News

CFP: Sharing Space II

Brian Friel Centre

Queen’s University Belfast

Friday, 14thJune 2019

Proposal Deadline: 10thMay 2019

The School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s in association with the Irish Society for Theatre Research is holding a one-day symposium on Practice as Research (PaR) processes in the creative arts at the Brian Friel Centre on Friday, 14th June 2019.

The aim of the symposium is to function as a creative colloquium for university PaR researchers to connect and share their work, and to identify important questions that will inform future development of artistic research in a university context.

Following the rich discussions of the symposium’s first iteration last year, we wish to continue exploring how PaR scholars “share space” through interdisciplinary connections and collaborations across different arts practices (e.g. dance, theatre, film, music, sonic arts, visual arts and performance art).

We welcome proposals for presentations connecting with any aspect of our “sharing space” theme. Additionally, in response to the current climate of apprehension and precarity pre-Brexit, and the threatened re-establishment of a “hard” border on the island of Ireland, we are particularly interested in considering:

– how PaR processes and performances draw attention to conceptual, philosophical, or physical operations of borders in their many manifestations in artistic practice?

– how PaR work responds to the stasis threatened by borders, frontiers, partitions, or boundaries, and generates thought about how they are negotiated?

– how the rigidity of division implied by imposed borders might serve as an impetus for motion to connect?

– how oscillations between binaries (e.g. here|there, inside|outside, us|them) are experienced, made visible, and/or dissolved in artistic processes and performance?

Details on keynote speakers and workshops to follow.

Sharing Space II is generously supported by funding from Queen’s University Belfast and the Irish Society for Theatre Research. Presentation and participation is free, although spaces are limited.

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FORMAT FOR SUBMISSIONS

Paper presentations are limited to 15 minutes. Proposals for practice demonstrations and other non-standard presentation formats are also accepted. Postgraduate researchers are very welcome.

Please include the following in your proposal:

– Names of presenter(s) and organisational/institutional affiliation(s)

– Technical, space and duration requirements

– Biography (max 100 words)

– Title and type of submission (panel, performance, etc.)

– 300 word abstract/description

A small number of travel scholarships (£50) are available to postgraduates travelling to the symposium from outside Belfast. Please indicate on your proposal if you would like to be considered for a travel scholarship, providing details of your cost of travel.

Proposals should be submitted to the symposium organisers, Dr Aoife McGrath, Paula Guzzanti and Argyro Tsampazi: aoife.mcgrath@qub.ac.uk; atsampazi01@qub.ac.uk; pguzzantiferrer01@qub.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions is May 10th2019

Acceptance decisions will be communicated by 17th May 2019.

For any queries please contact the organisers.

—
Dr Aoife McGrath
Subject Lead
Drama Department
Brian Friel Centre
School of Arts, English and Languages
Queen’s University Belfast

Co-Convener of the Choreography and Corporeality Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research

Email: aoife.mcgrath@qub.ac.uk<mailto:aoife.mcgrath@qub.ac.uk>
Phone: 0044 (028) 9097 3249

Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
CFP themed Issue: Resilience and Resourcefulness

Co-editors: Dr Steve Greer (University of Glasgow) and Dr Margaret Ames (Aberystwyth University)

This themed issue explores the contentious status of resilience in its relationship to applied theatre and performance practice.

First coined to describe the potential for stability or equilibrium in ecological systems, the concept of resilience has migrated into the domain of social policy and political theory as a highly influential paradigm for understanding the potential for adaptation in the face of unpredictable challenges or ‘shocks’ (Walker and Cooper, 2011). In turn, resourcefulness has been deployed to describe a ‘learned’ repertoire of cognitive skills allowing individuals to regulate their response to internal events such as emotions and pain (see Rosenbaum and Jaffe, 1983) as well as a broader ability to access and deploy materials, money and power. Situating the concept of resilience as a ‘new form of political intervention’ (2014, xii) Evans and Reid propose a darker function of this power. Far from being a pro-active quality of survival in the face of vulnerability, resilience is an armament of neoliberal nihilism.

Informed by Helen Nicholson’s proposal that we ask whether the forms of social change sought through applied practice are done to its participants, with them, or by them, this special edition asks ‘resilience to what? Resilience for whom?’ (see Cretney 2014, Cutter 2016). While narratives of self- reliance and triumph over adversity may affirm the persistence of individuals and communities – and the capacity of self-organised groups to ‘future proof’ their own existence – the celebration of autonomous resilience may have normative qualities when it rationalises a neoliberal discourse of ‘responsibility without power’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002). If resilience and resourcefulness offer mutually informative lenses for thinking about power and social justice then their ecological dimensions might also suggest the relationships between human activity in its broader, non-human contexts and participants.

In response, this issue considers how applied practice might respond to and emerge from evolving and multiple types of resilience and resourcefulness – whether personal, environmental, physical and/or political. We are particularly interested in how performance may subject definitions of those terms and their priorities to ethical scrutiny, and imagine – or begin to practice – alternatives to those preferred within neoliberal economies (which prize resilience and resourcefulness as the qualities of self-mastering, competitive subjects capable of thriving with limited support from the state). Though these concerns may be most immediately felt in the fields of disability arts and ecological performance, and in practice developed within marginalised or precarious communities, they also suggest the broader conditions within which contemporary applied practice unfolds.

We are also interested in how the relationships between resilience and resourcefulness may unfold in relation to a third term – sustainability – which calls attention to the timebound, finite and irreversible nature of the wider human use of natural resources and, perhaps, of the act of performance-making itself. How do we perform sustainable acts? What are we sustaining in performative terms? In exploring these questions, we do not understand resilience and resourcefulness as oppositional terms but as concepts which are mutually implicated in each other’s meaning.

Specific contributions may address the following:

* Where do social and ecological understandings of resilience intersect in and with applied performance?
* What can applied performance tell us about the relationship between resilience and vulnerability/precarity, or between resilience and resourcefulness?
* How can resilience help us understand the relationship of applied practices to space, community and place? How do different cultural contexts shape the meaning – and consequence – of resilience and resourcefulness?
* How do applied performance practices elaborate the relationship between collective resilience and self-care? How do we understand resilience and resourcefulness in relation to disability, impairment and ‘wellness’?
* How does resilience thinking inform and shape theatre practice? (e.g. demands for impact, ‘sustainable’ business models, emphasises on networks over institutions)
* How does applied performance practice help us reconsider – or better understand – sustainability on an individual or group level?
To support less pressurised working practices, we have deliberately adopted a longer than usual development process for this issue.

Please send initial proposals of approximately 300 words for articles (6-8,000 words), provocations (1500 words) and interviews / dialogues with and between practitioners, activists and researchers to both Stephen Greer (stephen.greer@glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:stephen.greer@glasgow.ac.uk>) and Margaret Ames (mma@aber.ac.uk<mailto:mma@aber.ac.uk>) by Friday June 28th. Full articles will be due in Spring 2020, with publication intended for volume 26, issue 1 in February 2021.

References

Cretney, Raven (2014) ‘Resilience for whom? Emerging critical geographies of socio-ecological resilience’, Geography Compass 8(9): 627-640.
Cutter, Susan L. (2016) ‘Resilience to What? Resilience for Whom?’, The Geographical Journal 182(2): 110-113.
Evans, B and Reid, J (2014) Resilient Life. The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity.
Peck, Jamie and Tickell, Adam (2002) ‘Neoliberalizing space’, Antipode. Wiley Online Library 34(3): 380-404.
Rosenbaum, Michael and Jaffe, Yoram (1983) ‘Learned helplessness: The role of individual differences in learned resourcefulness’, British Journal of Social Psychology. Wiley Online Library 22(3): 215-225.
Walker, Jeremy and Cooper, Melinda (2011) ‘Genealogies of resilience: From systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation’, Security dialogue. SAGE Publications Sage UK: London, England 42(2): 143-160.
Peck, Jamie, and Adam Tickell. 2002. Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34 (3): 380-404.
Walker, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. 2011. Genealogies of resilience: From systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation. Security dialogue 42 (2): 143-160.

Dr Stephen Greer
Senior Lecturer in Theatre Practices
School of Culture and Creative Arts
University of Glasgow
G12 8QQ

[category cfp}

https://www.astr.org/page/2019-working-sessions

2019 Working Sessions – ASTR www.astr.org ASTR is a US-based association dedicated to theatre and performance scholars by serving hundreds of members globally. Questions? Call us at 651-288-3429.

Glenn Odom
Associate Editor Studies in Theatre and Performance
Reader
University of Roehampton | London | SW15
Office hours Mondays 12:40-1:40 and by appointment

{category cfp]

Proposed Volume:
Theatre and the Macabre

Editors:
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Meredith Conti
Professor and Chair of Theatre Arts Assistant Professor of Theatre
Loyola Marymount University University at Buffalo, SUNY

Submissions Timeline and Contact Information:
Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a 100-word bio to kwetmore@lmu.edu and maconti@buffalo.edu by June 1, 2019. Accepted contributors will submit their chapter drafts to the editors by May 1, 2020.

Project Description:
Theatre and the Macabre will be the first edited collection to consider the diverse ways that the macabre operates within live performance. We move from an understanding of macabre theatre as one that disturbs, horrifies, or provokes because of its involvement with or depiction of death and injury, the gruesome and the grotesque, the dark and the fearful. The macabre in performance is evocative, adaptable, and at times elusive; this volume seeks to elucidate how texts, bodies, atmospheres, choreographies, sounds, and stage effects work (independently or collaboratively) to convey the macabre to audiences.

Because the macabre is neither time-bound nor limited to a specific culture or cultures, we hope that the collection’s chapters will range across periods, geographic boundaries, and sites of entertainment in deliberate and productive ways. We are particularly intent on securing contributions from scholars of color and those working in disability studies; horror (as a genre that often employs the macabre) has problematic and fascinating relationships with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability, and we are interested in interrogating these relationships within Theatre and the Macabre. Similarly, because macabre theatre also exists outside of playhouses and concert halls, contributors are encouraged to apply expansive notions of theatre and performance in crafting their abstracts.

Theatre and the Macabre is currently being considered for a contract with an academic press.

Possible topics for chapters include but are not limited to:

• Theatre’s performative/narrative hauntings and ghostings
• The supernatural and spiritualism onstage
• Figures of the macabre (murderers, ghosts, monsters, spirits, mad doctors, victims and innocents, etc.)
• Notions of identity and the macabre (gender, race, class, nationality, ability, religion, sexuality, etc.)
• Monstrosity, freakery, and the “horrification” of difference
• The intersection of theatrical spectatorship and theories of fear, horror, terror, trauma, and disgust
• Representations of dying and death in performance (secular or religious)
• Choreographies of horror/the macabre in movement
• Horror theatre (Le Grand Guignol, gothic dramas, McDonagh’s The Pillowman, National Theatre of Scotland’s Let the Right One In, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s The Snow in Midsummer, etc.)
• Theatrical adaptations of literary and filmic horror and how they emphasize the macabre (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sweeney Todd, Carrie, etc.)
• Global styles of macabre theatre and/or genres of horror (symbolism, surrealism, naturalism, medieval theatre, gothicism, Roman tragedies, German sturm-und-drang, British In-Yer-Face theatre, Iranian ta’ziyeh, Japanese kaidan, etc.)
• Medical theatre and medicalized bodies
• Dark designs and technologies (mise en scenes, soundscapes and smellscapes, extreme stage effects, and theatrical makeup)
• Immersive spectacles (hell houses, Halloween attractions, ghost tours, haunted tourism)
• Staging the unthinkable (graphic simulations of violence, horror, and torture onstage)

Please contact the editors at kwetmore@lmu.edu and maconti@buffalo.edu with any questions. We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Dr. Meredith Conti
Assistant Professor of Theatre
University at Buffalo, SUNY

Author, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (Routledge, 2018)
Book Review Editor, Theatre Annual
meredithaconti.com

Shoshin Theatre Association is organising an international theatre forum
and conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, between the 10-12th May 2019.
Co-organizer of the conference section is the Committee on Theatrical
Sciences of the Regional Committee in Cluj of the MTA.

Street – or open space – theatre, and alternative, non-classical ways of
doing performances count as rather widespread genres in the West,
sometimes with rich roots dating back centuries. Furthermore, several
companies exist whose primary purpose is not equivalent with the
artistic purposes of the state theatres; rather they lay emphasis on the
role of theatre in society,
while not neglecting artistic aspects either. However, in our region
these endeavours are only starting to come into public awareness. Among
the many reasons of this time delay we can mention not to a small extent
the absence of reliable funding as well as the rigidity which can be
experienced in the system of subsidized state theatres.

These currents usually function in the case of theatre companies who do
not exist in a strictly hierarchical system or as a state-supported
institution. What is the relationship between artistic intent and
functioning? Is it possible for independent, ‘other’ types of companies
to be able to grow in an environment where state theatres prevail? Is it
possible (for example following the examples of the Ghent Manifesto or
the National Theatres of Wales and Scotland) for subsidized, state
theatres to reinterpret themselves and to transform radically? In what
does a street performance differ from a performance held in a closed
space? What kind of other opportunities do public/alternative spaces
offer us? What kind of affair can a performance establish with public
space, what kind of doer-viewer relation does it presume, and how can a
performance influence our relationship with the public space?
Furthermore, what kind of examples do we know of theatre(s) turning
towards the periphery? For example, is the tradition of "landscaping"
(taking performances to villages) an out-dated custom, or indeed an
existent and urgent need that we need to adapt to the 21st century? And
how can we help the mostly abandoned communities living in rural areas
(villages and small towns) in a systemic way, through theatre (among
others)?

The above questions offer orientation, but they are not exclusive. We
await applications from university teachers, researchers, artists,
university students, cultural managers, leaders of theatres as well as
professionals from other areas. We are curious to see how these themes
can be approached beside the angle of theatre – in policy making,
cultural entrepreneurship, anthropology, sociology etc. Please send your
abstract of up to 400 words accompanied by a short CV until the 25th of
March 2019 to the following address: shoshin.mail@gmail.com. The
abstracts will be peer reviewed by the scientific committee asked for by
the Association, followed by the final confirmation until the 1st of
April. The lecturers of the chosen papers will be provided with meals,
accommodation (1 night) and their travel expenses will be reimbursed up
to the sum of 50 euro/person (in case of lecturers arriving from outside
Romania or Hungary).

The language of the conference is English. The conference will be held
on the 11th of March from morning to early afternoon and it is an
organic part of the weekend-long event called Out of the frame organized
by Shoshin Theatre Association. The theme of the event is: the research
of less institutionalized, alternative theatrical genres, with
particular regard to open space genres (street theatre, interactive
performances, community genres), furthermore, the analysis of what kind
of role performing arts have in the periphery and on the lives of
communities living in rural environments, and in a broader sense on the
whole of society. Other events in the programme consist of workshops,
book launches and roundtable discussions with acknowledged international
guests and professionals from Romania.

A keynote address will be held by Paul Allain, Professor of Theatre and
Performance, researcher, author, and Dean of the Graduate School of the
University of Kent.

More information soon on https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.shoshintheatre.com%2F&amp;data=02%7C01%7CGlenn.Odom%40ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK%7C8c2d4c99ed1f4502ac9508d69dd97216%7C5fe650635c3747fbb4cce42659e607ed%7C0%7C0%7C636869954606977637&amp;sdata=wFSZjhwSzPu7mzrAq%2B1A0vbdSidOB44u7%2B8D875%2FqF4%3D&amp;reserved=0 and
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Glenn Odom
Associate Editor Studies in Theatre and Performance
Reader
University of Roehampton | London | SW15
Office hours Mondays 12:40-1:40 and by appointment

Please find below the two statements from the two candidates for the chair of SCUDD, Kate Newey and Mark O’Thomas.

(Though working fine in most cases, some browsers may fail to show both statements, but the download link is functioning for both)

Please do not send us an individual response to the election, but ensure that the vote you send is the consensus of your SCUDD member department or unit.  Please send your unit’s vote to m.j.taylorbatty@leeds.ac.uk (using the subject line ‘SCUDD chair 2018’) by midnight on 15 April. Please use your ac.uk email address as a means to confirm affiliation.

Statement from Kate Newey