ATDS Special Issue CFP
“Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas”
The American Theatre and Drama Society invites submissions for its spring 2020 issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Membership in ATDS is not required for submission of an article, but submissions from members are especially encouraged.
The effort to create an economically and environmentally sustainable way of life through supporting local businesses, eating locally harvested foods, and even vacationing locally by taking “staycations,” has been a growing movement in recent decades. Typically focused on consumption of material goods, the “act local, think global” movement has yet to fully consider the social, economic, and environmental effects of local performing artists creating and participating in work intended for a local audience. As Jan Cohen-Cruz explains in Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States, in community-based productions, members of a community are “a primary source of the text, possibly of performers as well, and definitely a goodly portion of the audience … Community-based performance relies on artists guiding the creation of original work or material adapted to, and with people with a primary relationship to the content, not necessarily to the craft” (2). This special issue aims to build upon Cohen-Cruz’s work to further explore the significance and influence of local and community-based performances, both past and present, across the Americas. How does scholarship focused at the local level uncover underrecognized histories, theatre artists, traditions, and movements? What tensions exist between community-based theatre and the desire to manifest a sustainable lifestyle? What do these performance practices reveal about the complexity of theatre in and of the Americas? What are culturally or temporally distinct conceptualizations and practices of community-based work and the “act local, think global” philosophy? How do local acts define community while simultaneously establishing reciprocity with the world beyond their domain? How do local works, in their effort to recognize community, establish or reinforce exclusionary behavior? How does an investigation of the local inform or remap our understanding of the archive, repertoire, and canon? Of theatre, performance, and living traditions of the Americas? A deeper understanding of the making and consuming of locally sourced performance is critical to sustaining civic-minded artists and work in the future.
Topics authors may pursue include but are not limited to:
- Pageants, parades, or protests
- Histories or case studies of significant local/regional performance venues, artists, or companies
- Economic/social/environmental influence of performance on a community
- Theories of the local in relation to theatre, producing, and performance
- Relationships between local professional theatre and out-sourced professional theatre
- Cultural diversity across local performance practices
- The role of social media in creating performance and community and defining the local
- Multidisciplinarity in community-based production
- Theatre for social change
- Various approaches to community-based performance over time and across the Americas
- Sustainability and theatre at the local/civic level
- Civic and/or holiday performance traditions
- The effect of the global on the local
- Methodologies for critically reading local work
- Microhistories of local acts
Pieces may be full length essays, briefer profiles of artists, presenting organizations, or companies, or provocations to the field. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style, using endnotes, and submitted as an attachment in Microsoft Word format. All correspondence will be conducted by email. Submissions must be received by 1 November 2019. Please direct queries and submissions to Jocelyn L. Buckner: jocelynbuckner@gmail.com.
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