Saturday, August 29, 3:30-7:30pm
Please RSVP to mail@belami.info
Bel Ami invites you to an afternoon of lectures and performances exploring Samuel Beckett’s lifelong engagement with the visual arts. Drawing on David Lloyd’s account of painting as Beckett’s “thing,” this symposium asks how language and aesthetics relate throughout Beckett’s oeuvre. The event coincides with Dan Mitchell and Richard Sides’ exhibition, The Woods (July 18 – September 12, 2026), a presentation of paintings and sculptures, which—echoing Beckett’s puns and language games—activate familiar words in absurdist rearrangements.
Four short lectures by scholars Leland de la Durantaye (Claremont McKenna College), Foad Dizadji-Bahmani (Cal State University, Los Angeles), Katherine Weiss (Cal State University, Los Angeles), and David Lloyd (University of California, Riverside) will be followed by two performances: Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972), performed by Jeni Jones, and circa ten to the ninety (2025 – ), an interactive performance artwork by Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, Suan Santipreecha, and Luc Trahand that stages a chess game from Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy (1938), accompanied by a new sound composition from Luc Trahand.
SCHEDULE — Each lecture will be followed by a short Q&A. Light refreshments will be served.
3:30pm: Beckett’s Art of Mismaking, Leland de la Durantaye
4:00pm: Beckett and Duchamp, Foad Dizadji-Bahmani
4:30pm: “… another like herself…”, Katherine Weiss
[Intermission]
5:00pm: Beckett and Rage, David Lloyd
6:00pm: Samuel Beckett, Not I (1972), performed by Jeni Jones
6:30pm: circa ten to the ninety (2025 – ), performed by Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, Suan Santipreecha, and Luc Trahand
Leland de la Durantaye is a writer, critic, translator, and Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He has been a Fulbright fellow, a Woodrow Wilson fellow, a DAAD fellow, a Mellon fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a fellow of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. De la Durantaye is the author of three books and over eighty articles on topics in philosophy, French literature, German literature, Italian literature, anglophone literature, and the visual arts. His translation of Jacques Jouet’s Upstaged was a finalist for the PEN Best Translated Book of 2012. His nonfiction books are Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007); Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009); and Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (2016). He has published articles in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Artforum, and The Believer, among others. He serves on the editorial boards of the Harvard Review and Cabinet. His first novel, Hannah versus the Tree, was published by McSweeney’s in November 2018.
Foad Dizadji-Bahmani is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and his research has focused on philosophy of physics and science, as well as Wittgenstein. Recently, he has turned to modernist studies. Persistence of Memory, his paper on Salvador Dalí’s eponymous 1931 painting and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), was published in the July 2026 issue of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui. Dizadji-Bahmani is also an artist, and recently collaborated with Saun Santipreecha and Luc Trahand to create circa ten to the ninety (2025 – ), an ongoing performance project rooted in a fascination with chess as a form of creativity.
Katherine Weiss is the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at California State University, Los Angeles. Her publications include Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive (co-edited with Seán Kennedy, 2009); The Plays of Samuel Beckett (2013); Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art (co-edited with Robert Reginio and David Houston Jones, 2017), and Simply Beckett (2020). She has authored chapters in Beckett’s Afterlives: Adaptation, Remediation, Appropriation (2023) and Samuel Beckett and Ecology (2025), as well as articles in the Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (where she has served as a guest editor). Weiss was an invited lecturer at the Samuel Beckett Summer School (2019); a lead organizer of the Samuel Beckett Society’s Beckett and Justice conference (2024); and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Ashland Beckett Shorts Festival (2024).
David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of several books, including Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (2016) and Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2019), as well as the poetry collections Arc & Sill (2012), The Harm Fields (2022), and Archipelago (2026). The Press, Shelter, and The Pact, a book of three plays by Lloyd, was published in 2025. His latest book, Rage, Shame, and Dread, is forthcoming from Seagull Books in October 2026.
Jeni Jones is a Beckettian practitioner who has worked for 30 years as a director, producer, actor, writer, and rapper. She earned her BA in Theater Directing & English Literature from Fordham University, New York, and an MFA in Directing from California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita. Jones has directed Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Waiting for Godot, Not I, and Rockaby. Her 2018 short film, CLUB RAT$, received multiple awards. Between 2025 and 2026, Jones performed her double bill of Beckett’s Not I and Rockaby at the Beckett Society Conference, Edinburgh; University of California, Los Angeles; Beckett Conference at the University of Antwerp; and Drama Bookshop, New York. Her performance of Not I was reviewed in the 50th-anniversary edition of The Journal of Beckett Studies.
Saun Santipreecha is a composer and artist based in Los Angeles. In addition to producing his own feature film scores, he has worked alongside composers including John Debney, Danny Elfman, The Newton Brothers, and Abel Korzeniowski. His score credits for film and TV include Justice League (2017), Doctor Sleep (2019), Horizon: An American Saga (2024); Five Night’s At Freddy’s (2023); and Daredevil: Born Again (2025). Santipreecha has been the subject of two solo exhibitions at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles (2023, 2024). In 2024, he was commissioned to create an installation at The Wende Museum, Culver City. Santipreecha was a guest speaker at the 9th Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society at California State University, Los Angeles.
Luc Trahand is a French-American interdisciplinary artist. His practice incorporates sculpture, sound, literature, and software. He has collaborated with Foad Dizadji-Bahmani on circa ten to the ninety (2025 – ), and with Saun Santipreecha on the exhibitions ...These Things That Divide The World In Two…, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles (2024) and Per/formative Cities: A Nest of Triptychal Performances, Galleria D’Arte Contemporanea Bruno Lisi, Rome (presented by Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles, 2024). Trahand has released several EPs, an album titled In Coherence (2020), and DÉS.ILLUSIONS (2023), a series of sound works with an accompanying essay.