Menu
Cart

admin

About admin

Posts by Pria Williams:

Dance Chronicle Special Edition

A Special Issue of Dance Chronicle
Call for Research Articles 

All manuscripts will receive double-anonymous peer review.  Submissions will be accepted at any time before August 15, 2020.  Please submit manuscripts through the Taylor & Francis Submission Portal.

Movement Arts in Dance, Theatre, and Intermedial Performance

The physical role of the body on stage holds equal fascination for dance and theatre scholars and practitioners.  

 On one hand, particular genres such as commedia dell’arte and poor theatre have emphasized the agility, dexterity, kinesthetic equipage, rhetorical gestures, and raw physicality of players.  In actor training, Stella Adler famously commanded actors to “physicalize” in order to develop the sense of a character in a scene at a moment in time.    

 On the other hand, the historic development of ballet tells a story of transition from court to theater, with the elements of theatre–including drama, design, voice, and spoken texts–often assuming surprising proportions.  In various periods and places throughout the world the theatrical roots of dance and the dancelike ritual roots of theatre have intermingled in productive ways.     

 We invite contributions addressing how performers, directors, choreographers, and designers have explored the immediacy of the body and the power of presence in movement arts and intermedial performance.  Articles may address, but need not be limited to, such subjects as:

  1. How have various forms of physical theatre, including commedia dell’arte, pantomime, and circus, merged elements of dance and theatre to produce innovative intermedial genres and artists:  Mummenschanz, Cirque de Soleil, Michael Motion, Complicite, etc.? 
  2. In what ways do forms of Asian and African dance drama exhibit rich dimensions of dance and dancelike movement:  Noh (theatre of ghosts), Kabuki, Kathakali, etc.? 
  3. How have puppet theatre practices and the construct of the puppet reflected and refracted human movement in the West and the East? 
  4. How have robot, cyborg (half-human, half-machine), and weapons of war affected movement arts or practices on screen and digital media?  
  5. How practices in theatre intersected with dance or dancelike phenomena:  Stanislavsky technique, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Jerzy Grotowski’s poor theatre, etc.?
  6. How have hybrid forms of dance/theatre evolved in the 20th and 21stcenturies:  dance plays, Tanztheater, etc.  
  7. How have particular choreographers and genres of dance displayed strong linkages with theatre in contrast to approaches emphasizing dance for dance’s sake:  e.g., Antony Tudor, Martha Graham, opera-into-ballet, performance art, ballet d’action, etc.? 
  8. How have dance and theatre practices intersected in the American musical theatre to blur the lines between high art and popular forms:  Hamilton, Spring Awakening, etc.?

Performance Paradigm – Performance and Radical Kindness

Performance Paradigm 16: Performance and Radical Kindness  

Edited by Emma Willis (University of Auckland) and Alys Longley (University of Auckland)

 Kindness as a radical act is not just ‘being nice’ to one another; it is the core of articulating, recognising, and valuing the complexity and beauty of the human condition, and putting this into practice in order to dismantle harmful systems of oppression and subjugation. Radical kindness is the creation of space for vulnerability. (Burton and Turbine 2019)

In an era where political and civil discourses are marred by populist politics of division and exclusion, kindness may seem to be in short supply. When it does appear, it is perceived as soft, uncritical and feminized. Alternatively, it is critiqued as inherently biased and/or dependent on differences in subject position and power (Clegg and Rowland 2020). Yet kindness has its champions. In performance, the fields of applied theatre as well as socially engaged and relationally oriented modes of performance often express an ethos of kindness through their aim towards, justice, social coherence, and transformation. In the scholarly and popular psychology, researchers have heralded the benefit of kindness to personal happiness and wellbeing. At a political level, current New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has attracted global attention for her politics and practices of kindness, most recently emphasizing the importance of kindness as we respond collectively to Covid 19. However, ‘Kindness in the contemporary moment continues to be an under-researched emotion even in the midst of a surge of work in emotion and affect theory’ (Magnet at al 2014).

This issue of Performance Paradigm (https://www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal) seeks to respond to this gap in the literature, focusing on performance-based instantiations of kindness, and performance-led analyses of political and civil discourses that extend our understanding of its radical potential. Through discussion of a broad range of performance examples, we are seeking to redefine the performative potential of kindness, reinvesting it with the political power needed to counter prevailing political dispositions.

In considering the relationship between performance and kindness, we encourage a broad range of approaches. Kindness may be framed as a politically aspirational ethic that underlies or motivates performance – Petra Kuppers’ and Neil Marcus’s practice of ‘Helping Dances,’ for example, of which Kuppers writes: ‘All of us acknowledge living inter dependent lives, intersected and enabled by many, carried on the backs of infrastructural laborers of all kinds and touched by the kindnesses of strangers’ (Kuppers 2014). Kindness may also constitute an act of political and aesthetic refusal. Reflecting on a series of feminist performance works in Australia, Jana Perkovic remarks that the artists ‘found their strength not in attacking the enemy, but in standing their own ground. They were friendly works, non-combative – but through them, the artists claimed the right to exist for a universe full of dress-ups, kindness, self-reflection, freedom, and femininity’ (2014). Writing of Back to Back Theatre’s work, Super Discount, Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall remark that ‘The juxtaposition between dark and light, vulnerability and superpower, and acting and performance remind us that it is not the epic encounter that is of significance. Instead, as the artifice of acting is banished from this work, we are left with moments of human kindness and a series of questions about where we go from here’ (2013).

Kindness may also feature as a subject of thematic consideration. Lydia Adetunji’s 2019 play Calculating Kindness, for example, explores the life of George Price, best known for formulating an equation explaining altruism. Kindness may also inform the creative process. Sandra Reeve, for example, writes of what she calls ‘regenerative choreography’ which incorporates ‘loving kindness’ into its methodology (2018, 78). Performance strategies discussed may involve creating enabling disruptions or, as anthropologists Alison Phipps and Lesley Saunders describe, ‘poetry for the sake of gentling the space where violence is writ large and ugly’ (2009). Finally, a performance-based analysis might be applied to the discourse of kindness in political rhetoric. For example, in the same way that Denise Varney applies a performance studies framework to scrutinise the ‘affective power of misogyny’ (2017) in attacks on Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, such an approach might be used to assess the rhetoric of kindness in the discourse of leaders such as Ardern.

Through considering performances that variously enact, contemplate or promote kindness, we invite authors to challenge some of the prevailing beliefs and assumptions about what constitutes kindness. We therefore invite authors to consider not only performances that enhance our understanding of both the radical potential of kindness but also those that draw attention to its misuses.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • What is the role of kindness in creative pedagogies and creative practices? What is the relationship between discipline, disciplinarity and kindness in classrooms and rehearsal rooms?
  • How might the poetics of kindness inflect creative research methodologies, such as studio practices of performance writing?
  • How is kindness both performed and understood differently in distinct cultural contexts? How do these culturally specific articulations of kindness expand our understanding of kindness as praxis?
  • How does kindness figure in performances concerned with the politics of race and gender?
  • How, as Burton and Turbine explain, do various social and political biases undermine the legitimacy afforded to kindness? How has kindness, as they suggest, been ‘weaponized,’ and how can performance effectively challenge such bias?
  • How might performance-based analysis be applied to the discourse of kindness in political rhetoric?
  • How might kindness be applied beyond the human? For example, how might the radical potential of kindness be conceived of in relation to ecological crisis?
  • How do performances of kindness emphasize notions of interdependence and reciprocity?
  • How might kindness be conceived of as radical action? In what sense might it, as Magnet et al. write, function in performance as a ‘technology of social transformation’ and a ‘microtechnique for both resisting and shaping power relations’ (2014)?
  • How might kindness be framed as a principle for convening community in both performance contexts and civil society, building what Hall and Smith call networks of ‘flexible resilience’ (2015)?
  • How might we critique the capture by capital markets of kindness as an affective currency? What does this ‘mainstreaming’ of kindness tell us about its instrumentality?

Please send proposals of approximately 300 words to Dr Emma Willis (emma.willis@auckland.ac.nz) and Dr Alys Longley (a.longley@auckland.ac.nz) by 8 May 2020. Full articles will be due on 1 November 2020 for publication in Performance Paradigm, July 2021.

Please feel free to contact the issue editors with any questions. For more information about them, see here:

·      Dr Emma Willis, Senior Lecturer in Drama:

http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/people/ewil077

·      Dr Alys Longley, Associate Professor in Dance:

https://unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/profile/a-longley

 

Works Cited

Burton, Sarah and Vikki Turbine (2019) “‘We’re Not Asking for the Moon on a Stick’: Kindness and Generosity in the Academy.” Discoversocietyhttps://discoversociety.org/2019/07/03/were-not-asking-for-the-moon-on-a-stick-kindness-and-generosity-in-the-academy/.

Clegg, Sue and Stephen Rowland (2010) “Kindness in pedagogical practice and academic life”, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31:6, 719-735.

Grehan, Helena and Peter Eckersall (2013) “Review: Super Discount by Back to Back Theatre”, The Theatre Times, https://thetheatretimes.com/review-super-discount-back-back-theatre/​

Habibis, Daphne, Nicholas Hookway and Anthea Vreugdenhil (2016) “Kindness in Australia: An Empirical Critique of Moral Decline Sociology.” The British Journal of Sociology, 67(3), 395-413.

Hall, Tom and Robin James Smith (2015) “Care and Repair and the Politics of Urban Kindness.” Sociology 49(1) 3–18.

Kuppers, Petra (2014) “Crip Time.” Tikkun, 29 (4), 29-30.

Magnet, Shoshana, Corinne Lysandra Mason and Kathryn Trevenen (2014) “Feminism, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Kindness.” Feminist Teacher 25 (4), 1-22.

Perkovic, Jana (2014) “Performance: Dying on stage: Feminism 4.0.” The Lifted Brow, 23, 34.

Phipps, Alison and Lesley Saunders (2009) “The Sound of Violets: the Ethnographic Potency of Poetry?” Ethnography and Education 4 (3), 357-387.

Reeve, Sandra (2018) “On the Way to Regenerative Choreography.” Choreographic Practices 9 (1), 75-80.

Shklar, Judith N. (1989) “The Liberalism of Fear.” Pp. 21–37 in Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Varney, Denise (2017) “‘Not Now, Not Ever’: Julia Gillard and the Performative Power of Affect” in E. Diamond et al. (eds.), Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times, Palgrave Macmillan, 25-38.

Performance Research – On Perception

Performance Research

Vol. 26, No. 1: ‘On Perception’ (Jan/Feb 2021)

Issue Editors: Pil Hansen (University of Calgary, CA) and Freya Vass (University of Kent, UK)

Proposal deadline: Wednesday 29 April 2020

Performing arts training and performance methods develop perceptual skills that enable performers to direct their attention in extended ways, enabling them to remain present and aware while simultaneously perceiving multiple information sources, making decisions and acting on them. Process strategies and approaches to creation often tax well-trained, automated skills by involving physical or cognitive obstacles and conflicts, with an aim towards enhancing the performer’s ability to bring something new into the world. This work, in turn, invites audiences to also attend and perceive differently—to recalibrate and re-cognize their sensing and to more fully perceive across sensory modalities. The potential effect of this invitation is to attune audience members’ minds and bodies to a wider range of possibilities than what is perceptible within the pragmatically driven limits of everyday sensory perception. Not only aesthetically but also ideologically and ethically demanding, this perceptual re-calibration is a foundational condition of imagination, of approaching diverse minds and bodies as potentials instead of pathological deviations, and of the ability to register the many ways in which cultural practices and environments are both affected by and constrain human perception and action.

There is a crucial need to study the potential of the performing arts to affect our perceptual range and to re-sensitize us to connections between environment, human (inter)action and creative thinking. Yet this specific dimension of the work performing artists do is difficult to articulate, advance and measure. Unless it takes spectacular forms like perceptual assault, manipulation or theatrical magic, it tends to be addressed in vague terms that remain implicit to artists in training, audiences and funders.

With this issue of Performance Research, we invite artists and scholars to consider how perception is addressed and affected in and through performance. In particular, we welcome proposals that theorize practice and apply theory to practice in order to examine perceptual strategies of performance and their effects. Intersections between artistic enquiry in the performing arts and other disciplines, for example, cognitive science and cognitive/phenomenological philosophy, have proven particularly useful in addressing subjects of embodied cognition, memory and affect. By focusing on perception, this issue will focus on sensory registers and sensory loci of attention as a point through which embodied, cognitive, cultural and aesthetic processes are adapted. We furthermore embed this point of focus in the creative process and the specific perceptual demands and strategies of the performing arts.

We invite proposals that articulate or reflect on perceptual dimensions of the performing arts, including, but not limited to, enquiries into the following subject areas:

  • Perceptual learning and specialization in performing arts training
  • Compositional approaches that facilitate perceptual paths for the audience and/or performers
  • The constitution and adaptation of perceptual habits through performance praxis Intersections between perception and dramaturgy
  • Methods and methodology for researching perception and performance Perception as performance within, across, between and among performance cultures
  • Politicization of the senses in performance
  • Non-normative perceptual capacities, diverse abilities and artistic practice
  • The impact on perception of performative interactivity between animate and inanimate entities
  • The ethics of perceptual accessibility, inaccessibility and manipulation
  • Perceptual enhancement or inhibition in performance
  • Manipulation of performer/audience perception through perceptual illusion, disorientation or other means
  • Perception and spatial orientation/constitution/wayfinding in performance
  • Cross-modal perception, kinaesthetic empathy or induced synaesthesia in performance training, creation and reception
  • Extension of perceptual registers through technology in performance and its impact on perceptual reach and responsiveness
  • Perception in and of virtual performance

Contributions may take the form of short performance recipes and written poetic or performative reflections (1–3 pages), Practice-as-Research documentation and reflection or full-length (4–6,000 word) scholarly essays (length is to be determined with editors).

Schedule

Proposals: 29 April 2020
First drafts: 1 August 2020
Final drafts: 15 November 2020
Publication: February 2021

Issue Contacts

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors: Pil Hansen (University of Calgary, CA): pil.hansen@ucalgary.ca Freya Vass (University of Kent, UK): f.vass@kent.ac.uk General Guidelines for Submissions

Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our (www.performance-research.org ) and familiarize yourself with the journal.

Proposals will be accepted by email (Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF)).

Proposals should not exceed one A4 side.

Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.

Please include the issue title and issue number in the subject line of your email.

Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that all attachments do not exceed 5 MB, and there is a maximum of five images.

Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On the final acceptance of a completed article you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.

PAJ Call for Contributors

PAJ Call for Contributors


PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art entered its 44th year of publication in 2020. In pursuing our long-standing goal to include new voices and new forms of arts writing in the journal, we invite contributions from around the world on a range of topics and subject areas. Looking forward to future issues, there are a number of subjects we hope to focus on:

1. Neglected theatre and performance histories
2. Writers and new writing
3. Fascism and the rise of the far right
4. Performance, drawing, and notation (including theatre, dance, music, visual art)
5. New technologies and media
6. Spiritual dimensions of art

While we encourage articles on these subjects from contributors, we also accept essays on all other relevant topics for consideration. For all contributors, please send a letter of inquiry to submissions.paj@gmail.com in advance when possible. Deadlines remain open-ended as material is read year-round. All accepted submissions are published within a year. In addition to publishing articles, we also publish reviews on recent performances, exhibits, and published books.

For submissions, please follow the guidelines and stylesheet published on our website: www.mitpressjournals.org/paj.

Theatre History Studies – General & Special Section: “Commingled Histories: Theatre & Dance”

Theatre History Studies

CFP General Section

CFP Special Section: “Commingled Histories: Theatre & Dance”

Volume 41, 2022

Theatre History Studies accepts submissions on the full range of topics in theatre history on a rolling deadline. Please submit articles for consideration as soon as they are ready for review.

Please send manuscripts for the general section to:

Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
ths.editor@matc.us

Editor, Theatre History Studies

Skidmore College
Theatre Department
815 N. Broadway
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

The 2022 issue will feature a special section co-edited by Angela K. Ahlgren and Victoria Fortuna

Commingled Histories: Theatre & Dance

Over the past two decades, theatre, dance, and performance scholars have grappled with the tensions and generative intersections between text and movement, archival practices and performance repertoires, history and ethnography. Influential studies have probed and blurred the lines between theatre, dance, and performance. How might future histories account for the commingling of performance disciplines, both in how they have been practiced and in our historical accounting of them?

We propose “commingling” as a term that signals the fleshy, shifting, and sometimes risky ways performance research and practice ask us to share space, borrow methods, and move together in difference. Whereas “intersections” imply potentially static points of overlap, “commingling” invites consideration of the always-embodied dimensions of researching performance histories, including the  kinesthetics of archival research, the body-to-body encounters that drive oral history and ethnographic methods, and the collaborative dimensions of the writing process itself.

This special section interrogates the commingled histories of theatre, dance, and performance and the interdisciplinary methodologies that documenting them requires. We ask: How do theatre histories commingle with histories of dance, music, and other disciplines? What happens when ethnographic and archival research merge or generate friction? How does dance studies inform approaches to movement and text, voice and gesture, designs and bodies in theatre histories and vice versa? How might “commingling” provide a lens for considering conflict, coalition, segregation, and/or other ways of relating through performance processes, research practices, and in everyday life?

Submissions might engage the theme of “Commingled Histories” in relation to:

  • Performances and/or performance genres that invite multi- or intra-disciplinary analyses
  • Performances that commingle, frustrate, or disrupt received racial, ethnic, national, and/or hemispheric histories
  • Theorizing ethnographic dimensions of archival research and vice-versa, or other mixed methodological analyses
  • Dance and movement as a central concern in theatre histories and vice-versa
  • Rehearsal and training processes that bridge dance and theatre
  • Commingling and/or juxtaposition of on-stage and off-stage labor (directors, choreographers, stage managers, crew, etc.)
  • How costumes, props, and other material objects script or choreograph human agents
  • Political and ethical dimensions of performance practices

The co-editors are especially interested in essays that foreground political/ethical issues that arise out of the commingling of dance and theatre histories.

Please submit manuscripts for the special section by January 1, 2021. Submissions should follow  The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. For specific formatting guidelines, please see Guidelines for Contributors. Publication in 2022.

Please submit Special Section inquiries and manuscripts to both editors:

Special Section Editors

Angela K. Ahlgren

Victoria Fortuna

akahlgr@bgsu.edu

fortunav@reed.edu

Theatre History Studies is the official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference and is published by the University of Alabama Press. Please send manuscripts prepared in conformity with the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style and the University of Alabama Press style sheet located on the MATC website (here). Illustrations are encouraged. Essays should be between 6,000-8,000 words and use endnotes rather than footnotes.

Theatre History Studies accepts submissions for its general issue on the full range of topics in theatre history on a rolling deadline. Please send manuscripts for the general section to:

Dr. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, Editor

ths.editor@matc.us

Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada 42.1 (May 2021)

Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada 42.1 (May 2021)
General Issue


Theatre Research in Canada is seeking submissions for our next general issue on topics related to Canadian theatre and performance, both historical and contemporary, in national, international, and transnational contexts. Papers with a focus on Indigeneity and decolonization, on migration, and on trans- or non-binary experience in Canadian theatre and performance are especially welcome at this time.

TRIC/RTAC is Canada’s only peer-reviewed journal with an explicit focus on Canadian and Québécois theatre in both official languages. We publish original studies of all aspects of theatre production, as well as theoretically grounded studies of individual dramatic works and performance texts. The journal also welcomes and encourages submissions on performance studies topics, including: the performance of everyday life; the performativity of race, gender, class, and other identity categories; and the performance of nation or community through public acts or spectacles (to name but a few).

TRIC/RTAC remains dedicated to supporting research that explores First Nations theatre and performance cultures in Canada, as well as those of other historically disadvantaged social groups.

For detailed submission guidelines see: http://tricrtac.ca/en/forauthors/.

Submissions should be sent to our tric.rtac@utoronto.ca. Queries may be sent directly to the General Editor, Kim Solga, at ksolga@uwo.ca.

To be considered for publication in our next general issue, please submit your paper no later than 1 June 2020.

Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in Latin America and the Caribbean: Edited Volume

Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in Latin America and the Caribbean: Edited Volume

Editors:
Katherine Zien (McGill University)
Brenda Werth (American University)

 

Rationale:

As evidenced in the public nature of movements such as #NiUnaMenos, Argentina’s “Green Wave,” and the phenomenon of “Un violador en tu camino,” introduced by the Chilean performance group Lastesis, gender and sexuality are gaining public attention in Latin America in new ways, and performance is proving an important method of activism and engagement in the public sphere. At the same time, these collective actions call attention to their continuities with performative genealogies and historical legacies throughout the twentieth century, and even earlier, as Latin America has witnessed some of the earliest feminist movements in the Western Hemisphere (see Katherine Marino 2019; Elisabeth Friedman 2019; Rita Laura Segato 2016). In this volume, we seek to take stock of the current interweave of activism, performance, and gender and sexuality politics in the Americas. In addition to examining the innovative ways in which activists and artists are employing performative practices to advocate for rights related to gender and sexuality, we discuss how the regime of the right, buttressed by the Catholic Church and the Evangelical movement, and embodied perhaps most exemplarily by Brazil’s Bolsonaro, has adopted public practices to denounce the so-called “gender ideology” of the left and reinforce patriarchal hierarchies and heteronormative models of gender and family.

 We also hope where possible to point to continuities with or divergences from the legacies inscribed in texts such as Diana Taylor’s Disappearing Acts (1997) and Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (2003).  As Diana Taylor’s groundbreaking research has shown, the gendered and sexual displays of Cold War politics in Latin America and the Caribbean are intertwined with performances – whether “disappearing acts,” “theatre(s) of crisis,” “bad scripts,” or spectacular modes and scenarios of performing gender and sexuality.  In this text and others, including  Jean Franco’s pioneering works on Latin American women authors, gender is paramount in ways that both resonate with and depart from the current moment’s political movements and key figures. Important studies, including Jean Graham-Jones’s Evita, Inevitably (2015),  have allowed us further insight into the function of women leaders (de jure and de facto) during Latin America’s history, inviting us to examine the intersection between gender politics and populism and to consider the performance of hyper-masculinity and femininity in the portrayals of iconic figures such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Eva Perón.

While feminist histories have done the important work of denouncing the sometimes essentialist ideas of “true womanhood,” the “good mother,” or the virgin/whore dialectic, perspectives from indigenous feminisims have traditionally been overlooked (Julieta Paredes 2013; Aída Castillo Hernández 2010), and LGBTQ communities have only recently begun to be included in the public mobilizations against gender violence and in support of gender, sexuality and reproductive rights (Nacho Alonso, Juliana Martínez and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz 2018; Cecilia Sosa 2014). We hope that this volume will express the complexities, tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of gender and sexual politics of and in performance in the Americas.

Aiming for balanced regional coverage, we hope to include case studies spanning Latin America and the Caribbean and in dialogue with Latinx diasporic communities in the United States and Canada. We invite essays that attend to the historicity of gender and sexual justice movements, as well as their rootedness in theatre and performance practices. We also welcome papers revisiting canonical primary and secondary material on gender, sexuality, and performance in light of current events. Each essay will be 6000-7000 words, including notes and bibliography.

 Chapters that address the following themes are particularly welcome:

  1. Contemporary social movements in gender and sexuality: we welcome consideration of these movements, as well as how one defines and evaluates the efficacy of social movements now.
  1. Spectacles of gender violence: what is the role of spectacular gendered violence in normalizing or disrupting the patriarchy? What are continuing ethical dilemmas of aestheticizing violence, on and offstage? What is the relationship between mainstream media, activism and gender violence?
  1. Acts of revising the canon, shifting focus to and re-evaluating overlooked themes of gender and sexuality in theatrical traditions and movements (e.g., the grotesque, the avant-garde, documentary theater).
  1. Mobile and digital forms of activism: caravans, transnational exchanges; remapping, re-gendering space and time; gender and memory work.
  1. The historicization of human rights, feminism, and gender and sexuality activism in Latin America’s public sphere; influences across movements: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo; caravanas’ mother-activism, Cuba’s Damas de Blanco, memory and gender, devotion as activism.
  1. The transnational as a space of exception; the planetary; bare life; Butler’s concept of dispossession; the idea of “no [person’s]  land.” Performance as a possible complement or supplement to legal justice; performance as compensatory in the absence of legal justice.
  1. Intersectionality within these movements: race, class, and intergenerational relationships.
  1. Creation of new publics (and public spaces) through performance – and the place of gender and sexuality in this process.
  1. The persistence of paradigms of the heteronormative family in activism: are we working with the same scripts and roles even amid changing conditions? How are the scripts changing? How do both the left and right use these scripts to intervene in the public sphere?
  1. Risk: in what ways are gender and sexual performances putting bodies on the line? In what ways can we protect and keep safe the bodies performing this dangerous labor? What are the biopolitics of current manifestations of gender and sexuality activism in Latin America?

Procedure for submission: Please submit a 200-250 word abstract to both editors by May 10, 2020:

katherine.zien@mcgill.ca
werth@american.edu

 

MLA 2021 – Eugene O’Neill Society Session

Modern Language Association Convention

Toronto: January 7-10, 2021

The Eugene O’Neill Society

Call for Papers

Philosophy and Modern American Drama

As an allied organization with the MLA, the Eugene O’Neill Society has a guaranteed session at each annual convention. For 2021, the Society is broadening its scope beyond O’Neill to include all of modern American drama, from plays by O’Neill, Glaspell, and the Provincetown Players through works that have premiered in the past few years. We seek proposals in three general areas:

  • Discussions of dramatists who explicitly mention philosophers as inspirations for their work, such as O’Neill’s references to Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the roles these philosophers’ ideas have in the dramatists’ plays.
  • Discussions of philosophical theories of tragedy, comedy, or the absurd and their applications or lack of application to modern American theatre.
  • Discussions of the depiction of issues in epistemology, ethics, or any other areas of philosophy in modern American drama and the ways these plays help us to explore these issues.

Depending on the number and quality of proposals we receive, we plan to have either a standard 75-minute session of three 18-minute papers or a round-table discussion with five or six participants.

Please send proposals and a brief academic biography to David Palmer (dpalmer@maritime.edu) by Sunday, March 15. Proposals that in some way discuss Eugene O’Neill will be given preference, but this is not a requirement. A decision then will be made about whether to have a three-paper panel or a round-table discussion, and selected participants will be confirmed. The proposal for the session is due to the MLA administrators on Wednesday, April 1.

Thank you for considering this call for papers.

Load More