Call For Proposals – In Motion: Performance and Unsettling Borders: an interdisciplinary graduate student conference / performance festival – Submission Deadline: December 1, 2017

Department of Performance Studies
Northwestern University
April 27-29 2018

The deadline for proposals is December 1, 2017.

Please submit all proposals, and any questions to, inmotion2018@gmail.com

How do borders echo and reverberate as cultural geographies, unsettling space and forcing bodies to move, to organize, and to perform? How do performers and scholars account for and navigate their bordered existence, when traversing them can regularly (re)produce the conditions for both precarious and secure living? What conditions arise amongst bodies, boundaries, and the spaces there in between? The 2018 Department of Performance Studies Graduate Student Conference, In Motion: Performance and Unsettling Borders, invites graduate students—practitioners and scholars—to generate dialogue and debate by coming together around artistic work and interdisciplinary thinking.

Recent international, national, and local political and social events have brought increased attention to the reality of borderlands as contentious sites of movement and activity. History demonstrates that borders—immaterial and material— have always existed and that movement has always been central in their negotiation. For some, borders are porous and easy to cross, a mere nuisance or pit stop. For others, borders are an integral part of being, continuously looming, shaping entire lives. If the border affirms its presence through constant yet imperfect iteration (repetition), then how might we employ performance (and practice) to interrogate its rigidity? How does performance elicit a mode of thinking and doing that allows us to consider how borders, contemporary and historical, demand both imaginary and tangible forces to be maintained—and how might we come to unsettle (or secure them) through our practice(s)?

We seek proposals for traditional academic papers, performance-lectures, live performances, and other experimental formats. Papers, performances, and experimental submissions might want to consider:

Decolonial practices and aesthetics
Affects and political economies of race, gender, sexuality and disability
Geopolitics, geographic (dis)location and positioning
Immigration, emigration, migration, and displacement
Choreographic patterns: kinesthetic awareness and somatic power
Sound, sound art, and acoustic resonance
Temporality: iteration, and repetition in/on the margins
Border-crossing: thresholds, vestibules, portals, gates, and throughways
Memory, embodiment, and transference
Language, translation, communication, speculation
Mediatisation, telecommunication, and other forms of network exchange
Interdisciplinarity, cross-disciplinary practices, syncretism, hybridity
Spatial politics: built-environments and architectures
Transnational flows: sovereignty, authority, and the state
Travel and tourism economics
Death, Life, interstitial spaces
Skin, surface, hapticality
Object oriented ontologies
Panels and performances will be held at two local cultural/community spaces in Chicago and at Northwestern University in Evanston: Free Street Theatre (est. 1969) at the Pulaski Park Fieldhouse; and at Axis Lab (est. 2016) at the Argyle Red Line Station. Locations are wheelchair accessible, but questions about accessibility and accommodations can be directed at Didier Morelli (didiermorelli2018@u.northwestern.edu). We have partnered with students in the Departments of Art Theory and Practice to realize this event. The three-day conference also includes a featured performance and discussion, lectures, catered meals/receptions, and a Long Table to build community and dialogue across disciplines and artistic practices. We acknowledge that Northwestern campus sits on unceded Native land, once occupied by the Council of Three Fires Nations which includes the Chippewa, Ottawa and Potawatomi.

The deadline for proposals is December 1, 2017.

Please submit all proposals, and any questions to, inmotion2018@gmail.com

For paper proposals, please submit as a one word, pages or pdf document:

Name and Contact Information (with email address),
your institutional affiliation,
an abstract (~300 words),
a brief biography (~250 words), and
a curriculum vitae.
For performance and experimental proposals, please submit as a one word, pages or pdf document:

Name and Contact Information (with email address),
your institutional affiliation,
description of performance (~300 words),
a brief biography (~250 words),
a resumé or curriculum vitae,
technical requirements and duration,
and, if applicable, up to six jpeg images, link to an online portfolio, or other relevant media.
Some partial travel grants will be available for participants. Notices of acceptance will be sent on January 15, 2018. There is no registration fee.

Call for Abstracts – SETC Theatre Symposium – Submission Deadline: January 5, 2018

 

SETC Theatre Symposium Volume 27

“Theatre and Embodiment”

DATES: April 13-15, 2018

LOCATION: Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA

At the heart of the theatrical act is the simultaneous live presence of the actor and the audience. Given primacy of bodies in and to the theatrical act, how do we understand those bodies as communicating meaning? How do bodies understand themselves as operating within the theatrical or performative context? The 2018 Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) Theatre Symposium will focus on the interplay between theatre and embodiment. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The relationship of the actor’s body to space, staging, costume, and other production elements
• The relationship of the audience’s body(s) to performance and performance spaces
• The embodiment of socio-cultural ideas (gender, race, class, et. al.) in theatre
• The relationship of the body to the play text
• Actor-training via bodily learning
• Systems of physical/theatrical expression, both historical and contemporary
• The overlap of contemporary bodies and historical texts on stage
• Historical uses of the body/bodies on stage
• Theories of the body/embodiment as they relate to performance and performance practice
• The actor’s body in relation to the character’s body
• Cognitive approaches to embodied performance

Keynote speaker Dr. Rhonda Blair will present a central address on the topic, and will also provide a conference response. Dr. Blair is a Professor of Theatre at Southern Methodist University; her work includes 2016’s Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies, and has appeared in Theatre Topics, TDR, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, among others. Selected papers presented at the conference will be presented in Volume 27 of SETC’s annual Theatre Symposium journal. The conference fee of $150 includes registration, conference materials, selected meals, and coffee/snack service during the event.

Please send maximum one-page abstracts by January 5, 2018 to Sarah McCarroll, Editor, at smccarroll@georgiasouthern.edu. Please use “LastName TS Abstract” as your subject line. Abstracts should include complete contact information (snail mail, email, phone).

Call for Abstracts – New Directions on Improvisation – Submission Deadline: November 30, 2017

For the 2018 Comparative Drama Conference, there will be a sub-theme of improv running through the three days. On Thursday night we will be attending an improv performance at SAK Comedy Lab. On Saturday afternoon there will be a plenary dedicated to improv. To round out the conference, we invite papers for either a panel (or if we get enough interest a round table) on new directions in improv, as we look to consider how improv pushes boundaries within performance, the process of dramatic creation, and the text

Some possible topics to consider (but definitely not limited to):

Improv as pedagogy and its application to theatrical and/or non-theatrical sites

The function and face of modern theatrical improv in the cultural landscape

New discoveries in improv forms and structures (long/short/narrative-based)

Using improv as a tool in the traditional or non-traditional classroom

New dramaturgy that deploys improv as a strategy in the rehearsal space

New experiments and considerations of improv as a performance mode in its own right

The interactions between improv and the text in development, rehearsal, and/or performance

Please send your abstracts to Dr. David Charles: dcharles@rollins.edu.

Papers should be 15 minutes in length and written for oral presentation. Please submit a 250-word abstract in English to dcharles@rollins.edu by November 30, 2017. Please include a paper title, author’s name, status (faculty, graduate student, other/scholar-at-large), institutional affiliation, and postal address at top left.

Those whose abstracts are accepted for presentation are expected to attend the conference.

CFP – Beckett in International Culture and Politics – Submission Deadline: Friday, January 6, 2017

Submission Deadline – Friday, January 6, 2017 –

Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui solicits proposals for articles in French or English on Beckett’s global and political reach. More than the question of Beckett’s international influence, we ask scholars to consider how Beckett’s work provides aesthetic models for artists seeking to address political conflict, to break the straightjacket of imposed artistic forms, or to represent forms of human violence. Does Beckett’s work help or hinder artists in formulating a political aesthetic or navigating specific political demands and situations? Does Beckett’s work inform conceptions of committed art?How does Beckett’s style affect conceptions of literary form and the function of aesthetics in non-European settings, particularly those marked by colonial history? Papers that attend to engagements with Beckett’s work beyond Western Europe will receive special attention: the Middle East, Turkey, and other areas of Asia, the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, beyond and elsewhere.

250-word proposals due 6 January 2018; completed article for peer review, 1 April 2018. Send these and any queries to James McNaughton, jamesm@ua.edu

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Call for Abstracts – ATHE 2018 –Panel Proposal AMERICA ONLINE: (WEB)SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE

A potential Multidisciplinary Panel for

Performance Studies Focus Group and American Theatre and Drama Society

In 2012, Forbes Magazine published an article titled “The Internet Revolution is the New Industrial Revolution.” When “ARPANet” moved from a government application to a public one in the 1990s, the world shook. Since then, globalization, connectedness, and a slew of new sociological trends have emerged. According to this article, “[i]t’s a sweeping social disruption that brings with it not only new inventions and scientific advances, but perhaps most importantly revolutionizes both the methods of work and we the workers ourselves.”[1] But we have known this for a while. The “heyday” of the Internet Revolution been left in the dust, with this five-year old magazine article just one in a pile of billions. The “heyday” has become the everyday. However, in the context of theatre, the Internet Age is still brand new, a relative blip on the 2500-year radar of our history. Theatres across the world are still attempting to discern how best to use the Twentieth Century’s greatest gift to their advantage. Performance Studies has dug into the depths of digital performativity, but there is still a whole lot to mine.

This panel will address Online performance, both theatrical and social. This panel will also solely address American-based Internet performances, yet how you choose to frame “American” is up to you. The performance(s) you wish to discuss needs to have either been entirely performed Online, or at least a significant portion. Potential topics include:

• Populist Internet Movements (Black Lives Matter, #MAGA, etc.)
• Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) Gaming (World of Warcraft, Destiny, etc.)
• Experimental/Experiential Commercial Theatre Marketing (Paperless programs, Twitter role-play, etc.)
• Dual/Multiple identities of individual internet users
• Social Media Performance (YouTube song covers, Vine compilations, etc.)

Please send 250-300 word abstracts to Zach Dailey (zach.dailey@ttu.edu) by October 27th, 2017.

Thank you very much,

Zach Dailey, M.A.

Ph.D. Student, Texas Tech University

School of Theatre and Dance