cfp

The 40th Annual Mid-America Theatre Conference
Cleveland Marriot Downtown at Key Center, March 7 – 10, 2019
“INVENTION”

Theatre History Symposium—Call for Papers

All proposals must be received by October 15, 2018

We seem awash in invention at the moment. But are we drowning in it? What innovations float to the top? Does our current sea of inventiveness baptize us, clearing the way for new ways of thinking, being, and performing? As familiar conventions, narratives, and laws are cast aside, a space opens for rebirth, flights of fancy, and spectacular deceit. From students inventing a march for their lives to daily additions to the lexicon of fake news, invention promises hope and portends destruction.

After experiencing a tidal wave of inventiveness in the 18th- and 19th-centuries, Cleveland found itself on the ebb of industrial and economic prosperity. In the wake of this fallout, the city has been working to invent a new reputation, and the theatre scene is one way in which the city is innovating and reinvigorating its history. As the Cleveland-based inventor John Nottingham puts it, “I see a sea change coming back to the Midwest.” In what ways do we see a “sea change” in theatrical practice and scholarship?

This year’s Theatre History Symposium asks participants to consider the promises and problems that characterize our inventions on the stage, on the page, and in our classrooms. Some questions papers might address include: As historians, pedagogues, and artist/practitioners, how do we respond to today’s political/economic/social/cultural realities? In what ways has artistic invention been stifled? How do we innovate modes of critique? In what ways is “invention” gendered/racialized/sexualized? How do correlations between invention and progress create problematic considerations of invention? Does invention privilege the individual over the collective? What happens when collaborators are ignored/erased/silenced in histories about groundbreaking creations? How might historiographic approaches shed light on the collaborative processes that lead to invention?

We are excited to announce that Dr. Amy Hughes will serve as this year’s Theatre History Symposium Respondent.

For further information:http://matc.us/calls-for-papers/theater-history-symposium

All proposals must be received by October 15, 2018

Dancing in Common

Dance Studies Association, August 8-11, 2019

Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois

Kate Elswit and Melissa Blanco Borelli, program co-chairs

Susan Manning, local arrangements chair

What might it mean to speak about “the common” or “the commons” in relation to dancing bodies? How do long-standing ideas about the common good and common property inflect past and present practices? What opportunities might dance and its concomitant registers of embodied exchange offer to bodies on the margins of or outside the common?

Writing about alternative forms of ownership, Lewis Hyde reminds us Thomas Jefferson regarded knowledge itself as “common property” (2010). The commons might refer to practices in the public sphere, as Elizabeth Dillon (2014) describes a performative commons that circulates throughout the Atlantic World and created new publics in the 18th century. However participation in such a commons is politically charged, as Fred Moten and Stephen Harney underscore in describing the futurity of the black radical tradition as located in the undercommons condition of being in but not of (2013). Chandra Mohanty and Ann Russo discuss power differentials of intersectionality in terms of the need to deal with “common differences” in feminist praxis (1983). Lauren Berlant (2016) and Leela Gandhi (2011,2014) imagine the commons as a space that, although marred by our “broken world,” can create a new and possibly better way of being in the world through action. Dance as a form of action activates the social in many spaces, from clubs to classrooms to stages. In these geopolitical spaces, dance and dancing bodies move us to find common ground. Given the long-standing interconnections between colonialism, racism, and capitalism that warrant the radical reconfiguration of dance’s historiographies and futurities, we look to disrupt our different experiences and understandings of “the/a common(s)” and to produce alternative spaces for thinking and collaborating in common.

Thinking about these and so many other different experiences and understandings of the common, we gather near Chicago to reflect, move, and create. Chicago is a city of the common—from a labor union history that appealed to the commonality of worker causes, to its status as a transit hub where the passenger rail trains to East and West of the country interchange from the mid-19th century to today, as well as its place in the Great Migration North for African American communities—and also of the uncommon, including the turn of the century feat of engineering that reversed the flow of the Chicago River. “Dancing in Common” meets on the campus of Northwestern University on the shore of Lake Michigan. The Hotel Orrington and other conference hotels are just a few blocks away in Evanston, near public transportation to downtown Chicago and airports. Film screenings, club outings, and performances at Links Hall complement the wide range of panels, workshops, and plenaries planned for DSA 2019.

Presentations may address, but are not limited to, the following topics and questions:

• Commons and canons: “Common knowledge” and “common practices,” including studio practice, historiography, repertory work, reconstruction, and pedagogy
• Cultural commons and the public sphere: How might we think about the commons across time and space, for example in relation to past and present (g)localities? What is dance’s responsibility to and role within the environment as common site?
• Intellectual property and the commons: Copyright and power versus common property, as well as the value of movement as part of a cultural commons associated with both heritage and innovation
• Media and the commons: What is the role of the (popular) screen as a site of global production and distribution for an affective commons? What kinds of appropriations, intercultural practices, and commodifications could be (counter)productive to neoliberal approaches to the “cultural commons”?
• Relationships between the commons and institutions: From funding dance with claims for the common good, to the limits of institutional belonging
• Ethics of difference, belonging, and solidarity: How do we support an undercommons; a queer commons; a brown commons? How do we engage with institutional practices of intersectionality, including finding common ground between multiple disciplines or causes, without devaluing their particularity or presuming shared experience? How does dance practice solidarity and alliance?
• Theorizing the (un)common: What are the tensions in dance making and scholarship between the unique or exemplary and the claim to speak for what is taken for granted as “common sense”?

We invite proposals from those situated in academic and professional practices to engage in conversations around the ways in which the practice and politics of dance and/or choreography offer critical and creative spaces of reflection on our embodied relationships to the multiple concepts of “the/a commons.” Proposed presentations may take the form of papers, panels, roundtable discussions, lecture-demonstrations, movement workshops, dance works using outdoor or indoor sites, and screendances that address our theme. Papers that are already grouped into panels have a higher likelihood of acceptance and are encouraged; individual papers will be grouped into panels by the program committee.

In addition, in the spirit of the conference theme and looking toward how we ourselves might engage in a “practice of commons,” we also invite proposals from teams of facilitators for a special presentation format: Gatherings for Common Practices. These will take a dialogical approach to share thinking and tools for creative scholarship and pedagogy among attendees, which might center around topics such as “Pedagogies for Un/Common Bodies,” “Syllabi for a 21st Century Dance Commons,” or “Strategies for Survival in Institutional Commons.”

Submit your proposals by 15 January 2019. The online conference site will accept proposals after 15 August 2018. See https://dancestudiesassociation.org/conferences

DSA presents up to six awards each year to graduate students. The Selma Jeanne Cohen Award is for conference presentation; the graduate travel award is for participation or presentation. It is not possible to win both the same year. The deadline for both awards is the same as for proposals, 15 January 2019. For details on both awards, see:

https://dancestudiesassociation.org/awards/selma-jeanne-cohen-award

https://dancestudiesassociation.org/awards/graduate-student-travel-award-grants

All questions, including regarding access, should be sent to info@dancestudiesassociation.org

2019 Conference Program Committee: Anurima Banerji, Sherril Dodds, Imani K Johnson, Einav Katan-Schmid, Kareem Khubchandani, Lorenzo Perillo, Crystal Michelle Perkins, VK Preston, Chiayi Seetoo, Arabella Stanger

Special Issue of Studies in Musical Theatre:

Ethnography and Musical Theatre

• Methods and ethics in researching musicals through an ethnographic lens
• Musical theatre as a facilitator of temporary (or long-term) community
• Musicals in under-studied places
• Discursive networks in musical theatre
• Local pageants and the making of place
• Musicals in education and professional training programmes
• The musical as a live (and lived) entity
• Global practices of musical theatre
• The process(es) of making musical theatre

New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies, Volume Four:
Albee’s Influence on American Drama

New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies is the official publication of the Edward Albee Society, published annually by Brill.

(Volume One, Edward Albee and Absurdism, published January 2017, Volume Two, Sex, Gender and Sexualities in Edward Albee’s Plays forthcoming, March 2018.)

Volume Four: Edward Albee’s Influence on American Drama

We are seeking essays that explore Albee’s influence and reach in the American theatre.  This could include playwrights whom he mentored directly, playwrights who were inspired by him, his role as director of both his own and others’ work, collaborators who worked with him, and artists whose own careers were in some way shaped by him.

In particular, we are interested in essays on any or all of the following topics:

• The work of the Playwrights Unit, part of Albarwild Theatre Arts, Inc.
• Albee’s mentorship of playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy, Lanford Wilson, Amiri Baraka, Terrence McNally, Megan Terry, John Guare, A.R. Gurney, Sam Shepard, and others
• Albee’s partnership with the Cherry Lane theatre and his contributions to off-Broadway theatre
• Imitators of Albee’s Style
• Albee as professor and his work in the academy
• Albee’s influence on LGBTQ theatre

We encourage submissions from graduate students as well as established scholars or theatre professionals from any approach (e.g., theatre history, performance studies, literary theory and criticism), as well as those who have worked with Mr. Albee in any of the above activities.

Please contact volume editor Natka Bianchini (nbianchini@loyola.edu) for queries, proposals, and/or submissions.  For submission guidelines, please see the general call for submissions on the Edward Albee Society website.

Submission deadline for completed manuscripts: November 15, 2018

The Nominations and Elections Committee of the August Wilson Society calls for the nomination of eligible officers on its executive board to serve a two-year term beginning August 2018. Candidates are eligible for nomination if a) their AWS membership is current and b) they meet the qualifications of their office of interest. The August Wilson Society is particularly interested in nominees with a keen interest in the work of AWS, demonstrated leadership experience, and strong professional standing.

A description of each office is below.

Please consider self-nominating and/or assist us by encouraging other excellent candidates to self-nominate. All viable candidates should email Artisia Green (avgreen@wm.edu) on or before June 30 with an expression of interest (250 words or less) and an abbreviated CV.

The American Theatre and Drama Society invites submissions for the Spring 2019 issue of

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre

The Embodied Arts

Submission Deadline: 15 Oct. 2018

From the earliest examples of embodied art, theatre and dance have been intertwined. Witness the dual meaning of the ancient Hindu term “Nāṭya” as dance-theatre or the dithyrambic performances of the City Dionysia.  However, within theatre, dance, and performance studies today, disciplinary divides remain that may not reflect the actualities of artistic practices historically or in our contemporary moment. Many artists operate across the embodied arts and are uninterested in defining their works within any particular disciplinary genre. As Kate Elswit argues in Theatre & Dance (2018) “The artificial divisions between the thing most often called ‘theatre’ and the thing most often called ‘dance’ in both academic and artistic spheres have overshadowed their interdependence” (2).

Inspired by Nadine George-Graves’s proposal in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (2015) that we unify these connected fields under the rubric of “performative embodiment”(5), this special issue of JADT invites essays that attend to the intradisciplinary dynamics of the embodied arts. Within this call, the embodied arts are understood as complementary modes of discourse and practice, which trouble disciplinary boundaries and encourage broad scholarly inquiry.

Submissions might engage any of the questions below, though are not limited to them:

• How do we consider the aesthetics and politics of bodies moving through space and time?
• How are gesture, choreography, and movement meaning-makers in performance?
• How do artists, works, genres, and/or audiences enact or theorize relationships between corporeality and language?
• How do developing artistic practices, such as dance dramaturgy, invite an interdisciplinary toolbox encompassing both choreographic and linguistic communication?

Submissions that focus on the embodied arts — dance, theatre, performance art, or any hybrid form therein — across American geographies and historical moments are welcome. ATDS recognizes that notions of America encompass migrations of peoples and cultures that overlap and influence one another.

Manuscripts of up to 6000 words should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style, using endnotes, and submitted as attachments in Microsoft Word format. All correspondence will be conducted by e-mail. Submissions must be received no later than 15 October 2018; please e-mail queries and articles to Lezlie Cross (lezlie.cross@unlv.edu) and Ariel Nereson (anereson@buffalo.edu), guest editors of this special issue.

Authors need not be members of the American Theatre and Drama Society but submissions from members are especially encouraged.

For more information about JADT, see http://jadtjournal.org

Call for Papers: Puppetry International #44: Puppetry Social Action/Social Justice

PUPPETRY INTERNATIONAL seeks brief articles (max. 2000 words) for its “Puppetry in Social Action/Social Justice” issue. We intend a broad interpretation of the topic and a style that will appeal to general readers with a strong interest in any aspect of the theme.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• An analytical profile of a specific artist, theater company or institution engaged in work that addresses social injustice, or “speaks truth to power.”
• A personal essay on the importance of puppetry in the author’s life as it helped to address an issue of fairness, equality, legal representation, or other social challenge
• A historical examination of a puppet-related movement in social justice
• A consideration of the differences of puppetry’s social significance as found in differentcountries or cultures
• Instances of international collaborations between puppet companies in order to address issues of oppression, trafficking, forced migration, curtailment of civil rights, freedom, religion, abridgement of free speech, racism, ethnic cleansing or other social ills.
• Interviews with prominent practitioners concerned with issues of social justice.
• Reviews of books, films, or performances related to the subject of puppetry social action/social justice (see Book and Performance Reviews below).

If interested please send a proposal or query email to aperiale@gmail.com

Deadline for editor-reviewed submissions: August 1, 2018

Submissions for Peer Review

We strive to publish at least one double-blind peer-reviewed article per issue. These do not necessarily need to be on the theme of the issue. The peer-reviewed section of Puppetry International aims to explore how the puppet functions dramaturgically, to investigate larger philosophical questions generated in response to puppets and performing objects, and to trace the integral place of puppetry in world performance culture. We especially seek work by scholars who are pioneering new discoveries based on archival, field, or practice-based research and/or who aim to generate fresh theoretical perspectives on how humans interact with objects in performance. Submissions for peer review should follow the same length (2,000 words, including notes and bibliography) and style restrictions (MLA) as all other articles, but should demonstrate scholarly rigor and original research while remaining accessible to a broad readership. Longer versions of these articles can be published on our website.

Peer review submissions should be emailed to peer-review editors Dawn Tracy Brandes Dawn.Brandes@ukings.ca) and Dassia Posner (dassia2@gmail.com) as well as to general editor Andrew Periale (aperiale@gmail.com).

Deadline for peer-reviewed submissions: June 15, 2018.

Book and Performance Reviews

We also seek BOOK reviews (500 words max.) and PERFORMANCE reviews (1, 000 words max.)

Performance reviews to editor Andrew Periale: aperiale@gmail.com.

Book reviews to John Bell john.bell.puppeteer@gmail.com. Word documents preferred.

Deadline for book and performance review submissions: August 1, 2018

For All Submissions – PLEASE READ!

Subject line on email:

PI 44, author’s last name, key word(s) from title (e.g. PI 44 Bell interview PSchumann)

NO FORMATTING (no columns, embedded images, exotic fonts, different sizes of text,

etc.), please.

Please note: While we generally publish new, original writing, we occasionally accept translations of previously published articles if they have not yet appeared in English. Images should be sent, preferably as jpegs, at 300dpi at size to be printed. Larger is fine.

 CALL FOR PROPOSALS (BOOK)

Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away

Editor: Judith Rudakoff

Abstracts Due June 30

“Suggested by a friend: ‘If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”

This tweet by Alyssa Milano, sent on October 15, 2017, opened the flood gates to an outpouring of testimony and witnessing across the Twitterverse that subsequently reverberated throughout social media. Facebook status lines quickly began to read “Me too,” and the hashtag #MeToo was trending. Abby Ohlheiser wrote in The Washington Post on October 19, 2017, “#MeToo has produced a kind of unity by volume, but when you speak to individual women about it, you find a wide range of responses — empowerment, exhaustion, solidarity, trauma.”

The original MeToo movement began a decade earlier, in 2006, when African American activist Tarana Burke adopted the phrase as part of her campaign to raise awareness of sexual violence against women. Today’s provocative campaign has inspired not only awareness, testimony, and witnessing, but also artistic response.

This CFP invites the international community of scholars and artists to contribute essays to a book that will focus on the diversity of responses to and critical engagement with live performance emanating from or dramatizing issues and experiences central to the #MeToo movement.

Essays might examine contemporary work, or adaptations of works from other eras, re-imagined in a #MeToo context. A wide range of cultural voices reflecting a diversity of perspectives is encouraged.

Critical engagement with live performance that blurs boundaries between genres or is outside of conventional theatre form is also encouraged. (For example, discussion and close reading of Kesha’s moving #MeToo performance of “Praying” at the 2018 Grammy Awards.)

Essays should document, analyze, and interrogate specific performances and the contexts that inspired them.

Abstracts of up to 500 words should be submitted on or before June 30, 2018 (to rudakoff@yorku.ca with the subject line #MeToo: your surname) as a double-spaced MS Word file attachment and should include a brief biographical note and indication of professional affiliation.

Anticipated production schedule (subject to change)

Abstracts due June 30 2018

Papers due December 30 2018

Revised papers due May 1 2019

Manuscript submitted to publisher (Intellect Books UK) June 30 2019

Full articles will be due on or before December 30, 2018, and should be submitted (to rudakoff@yorku.ca with the subject line #MeToo: your surname) as a double-spaced MS Word file email attachment following the editorial style of Chicago Manual of Style 16^th Edition. Articles should be written in English and 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes), although shorter pieces will be considered. Please include a brief biographical note with the final submission of up to 500 words that includes your affiliation.

Please address any questions to:

rudakoff@yorku.ca

Judith Rudakoff (Dr.)

Professor

Theatre Department

Centre for Film & Theatre

York University

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

CALL FOR PAPERS

Let the Sun Shine In: American Theatre, Protest and Censorship

An international conference co-sponsored by the American Theatre & Drama Society

and the Eccles Centre for American Studies

https://www.atds.org/

https://www.bl.uk/eccles-centre

October 26-27, 2018

British Library, London (UK)

Keynote speakers:

Prof. Ramón Espejo Romero, Universidad de Sevilla (Spain)

Dr. Marlis Schweitzer, York University (Canada)

In 1968, the American musical Hair opened on Broadway, in London’s West End, and in Munich, West Germany. Hailed by many for capturing the zeitgeist of the late 1960s, Hair also reflected changes in the writing and production of American theatre. Produced Off-Broadway at the Public Theater, it emerged from experimental theatre practice to achieve commercial success on Broadway and internationally. Staging contemporary protest and dissent, the musical was censored on tour in Boston but became the first production to open after the Theatres Act ended both censorship in British theatre and the power of the Lord Chamberlain. This conference investigates American theatre, protest, and censorship in 1968, but it also looks backwards and forward to consider how protest and censorship have shaped American theatre, while challenging—and inspiring—its practitioners and audiences.

Scholars across the humanities and beyond are reflecting on the social unrest and demands for change expressed in 1968, recognizing the year as a catalyst for both positive and negative developments in culture and society. We intend to situate 1968 in a larger discussion of American theatre’s long-term and ongoing relationship with protest and censorship. Scholars working on all aspects of American theatre and drama are invited to propose papers considering but not limited to questions such as:

How has American theatre been limited, censored, banned, or otherwise challenged (in the United States and/or abroad)?

How has American theatre responded to and facilitated protest?

Why have American theatre’s stagings of protest and responses to social movements proven so appealing to practitioners and audiences in other countries?

What are American theatre’s legacies of 1968?

What labor might American theatre still accomplish today, in facilitating protest, or challenging censorship?

The conference will include a show-and-tell from the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection at the British Library, and scholars engaged with American sources in this archive are encouraged to submit proposals. Practitioners and scholars with an interest in American theatre pedagogy are also encouraged to submit proposals.

Please submit a 250 word abstract and brief biography via the event’s Google form, no later than May 18, 2018:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSesuNXlgYVhd2c3HKCc2bBdczXeM0l6IATXFbLJi76CD9hY6w/viewform?usp=sf_link

Presenters will be notified by June 15th. Please contact the organisers atustheatreprotestandcensorship@gmail.com with any questions or concerns.

Theatre in the Age of Trump

As part of this event, ATDS will sponsor the panel “Theatre in the Age of Trump.” The three selected panellists will receive funding to help defray the cost of attending the conference as well as free registration. Interested scholars may indicate their interest in being considered for this session when submitting a proposal via the Google form.

How have the intellectual chaos, dishonesty, and distortions of the Trump presidency impacted our work as theatre scholars, educators and practitioners? This panel will investigate theatre and performance examinations of Donald Trump and his presidency and consider how these clarify the work we might do in our theatres and universities. The Trump presidency is adding a further dimension to this work, and this dimension may go beyond the immediate present into the historic past, a past that precedes 1968. Proposals may wish to consider:

How does politics enter into historiography?

To what degree do we query the political views embedded in earlier (pre-2016, pre-Trump era) plays?

How, in understanding these dramas and their stage histories, do we contextualize and explain them?

How are our questions framed? Are these questions best ignored by historians? Are they so minor as to be inconsequential?

Key events and debates since Trump’s election, including but not limited to: his inauguration, the Women’s Marches, the National Parks Service rogue social media activity, protests around monuments to the Confederacy in public spaces, Saturday Night Live‘s and Stephen Colbert’s ongoing caricatures of Donald and Melania Trump, the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and the activism of its theatre students.

Artists’ and audiences’ recent uses of theatre and performance in opposition to Trump and the U.S. Federal government, for example through productions of the stage adaptation of the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here.