Kings of England Accepted to Performing Lives Conference, Kingston University, 6-8th July

Indeed. My first conference as an "independent scholar" post-PhD. The proposal read:

(In response to the question: “WHOSE LIFE?”):

Since April 2008 I have been performing alongside my 74-year-old father under the name “Kings of England”. Our show, “Where We Live & What We Live For” has been scratched at five times and has confirmed for support by the BAC, the Nuffield Theatre and Leeds Met Studio Theatre in 2009.

I found a picture of my father (before he was my father) jumping from the rocks toward the sea. The picture, taken off the South coast of France in 1958, catches him partway down.

In 2001 he suffered a transient-ischemic attack, falling of a bicycle in the hillsnear home. My mother reports that for an hour, he did not remember his name, now where he was; nor where he lived.

I asked him about his fall, and about his landing, and he seemed to be unable to remember much at all except for “how clear the water was” and “all these little fishes”, he said: “talk about a clear blue sea”.

In response he has given me license to reclaim that lost hour, writing invention and supposition into the spaces created in the event of forgetting.

We may accord these inventions and suppositions certain ethical significance, drawing a Blanchotian treatment of the verb “to research” through Levinasian treatment of the unknowable-ness of the other: inventing fictions to replace lost facts, we aim to preserve the dignity of the unknown as unknown, as a point of convergence between us.

For ‘Performing Lives’ we propose to show 15 minutes of performance followed by 15 minutes Q & A.