BOOM OR BUST! Economies of production & exchange in theatre, performance & culture
ADSA annual conference, Perth, 30 June - 3 July 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS

Throughout Western Australia, iron ore, bauxite and other minerals are being mined and transported via ports, roads and railways to China, India and other booming economies. As the Canadian environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky recently observed, whenever one sees a skyscraper, one can imagine somewhere a hole at least as big which has furnished the raw materials for the building. The super-pit outside Kalgoorlie is one such reciprocal cavity whose contents facilitate constructions in distant lands and in Perth itself. The Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) invites participants to metaphorically re-imagine the boom and bust phenomena in cultural and aesthetic terms. 

The committee invites you to respond to the theme by March 31st 2009 in the following ways:

1. submit an abstract of 300 words for an individual paper
2. submit a proposal for a themed panel
3. submit a proposal for a performance, performative presentation or workshop

Email expressions of interest to  adsa09@ecu.edu.au

The interpretation of themes might include (but is not confined to) the following:

• Economic exchange & power. If any boom is dependent on a flow of matter and ideas across borders, how do the performing arts reflect and/or resist current economic patterns, exchanges, blocks, ruptures and cycles?
• Boom times. What were the golden ages of art forms, artists, cultures and nations? Are we experiencing them now? Do artists and modes from these golden ages still serve as the main sources of creativity today? What are some of the current sites of booming cultural and economic exchange in the performing arts and theatre?
• Bust times. Are the performing arts in a perpetual spiral of bust times? Is 21st century theatre dependent upon a sapping of resources? What comes of failure,fights, break-ups, broken bodies and busted performance?
• Cycles of growth & contraction. What are the models and dynamics of sustainability and regeneration in scenography, dramaturgy and narrative? How does the performing body expand and contract?
• Form & flux. Are the performing arts ever stable, or are they endlessly moving between booms and busts? What are the cycles driving artists in terms of growth and collapse, movement and exchange, flux and stability? What are implications for the arts of booming new decentred systems?
• Scale. What are the aesthetics of the small and the large? When is bigger better? Do little stories matter in big times?
• Time. How do cycles of boom and bust occur in the temporal structures of performance? Do theatrical forms and performance modes have their own special measures of time, and how do they function and alter?
• Unrepeatable performance. Do we as critics and audiences fetishize the myth of the effervescent, performative moment, poised between boom and bust?
• Distance & inversion. What is the distance between the bursting outward directions of performances and the internal processing of audiences? How do performances traverse distances of power, culture, language, audience, direction and intensity?
• Acoustics. Sonic booms, explosions, echoes, aftershocks, booming or busted voices. What rebounds do the arts produce in culture, aesthetics or the audience? What voices do they sustain or smother?

For further information, please contact: adsa09@ecu.edu.au 

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