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Critical Stages/Scènes critiques
Unstable Grounds: Reconfigurations of Performance and Politics
Guest editors: Gigi Argyropoulou and Stefanie Sachsenmaier
Special Issue, June 2021 (#23)

This issue explores operations of performance during unstable conditions marked by socio-political, environmental, economic and further challenges. It is particularly interested in histories, reconfigurations and mutations of performance practice as it seeks to respond and ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) of the present. Thinking through and beyond the political and ‘social turn’ (Jackson, 2011; Bishop, 2006; Kester, 2011) of recent years, this issue examines instances that rethink the relationship between performance and politics, giving rise to performative reconfigurations that challenge sedimented practices. Focusing on specific examples of performance practice in view of its emerging forms, aesthetics, processes of making, methods and pedagogies, the issue aims to trace how performance might critically question social imaginaries and offer structures of being and living otherwise.

In the face of the current Covid-19 pandemic, the wider performance sector has effectively been rendered inoperable. The current convergence of complex issues in the sector and beyond, triggered by the pandemic as well as the Black Lives Matter movement, in conjunction with the environmental crisis, calls for a radical undoing and reorganising of the political, the social, the cultural and the existential. In connection to current as well as related historical conditions, this issue seeks to address the following questions: How might cultural workers embrace conditions of instability and engage in processes of ‘shared brokenness’ (Harney and Moten, 2018)? In what ways might performance contribute to a shaking up of the ‘terrain of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2007)? What methods and tools are developed through performance-making that might function as models of ‘affirmative praxis’ (Braidotti, 2016)? How do performance processes participate in the building of an ‘emergent strategy’ (brown, 2017)?

We envisage this mixed-modal online peer-reviewed journal issue to include essays, manifestos, critical reflections, including images, videos and further forms of creative works. Indicative topics and questions to be addressed might include, but are not limited to:

– New ecologies and performance futures
– Performance during/after the pandemic (digital and alternative spaces)
– Performance as intervention/protests
– Collective modes of organising in performance
– Performance of/in brokenness
– Racism and social inequalities
– Indigenous knowledges
– Queer and counter publics
– Radical feminist traditions
– Performance and the environment
– Performance and posthuman thought
– Performance as/and exit/escape/withdrawal/stasis
– Radical histories of performance during periods of instability
– Neomaterialist approaches to performance-making and the undoing of structures

Full length essays as well as short provocations will be considered, alongside artists pages and other creative, multimedia material. We especially invite submissions from artists, academics and practitioner researchers from Global Majority backgrounds. For information about submission, visit: https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.critical-stages.org%2Fsubmission-guidelines%2F&data=02%7C01%7CGlenn.Odom%40ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK%7C6187625cf33443531b5d08d864cc63a3%7C5fe650635c3747fbb4cce42659e607ed%7C0%7C0%7C637370176301417345&sdata=HsKsmII8z7EFn4IxnKrsQSbuJtGzOgTcu8NWqQSGGj0%3D&reserved=0

Timeline
Proposals (abstracts 300 words plus short biography): 20 October 2020
First drafts: 20 January 2021
Final drafts: 10 April 2021
Publication: June 2021

For proposals, submissions and general enquiries, please email argyropoulougigi@gmail.com and s.sachsenmaier@mdx.ac.uk

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Section Editor: Yana Meerzon (Canada)

The “ESSAY SECTION” is dedicated to urgent issues related to theater and performance making, ways of thinking and writing about theatre and performing arts, ways of viewing and reflecting practices, pedagogies of performance and text analysis, practices of dramaturgy, interdisciplinarity, transcultural approaches and digitalization of communication practices in theatre and cultural performance, among other issues. The aim of the ESSAY SECTION is to offer a broader practical, aesthetic, historical and theoretical outlet to those interested in recent developments in theatre and performance across national and disciplinary boundaries.

Critical Stages/Scènes critiques is a peer-reviewed on-line journal fully committed to the Open Access Initiative. Inquiries, abstracts and submissions are to be sent to the editor of this section. Yana Meerzon (University of Ottawa) at yana.meerzon@gmail.com

Production Calendar for June 2021 publication:

Abstracts (250 words) and Bio (100 words) – October 15, 2020

Complete Articles (up to 5000 words) – December 15, 2020

Peer-Review Process – January / February 2021

Second Draft based on Reviews’ Comments – March 1, 2021

Technical Editing – April/May 2021

Publication Date – June 2021

November 1, 2020

Seeking proposals for an edited collection on “theatre-fiction”, i.e. novels and stories about theatre.

Theatre has made star appearances in dozens of novels, from J. W. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow to Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed. There are historical theatre-novels (John Arden’s Silence Among the Weapons), naturalist theatre-novels (George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife), children’s theatre-novels (Noel Streatfeild’s Curtain Up), detective theatre-novels (Claire Legendre’s La Méthode Stanislavski), and even science-fiction theatre-novels (Christopher Stasheff’s A Company of Stars). But while literary genres such as science fiction or detective fiction have been extensively theorized, “theatre-fiction” has not received the attention that this enduringly popular and complexly intermedial genre deserves. This volume of essays will explore novelists from a range of eras and parts of the world who engage in sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice(s) and industry, examining what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre.

This project situates itself within a developing domain of scholarship on theatre/novel intersections. The significance of theatre in the lives of particular novelists has been probed in studies such as Francesca Saggini’s Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts and Stephen Putzel’s Virginia Woolf and the Theater. Monographs such as Alan Ackerman’s The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage and David Kurnick’s Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel remind us that theatrical and novelistic forms did not develop in isolation, accentuating a history of fluid boundaries, reciprocal exchanges, and creative antagonisms. On one hand, what will connect the chapters in the proposed volume is a more specific thematic emphasis—they will focus on novels that are specifically about theatre as artistic practice and industry (as opposed, for instance, to novels whose engagement with theatre and drama is more strictly formal, e.g. novels reflecting the five-act structure of Shakespearean tragedy or the dialogue of well-made plays). Theatre-novelists, however, are linked not only by theme and topoi but also by the shared formal and stylistic challenges and opportunities that arise from engaging through one medium with elements and attributes of others. In this respect, a study of theatre-fiction has links with the developing field of intermediality, which has grown to examine what theorists call “intermedial reference” or “intermedial representation”. Within intermediality studies, significant attention has been paid to topics such as the ekphrasis of visual art and cinema, leaving novelistic engagement with theatre largely unexplored.

In addition to accentuating the significance of theatre in the work of prominent novelists, this volume is also an opportunity for less-studied theatre-novelists to receive critical attention. The aim is to bring together discussions of theatre-fiction from a range of eras and parts of the world, shedding light on some hitherto neglected works and bringing them into conversation with a broader field. The following link provides a list of novels and stories that engage in sustained ways with theatre, and which might be possibilities for discussion in this collection. https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FTheatre-fiction%23List_of_Novels_and_Stories_about_Theatre&amp;data=02%7C01%7CGlenn.Odom%40ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK%7Cec462c31c7d646bdf11a08d85515037c%7C5fe650635c3747fbb4cce42659e607ed%7C0%7C0%7C637352896035484221&amp;sdata=JiUdO1SHL4S0RNlbhyHGNCIhSVVIkIqDn2UogEu7ux4%3D&amp;reserved=0

The volume will showcase a range of approaches to theatre-fiction, such as:
• a focused analysis of a particular theatre-novel;
• an analysis of theatre across the oeuvre a novelist who frequently engages with it;
• a comparison of the ways in which two or more novelists engage with theatre;
• a discussion of theatre-fiction from a particular era (e.g. late-1800s France);
• a discussion of a specific theatre-fictional phenomenon across two or more novels (e.g. novelistic portrayal of theatre audiences, novelistic rendering of acting methods …);
• an investigation of how theory and scholarship from the realms of Theatre and Performance Studies might inform analysis of theatre in novels;
• theatre-fiction and pandemics: the next-best thing when theatres are closed?
• etc.

Please send a brief bio and an abstract of no more than 600 words to graham.wolfe@nus.edu.sg by November 1st 2020.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Dr. Graham Wolfe
Associate Professor, Theatre Studies, English Language and Literature
National University of Singapore
graham.wolfe@nus.edu.sg

Call for Submissions
PSA XXXIII (2020)
Co-editors: Enza De Francisci, Lisa Sarti, and Michael Subialka

PSA, the journal of the Pirandello Society of America, is happy to announce its upcoming special issue devoted to Six Characters as World Literature (volume 33, which will be published in spring 2021). Celebrating the centenary of one of the most monumental works of modernist theatre, we examine not only the formation, impact, and legacy of Six Characters, but also its position as a text within the global circulation of world literature.

Pirandello’s groundbreaking play is a text that has been translated, disseminated, adapted, and transformed in myriad ways, travelling into many different linguistic and cultural systems. It is also a text that was itself shaped by a transnational itinerary in its own moment. With this complex two-way process and intercultural reception in mind, we invite interdisciplinary contributions that explore Six Characters and its moment, author, and the various pathways through which it has impacted the history of theatre and the imagination of a global audience.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Language and Six Characters, from its formation and production to translation and circulation
* Media and multimedia exchanges
* Pirandello and his contemporaries on a global stage
* Six Characters in the history of international theatre (impact, legacy, circulation, reception, etc.)
* Six Characters and avant-garde experimentation/innovation
* Adaptations, re-writings and cultural translations in the circulation of Six Characters
* Six Characters and the sociology of translation: networks and agents that have enabled Pirandello and this play to travel through translation (particular contexts, material conditions, and individuals)
* Six Characters’ relation to its cultural moment, and to subsequent moments
* Gender in Six Characters, Pirandello, Italy, Europe, and/or global sites of reception
* Issues in transnational performance traditions and different theatre cultures
* Questions of modernity in Six Characters, Pirandello, Italy, Europe, and/or global sites of reception

Article submissions should generally be between 5,000 and 10,000 words, follow MLA formatting, and can be made via email (please send an anonymized word document with separate cover sheet including personal information) to: editorpsa@gmail.com<mailto:editorpsa>

The submission deadline for this issue is January 15, 2021. Questions for the editors can be directed to the email address above.

In addition to article submissions on the special topic above, PSA seeks submissions that would fit into its other sections:

Interviews for publication in the journal’s “In Conversation” section.
We are happy to accept submissions consisting of interviews with directors, producers, actors, filmmakers, translators, or other artists who work on Pirandello or who connect themselves to Pirandellian themes.

New translations of Pirandello’s work or relating to Pirandello’s work.

Original creative work inspired by or relating to Pirandello.

Pedagogical engagements with Pirandello, Pirandello and teaching, how is Pirandello taught and received in class (theatre studies, language classes, Italian literature, psychology and philosophy courses).

Finally, the journal also publishes book and performance reviews relating to Pirandello and encourages submissions of any relevant reviews to the editors.

We are happy to accept submissions for these on a rolling basis. These submissions can likewise be made via email (as a word document) to: editorpsa@gmail.com<mailto:editorpsa> and any questions should be directed to the editors.

We look forward to reading your submissions.

Best wishes,
Enza De Francisci, Lisa Sarti, and Michael Subialka
Co-editors, PSA 33, “Six Characters as World Literature”

You are cordially invited to join us at the Shakespeare Association of America’s 2021 conference in Austin, Texas, 31 March – 3 April 2021

Embodying Differences in Global Shakespearean Performance

Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University)
Elizabeth Pentland (York University)
Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)
The ethics of embodied difference intersect with global frames for filming and performing Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. How do categories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability put pressure on artists’ and audiences’ claims about ethical and political gains of global Shakespeare? This seminar invites contributions that examine identity politics in the production and global reception of adaptations.
Sign up at:
https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fshakespeareassociation.org%2Fannual-meetings%2F2021-seminars-and-workshops%2F&amp;data=02%7C01%7CGlenn.Odom%40ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK%7Cc2f2678ea8aa428d28c108d843cb2a0c%7C5fe650635c3747fbb4cce42659e607ed%7C0%7C0%7C637333887164372732&amp;sdata=m4%2FaMPTxY2%2FAHMFdCr4tdXMgEwWVBsb5GSfuja0kZA0%3D&amp;reserved=0