CALL FOR ARTICLES
ABOUT PERFORMANCE #9, 2009
 
About Performance is a peer reviewed journal published by the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Each issue of the journal is devoted to a single theme and the journal appears once a year in June/July. The 2009 issue of About Performance will be co-edited by Paul Dwyer and Gay McAuley and its title is Playing Politics: Performance, Community and Social Change.
 
A great deal of performance studies scholarship has revolved around the concepts of ‘social drama’, ‘liminal/liminoid’ experience, and the ‘efficacy’ of performance; there has been vigorous critique concerning the embodied politics of identity, the behaviour of ‘unruly perfomatives’, the ironies of ‘resistant’ postmodernism, post-colonial ‘mimicry’, border-crossing intercultural performances and much more besides. Are such dominant theoretical tropes still revealing as much as we might like about contemporary community-based performance practices, documentary/verbatim theatre, the dramaturgies of political protest or the performative ‘packaging’ of politicians and their policies?
 
The editors invite contributions that engage with these and other genres in order to theorise the nexus between performance and social change. We are particularly interested in articles that deal with a body of work rather than a single production, and in discussion of performance practices that emerge from sustained long- term relationships between particular performers, places and communities.
 
Proposals (200-300 words) are invited for articles dealing with any of the above areas of interest. Articles are normally between 6000 to 8000 words. Please send your proposal to The Editors, About Performance (Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia); or by email, either to gay.mcauley@usyd.edu.au or to paul.dwyer@usyd.edu.au and include a brief note giving your institutional affiliation, mailing and email addresses. Proposals should be sent by 20. May 2008 and we will notify you within a month whether the proposal has been accepted. The deadline for completed articles is 1. November 2008.  Articles are submitted to a peer review process and any suggested revisions are to be completed by 1. February 2009. The journal will be published in June 2009.