Monika Zyla

Time: 10 AM to 11 AM

More Info: Song, Stage and Screen VII: The Musical’s Global Conquest Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG), University of Groningen (The Netherlands), 2-5 July 2012 The New York Times has frequently reported on the increasingly global musical theatre community. Broadway flops are finding success in Europe and China's economic power is stimulating a musical theatre industry aspiring to enter the global market. This conference investigates the range of global contexts within which stage and film musicals are created, circulated and consumed. While much growth has occurred in recent decades, musicals have been circulated transnationally for more than a century, and forms such as the American musical developed out of a range of cultural influences. Stage and screen musicals also make the global local, with, for example, Rodgers and Hammerstein choosing foreign settings for their stage musicals, culturally-specific narratives becoming global commodities (Les Misérables, Billy Elliot), and Bollywood films bringing exotic locations to domestic film audiences. Globalization is also a story musicals tell, as demonstrated by one of Broadway's newest musicals, Once, about an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant. With the explosion of media technologies offering ever more platforms and dimensions, musical theatre and film find new expression and distribution, shrinking the global stage onto our cellphones, laptops and Ipads. Song, Stage and Screen is the annual conference of the academic journal, Studies in Musical Theatre, which is published by Intellect Press. Previous Song, Stage and Screen conferences have been held at the University of Portsmouth, UK (2006), University of Leeds, UK (2007), the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2008), University of Maryland, College Park (2009), University of Winchester, UK (2010) and University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance (2011). It is expected that a selection of papers from this conference will be invited for submission to the journal.

Event Date: Jul 4, 2012

Organization: Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG),

Conference End Date: Jul 5, 2012

Conference Start Date: Jul 2, 2012

Time: 2 PM to 5 PM

Location: Institution: Faculty of Arts, Culture and Media, University of Groningen Address: Oude Boteringstraat 34, Groningen Room: 002 (on ground floor)

More Info: Context In this symposium, dance music is reconfigured in a variety of new contexts from the matrices of city and national politics, to the fluid and changing creative output guided by aesthetic and musical processes of intertexuality, digitalization, experimentation and mixed-mediation. Multiculturalism, citizenship, collectivity and mass-mediation all relate to the processes and organizational structures inspiring dance music’s recent proliferation in the creative city. The activity of contemporary dance music participants variously challenge or reify the precarious cultural and ethnic identities assigned to central and peripheralized groups such as those “citizens” connected to the nation-state or conversely those cosmopolitans working internationally and self-represented outside the political bounds of regions and nations. Independent, highly professional artists promoting transnational networks in, around and beyond the metropolitan centers of leisure and physical interactivity speak to new kinds of connections engendered by digital media, migration and mobility in the twenty first century. The three speakers uniquely contribute to a discourse which too long centered upon the particular geographical locals and “schools” of fragmented genres of electronic dance music to incorporate other surprising theoretical frames which juxtapose seemingly incongruous genres such as jazz and folk or articulate varying levels of musical professionalism and activity. Finally the speakers also consider those outside the creative musical process as important mediators in the culture of dance music such as bouncers and event planners whose influence speaks to powerful barriers and markers of identity continually at play when articulating the “who, when and where” instantiating dance music’s politics of pleasure and bodily expression in the post-industrial city.

Event Date: Dec 9, 2011

Organization: International Association for Study of Popular Music