Parliament

Panel Discussion

March 5, 2024, The Segal Theatre

The Martin E. Segal Center is proud to present the third New York iteration of Parliament in cooperation with Social Practice CUNY.

Parliament is a pioneering work of situational choreography and exploration of ecological aesthetics. The work offers participants a critically needed withdrawal from normal modes of social action and provides instead an innovative site for 21st-century experimentalist cooperation. Embedded in the immediacy of Michael Kliën’s choreographic framework, citizen-performers, working in silence, come together to bear witness to and hold council amidst the elemental phenomena and fundamental concerns of collectively lived experience. Pointing towards unseen and unexperienced modes of social organization, Parliament traverses, probes and navigates the paradigms that animate our present-day political relations.

Panel Discussion with Michael Kliën and Social Practice CUNY

7:30 pm - 8:30 pm

FREE  + Open to public. First come, first served.

Choreographer and artist Michael Kliën will speak about Parliament and his practice of social choreography that he has developed at the Laboratory for Social Choreography at Duke University. He will be joined by a representative from our co-host, Social Practice CUNY. 

Parliament 

4:30 pm - 7:00 pm 

CLOSED

Over the past decade, at least a thousand people (among them philosophers, office workers, professional dancers, scientists, students, and artists) have participated in Parliament sessions from Athens to NYC. For all its potency, Parliament resists 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."

To participate in Parliament, you must RSVP to Cory Tamler by emailing corytamler@gmail.com. This event is not open to the public. 

This event is produced in collaboration with Natasha Katerinopoulos and Cory Tamler.

Biographies:

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, Athens Festival, 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 Ph.D. 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 founding-director of the Laboratory for Social Choreography at the Kenan Institute of Ethics in 2020.

Cory Tamler (www.corytamler.com) is the Program Coordinator for Social Practice CUNY and a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, where she is writing about co-authorship practices in contemporary performance. She is a former Fulbright scholar and in 2021-2022 was a visiting DAAD scholar at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Gießen. Cory also makes research-based performances with In Kinship (Wabanaki/Maine). Her first book, A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography, was published in 2022. She is based in Berlin, Germany, where she is developing a trilogy of plays in collaboration with bodies of water and Alex Viteri Arturo. She tends a garden near the Helenesee.