Call for Proposals
Performance Studies international Annual Conference
PSi2020 Crises of Care: Act, Respond, Engage
Stream: Ends
July 7-11, 2020 – Rijeka, Croatia
Deadline for proposals: December 31, 2019
The curators of the Ends stream at PSi2020 are pleased to announce that the calls for proposals for PSi’s annual conference is now open. The theme for the conference this year is Crisis of Care: Act, Respond, Engage.
Ends is one of the six interweaving streams of research (sort of conferences-within-conference) that responds to contemporary issues. The other five streams are: Listening; Materiality and Corporeality; Neighborhoods; Editing, Curating, Publishing; and, Times of Power, Historical Paradigms.
You can read more about our stream on the website: https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpsi2020rijeka.com%2Fthe-streams%2Fends%2F&data=02%7C01%7CGlenn.Odom%40ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK%7Cacb51fbce47d4727b48b08d76703c5ac%7C5fe650635c3747fbb4cce42659e607ed%7C0%7C0%7C637091138224927618&sdata=9gXer0M5uQFzen5f8s6J0cmSfN8sFzflaFlF4E5LlCE%3D&reserved=0
The international curators of the Ends stream, Kristof van Baarle (University of Antwerp, Belgium), Felipe Cervera (LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore), Rayya El Zein (Wesleyan University, USA), Kyoko Iwaki (Waseda University, Japan) and Eero Laine (University at Buffalo State University of New York, USA), are looking forward to receiving your proposals.
Call for Proposals
Eventually, all ends. Ends are biological as much as they are political; phenomenological as much as metaphysical; embodied as much as intangible. Yet, in contrast to the omnipresence of narratives reflecting the ends of the human, the planet, and democracy (among others), we find the ends declared in dystopic, utopic, and other visions in between do not arrive. Like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, we are perpetually waiting, ending, but never quite so. The ends have been unmoored from a chronological timeline and have transformed into a chronic condition of mourning.
In performance studies and in contemporary performance practices, theorists, and practitioners have explored the affective, aesthetic, and political resonances of these ends in different ways. These approaches to impending ends show a certain cyclicality and intellectual inclination towards the hopes for a “post-” that is, in consequence, never quite it. Although the ends are upon us together, they are always delayed, in the durational now—both in the world and in the theory we produce. Ends proposes to take the ends as multiple, as an ontological overlap of finitudes and to develop collective epistemes of the end. This conference stream will therefore experiment with distributed authorship and research as the methodology for the ends. What is the performance theory of our ends? And beyond, how might we push performance theories to consider the ends of performance beyond the potency of the ephemeral and the production of alternatives? What is performance (theory) as a means without ends?
Ends will be a stream committed to collective writing, shared knowledge, and an intellectual commons. It is an attempt to reshape and overwrite notions of singular authorship and creation that remain pervasive in performance studies and affiliated disciplines, even as such ways of making often sit in opposition to the political and artistic work to which we aspire.
Rationale and Structure
The collaboration of Ends will extend beyond the local time of the PSi conference. The curators of this stream plan to devise practices of transindividual writing that work across either physical or digital platforms to explore the processes of collective research and creation. In their submissions, participants are asked to articulate a vision of ends and express a willingness to work between the individual and the collective author. Beginning in early 2020, stream curators will facilitate a process that will culminate in shared writing, exchanges, and performance installations during the PSi Conference in Rijeka.
During the conference, the stream will convene at the University of Rijeka in the morning for panels, roundtables, workshops, and in person meetings that stem from the work prior to the conference. Additional workshops and discussions will take place during the early afternoon as part of the conference-wide Intensive Care and Institutional Critique programs. In the late afternoon, the stream will convene and use the stage, auditorium, and boxes of the National Theatre of Croatia in Rijeka to put the ideas, thoughts, and performances discussed into praxis. Members of the stream will create and take part in the interactive performance installation, which will evolve from the collective work leading up to the conference and that will be open to all conference attendees. At the moment, the afternoon session is still open to new ideas, and the members of the stream are willing to collectively develop the precise format of the event in the upcoming months.
Presentation Guidelines
We invite interested parties (individuals or collectives) to submit proposals via the application form. Feel free to indicate a type of presentation with the understanding that it may change through the collaborative process.
In the brief biographical statement, please describe your (in)experience with collaborative writing.
How to Apply
To submit a proposal for the stream Ends, please fill out the online application form, which can be found here<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fforms%2Fd%2Fe%2F1FAIpQLSfZByKhAaxtRerzoyhEI6MznWU-QN4UeAbSa5GxSasOE48Y8Q%2Fviewform&data=02%7C01%7CGlenn.Odom%40ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK%7Cacb51fbce47d4727b48b08d76703c5ac%7C5fe650635c3747fbb4cce42659e607ed%7C0%7C0%7C637091138224927618&sdata=DHCghc0hrsrU8JUR2IHOU%2BZdHUXnZA4rc4FJ048KEaE%3D&reserved=0>: https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpsi2020rijeka.com%2Fconference%2Fapplication-form%2F&data=02%7C01%7CGlenn.Odom%40ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK%7Cacb51fbce47d4727b48b08d76703c5ac%7C5fe650635c3747fbb4cce42659e607ed%7C0%7C0%7C637091138224927618&sdata=UnrlXPnU6zWKQVAY2arlvW2Xz953lLkPOAGQCNkRJsY%3D&reserved=0
Also provide an image or audio that complements or interacts with your abstract—this might be of your own work as an artist or other material. (This is a special requirement for this stream and should be sent directly to the stream contact: endspsi2020@gmail.com)
The deadline to submit a proposal is December 31, 2019.
All other conference dates and deadlines can be found on the conference timeline<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpsi2020rijeka.com%2Fconference%2Ftimeline%2F&data=02%7C01%7CGlenn.Odom%40ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK%7Cacb51fbce47d4727b48b08d76703c5ac%7C5fe650635c3747fbb4cce42659e607ed%7C0%7C0%7C637091138224927618&sdata=40xGzQ8r%2Fi9ljyIbar96YMc2cJR52mBVhdsQW%2BhbIl4%3D&reserved=0>.
Please direct any questions regarding your application to endspsi2020@gmail.com<mailto:endspsi2020@gmail.com>