Theory and Criticism Focus Group—ATHE 2020 Conference
Drive: Combustion ↔ Energy ↔ Resilience ↔ Drive ↔ Resilience ↔ Energy ↔ Combustion
Detroit, Michigan
July 29-August 2, 2020
Please send questions to Theory and Criticism Conference Planner: Daniel Ciba (danciba@hotmail.com)
1. “Spare Parts”
An Interactive Roundtable Event
In response to the 2020 ATHE conference theme, “Drive,” the Theory and Criticism Focus Group will focus our annual roundtable series on scholarly and practical explorations of the concept of “Spare Parts.” How often during rehearsals, preparation for classes, and the writing process, do we stumble on some aspect of our research that does not fit? As scholars, how often do we eliminate tangents from our narratives? As practitioners, how often do we cut material that we love in deference to time limitations and where does that artistry go? As teachers, how often do we lament the lack of just “fifteen more minutes” or “one more class meeting,” and what is it that always seems to get pushed to next class? For the “Spare Parts” roundtable series, we welcome contributions from practitioners, educators, and scholars where we imagine ourselves to be “performative mechanics” who discard/use/replace these Spare Parts of our written and embodied texts as if they were parts of an automobile.
Drawing from the postmodern concept of bricolage, examined by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, these roundtables will encourage participants to reuse, recycle, and rethink discarded scraps of scholarship and practice. Pastiche, deconstruction, parody, collages, and mash-ups—each in its own way instigates a new methodology where coherency, unification, and closure are not the narrative’s underlying goal. Yet, often both practical and scholarly research requires the creators to put aside evocative material that seems not to fit into expected patterns. Building on the idea of driving as a mechanical process that involves the interaction of multiple parts, ATHE’s 2020 Detroit conference provides our community of theorists, critics, artists, and teachers an opportunity to bring forward these discarded scraps and put them in conversation with each other. By rescuing the spare parts of our scholarship, pedagogy, and practice from our own scrap heaps, what new voices, ideas, and paths can we add to “functional” scholarship and creative practice?
What bits of your research have you discarded? What can we do with these spare parts of our inquiries, left over somehow because they don’t seem to fit our larger goals, yet linger and compel us to keep them alive? What are the ways in which practitioners and scholars might conceptualize and apply the metaphor of “Spare Parts” to their work? What changes when the focus becomes making something out of scraps, rather than polishing a narrative to the point that it erases, rather than emphasizes, existing and important gaps? From irresolvable contradictions to surprising intersections, how can an intentional curation of these “tangential” erasures create new narratives that better reflect the multiplicity rather than the singularity of the stories we choose to tell?
The Theory and Criticism Focus Group seeks position papers from theatre artists, educators, scholars, activists, philosophers, and critics interested in examining our 2020 Roundtable Series theme, “Spare Parts.”
The roundtables eschew formal paper presentations in favor of short position papers and provocations designed to encourage interactive critical conversations among panelists and audience members. Building on our previous roundtable series, we strive to include a diverse range of participants from graduate students and emerging scholars, to professional critics, artists, educators, and senior scholars. Position papers can take the form of a short essay, a manifesto, an outreach exercise, a critical review, a theoretical musing, a research report, a creative project, an interview, or an embodied performance practice. Suggestions include, but are not limited to:
- How might we examine byproducts? As things produced that don\’t fit into the well-oiled machinations of theatre, theory, or industry, and are therefore discarded. From scholarship to sludge, how do we deal with the byproducts?
- How might we reuse discarded scraps of theory and practice that currently litter the dirt road taken by drama and theatre as they have evolved worldwide? How might we rebuild broken down theories and practices, and to put them in conversation with their more competitive counterparts today? How might we rev-up obsolete models of theory and practice that were silenced by their competition and were driven out of the stage?
- How do we treat the spare parts of artistic practice as objects of analysis? What do these odds and ends tell us about the environment in which they were begun, abandoned, discarded, and destroyed? What are we—as teachers, practitioners, and scholars—doing when we fill in the gaps?
- How might these discarded pieces provide valuable information that resists the re-inscription of existing master-narratives? What gets “left out” of the canon and how does that marginal status lead to new/innovative/important discourse communities that focus on recovering minoritarian identities? What enables us to replicate problematic methods, reinforce an unbearably exclusive canon, and validate compromised institutions?
- How might we tie “Spare Parts” to eco-criticism? The application of the familiar recycle, reduce, reuse mentality to scholarship might provide additional channels to consider resources and labor as part of existing scholarship and practice, which requires the elimination as much as the generation of ideas.
- How might spare parts apply to pedagogy? Where does failure fit into the “Spare Parts” of our classrooms? How do we facilitate learning in ways that are not measurable or valued by institutional benchmarks?
- How might playwrights, actors, directors, and designers apply a practical application of spare parts to their work? In what ways do spare parts echo musical revues, devised performance, and post-dramatic theatre? What kinds of practice focus on the emphasis rather than the elimination of errors? How are the “spare parts” recycled to form “new” theories and to invent “new” practices in dramaturgy, directing, designing, and acting?
The Theory and Criticism Focus Group will accept individual 250-word position paper abstracts for the “Spare Parts” Roundtable Series until Monday, October 14, 2019. Submissions should include:
- Abstract (250 words or less)
- Title
- Contact information (name, institutional affiliation, email address, and phone number)
- a brief bio of 50 words or less
- any specific A/V requirements (only if absolutely necessary)
T&C will inform participants of their acceptance by Friday, October 25 and the Theory and Criticism Focus Group will oversee the submission of the Roundtable Series panels through ATHE’s online proposal process. Send your position paper abstracts to the Theory and Criticism Focus Group conference planner Daniel Ciba at danciba@hotmail.com.
2) Call for Complete Session Proposals, Sponsored by the Theory and Criticism Focus Group
We also seek complete session proposals for the 2020 conference that include a broad range of theoretical/critical interrogations and applications based on the theme of “Drive.” We encourage multidisciplinary dialogues across the fields of performance scholarship and praxis. We also seek participants from a variety of focus group affiliations.
The Theory and Criticism Focus Group supports broad definitions of criticism and performance, and therefore encourages a wide range of examples and topics. Feel free to explore both historical and contemporary critics and theorists, in popular culture, academic scholarship, and performance praxis. Panel proposals that engage scholarly conversation in creative ways are highly encouraged.
Although our Focus Group welcomes panels on any topic related to theory, pedagogy, and criticism, the following suggestions emerged from discussions about the CFP, the conference theme, and Detroit:
- Theatre as product: a means of production (Drawing from Adorno, Benjamin, and Marx)
- The concept of emissions and a need for continued investment in the environment
- Stagnation—pauses, gaps, silences, distancing, refusals
- Resiliency and innovation—Connecting theater and performance to the digital humanities
- Combust—exploding frameworks, canons, and conventional “best practices”
- Putting out fires—soothing, defusing, and containing—in reference to Amazon rainforest
Please Note:
- Single Focus Group Sessions can address questions to the conference planner (danciba@hotmail.com) before submitting their proposal.
- Multidisciplinary proposals must be authorized by TWO sponsoring ATHE focus groups. Email and get authorization from each focus group’s conference planner before submitting.
- You can only choose 1 Free A/V aid: audio or CD player OR flip chart OR LCD projector.
- If you need additional A/V, you or the focus group will need to apply for a conference grant. Let your conference planner know.
- For more detailed information see: https://www.athe.org/page/20conf_home
Complete session proposals (separate from the Roundtable Series) should be submitted directly to the ATHE website (www.athe.org). You must have the names for all participants ready for the proposal. The website includes submission information and forms. The session proposal deadline is November 1, 2019.
NOTES:
If you have questions about the ATHE panel proposal submission process, feel free to email Daniel Ciba at danciba@hotmail.com.
Single paper submissions (outside of our annual roundtable series or a completed session proposal) looking for a session home may contact Daniel Ciba at danciba@hotmail.com.
Individuals do not need to be a member of the Theory and Criticism Focus Group or ATHE to submit single presentations or panels. However, if chosen and scheduled, participants must become members of ATHE by the time of the conference.
