On Wednesday 21 September, we will recommence the semi-public sessions of our ongoing Reading Group after the summer break. The Reading Group is currently focused on the field of research of Edition VI – Event and Duration (2015–2016).

For this sixth meeting we will read a book by the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, entitled Conversations with Children (1978). In this book, Laing records conversations with his children, Adam and Natasha, which he wrote down from memory over a six-year period as part of a journal he kept. The book will be made available to readers on the night and will be read aloud across the session.

The reading of Laing’s book and its consideration of the child through their personal expressions of lived experience, follows on from our previous meeting in which we read José Esteban Muñoz’ essay ‘Stages: Queers, Punks and the Utopian Performative’ (2009). In this essay Muñoz’ wrote to rescue the term ‘stage’ from its use by adults to define “a developmental hiccup, a moment of misalignment that will, hopefully, correct itself” as a way to manage and contain the potentiality of queer youth.

If you would like to join the Amsterdam Reading Group please email a brief statement of your motivation to join to bookings@ificantdance.org.