera Washington (Tufts)  “Adaptation and Identity: Haitian Vodou in Folkloric Performance”
 

12:00 - 1:00 pm - LUNCH

1:00 - 2:00 pm - KEYNOTE
 

introduction by Doris Sommer (Harvard)
 

Diana Taylor (NYU)
 

“Saving the ‘Live’: Performance and Intangible Cultural Heritage”
 

2:00 - 2:15 pm - COFFEE BREAK
 

2:15 - 3:15 pm - NEIGHBORHOOD SAINTS

Augusto  Ferraiuolo (BU),  “Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy: Religious Festive Practice in Boston’s North End”
 

Henry Cataldo (Mass Art),  “Boston’s North End Religious Feasts: Songs, Cries, and Prayers”
 

Kay Turner (NYU),  “Saints Alive in Brooklyn: Gender and Performance in Traditional Italian-American Feste”
 

3:15 - 4:30 pm - FESTIVALS FOR A SECULAR SOCIETY
 

Reebee Garafalo  (UMass Boston), “HONK!: The New Ground Game of Musical Activism”
 

Erminio Pinque (RISD, BIG NAZO LAB),  “Transformative Creature Invasions & Festival Jump-Starting” 
 

Joy Fairfield (Stanford), “‘Burning Man was Better Next Year’: Performing Utopian Nostalgia at a Post-Modern Secular Festival”

Charles Keil  (SUNY/Buffalo),  “Peace & Joy Unlimited: Returning the Festive to Everyday Life” 

4:30 - PERFORMANCE
 

BIG NAZO Intergalactic Creature Invasion Party