Call for Sumbissions, Performance Research: Volume 31, Issue 4 - On Description
| Type of post: | Association news item |
| Sub-type: | No sub-type |
| Posted By: | Caroline Wake |
| Status: | Current |
| Date Posted: | Fri, 1 Aug 2025 |
Performance Research
Volume 31, Issue 4 - On Description
Deadline: 3 September 2025
Issue Editors: Helena Grehan and Caroline Wake
Typically associated with action, the history of theatre and performance is nonetheless punctuated by passages of description. Some examples might include the many messengers who report on past action and choruses who comment on the present, whether it be in ancient Greek and Roman tragedy, Shakespearean and early modern drama, Sanskrit drama or Japanese Noh theatre. Other examples include the diegetic theatres of various modernists, as identified by Martin Puchner who distinguishes between ‘printed diegesis (stage directions, descriptive and diegetic speech in closet drama)’ and ‘performed diegesis (diegetic speech spoken by a chorus, choruslike commentators or narrating or descriptive characters)’ (2003: 26). Still other examples might include contemporary genres of autobiographical and testimonial theatre, audio theatres, or performances that evoke absent artworks, unstageable scenes and impossible futures (Guy 2017). Description simultaneously expands theatrical action and eases the burden of theatrical production, since, for example, it is far easier to report a battle than to enact it. Yet description also draws attention to itself, to the fact that we are in a theatre, and to theatre’s inevitable shortcomings. Description, then, facilitates both anti- and meta-theatrical modes of performance.
If the history of performance is punctuated by description, then so too is the history of performance studies. The field understands description not only as an object of study but also as a method: a mode of attention and apprehension. Indeed, it is perhaps the method most central to the field, so naturalized, accepted and taken for granted that it merits no separate entry in the most recent book on methods (Davis and Rae 2024), though it is mentioned in reference to actor-network theory, affect theory, content analysis, material and object theory, reception theory and speech-act theory (Davis 2024: 16–25) and later fieldwork (Tinius 2024: 191). Unlike scholars in, say, literary studies, those in performance studies can never assume that their readers have – or had – access to the same text: for even if we read the same play, we did not necessarily see the same production; even if we saw the same production, we did not necessarily see the same performance; and in some modes, such as immersive theatre, even if we saw the same performance, we did not see the same scenes; and even if we saw the same scenes, we would describe what we saw differently. Description is thus a methodological necessity, which can be foregrounded or backgrounded but rarely avoided, as scholars in other fields might claim to do.
In revisiting description, we seek to converse not only with performance studies but also other disciplines currently rediscovering, reconceiving of and otherwise reckoning with description. Previously dismissed as ‘impossible … ideological … and insufficiently critical or even tautological, because it simply repeats what anyone can see and hear’, description is now being revalued as part of the broader move away from modes of close reading and critique towards modes of distant, surface, reparative and materialist reading (Marcus et al. 2016b: 4). Nowhere is this more evident than in two journal issues published five years apart: Marcus, Love and Best’s special issue of Representations devoted to ‘Description across disciplines’ (2016) and Vittelone, Mair and Kierans’ response ‘Thinking with description’ in Qualitative Research (2021). It is striking that theatre and performance are absent from both of these issues – which range widely across literary studies, art history and criticism, psychology, anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies – and yet performance persists. Indeed, in their introduction, Marcus, Love and Best meditate on two smiles delivered by two different actors and cite Richard Schechner on ‘restored’ behaviour (Marcus et al. 2016b: 14–15). Elsewhere, Love has praised theorists central to performance studies, including Ray L. Birdwhistell, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, and Gilbert Ryle (Love 2010, 2013, 2016). Perhaps, then, it is time for performance studies to join or rejoin the conversation.
In fact, this conversation is already underway via Johanna Linsley and Georgina Guy’s special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on ‘Hear tell: Describing, reporting, narrating’ (2023). We seek to extend their work and the issue’s interest in performance, documentation and description by contemplating new genres of pre-emptive description (publicity blurbs, content warnings, social stories), contemporaneous description (audio descriptions) and retrospective description (reviews). If Susan Sontag’s was the era of ‘descriptive’ criticism (1966: 12–14), is ours the era of ‘post-descriptive criticism’ (Davis 2015) or something else again? If everything is documented and distributed via smart phones and social media, do we even need to describe anything anymore? Or does the opposite apply: do detailed, accurate – even forensic – descriptions matter more than ever in a time of misinformation and deep fakes?
The mention of the digital provides one final provocation: the relationship between data, metadata and description. For archivists, description is a ‘set of data crafted to identify and represent an archival resource or component thereof’ (Society of American Archivists 2025). Relatedly, ‘reparative description’ is the ‘remediation of practices or data that exclude, silence, harm, or mischaracterize marginalized people in the data created or used by archivists to identify or characterize archival resources’ (ibid.). What might reparative description look like for theatre and performance databases, archives, and museums? Lastly, and perhaps inevitably, there is work to do on computational modes of description, including automated description, algorithmic description and generative artificial intelligence (AI).
If not already clear, this journal issue conceives of description broadly, generously and generatively. We follow Bruno Latour in asking, ‘What is so wrong with “mere descriptions”?’ (2005: 136) and wondering whether ‘writing a true and complete report about the topic at hand’ (127) might not be ‘the highest and rarest achievement’ (137). In short, this issue invites contributors to think of description as nothing more and nothing less than part of the ‘the collective, uncertain, and ongoing activity of trying to get a handle on the world’ (Marcus et al. 2016b: 4).
Submissions are invited on (but not limited to) the following themes:
· Printed descriptions, such as stage directions
· Performed description, such as diegetic speech and reported action and its problems and possibilities
· Pre-emptive descriptions, such as publicity blurbs, content warnings, social stories and trailers, and how they influence the audience’s horizon of expectations
· Contemporaneous descriptions, such as audio descriptions, and their impact on the audience experience
· Retrospective description, including types of criticism
· The role of figures such as messengers, envoys, reporters and witnesses
· The functioning and importance of modes of audio theatre and performance
· Descriptions that produce mental images in the mind’s eye and, conversely, audiences with aphantasia or the inability to visualize mental images
· Theatre and performance databases, data models, and metadata as description
· Archival practice and reparative descriptions within theatre and performance
· Famous or infamous descriptions and their significance
· Description as method, whether as part of fieldwork or as central to a work
· Pedagogies of description and how these change over time and location
Select references
Davis, Ben (2015) ‘Superscript 2015L: Keynote: Post-descriptive criticism’, www.youtube.com/
Davis, Tracy C. (2024) ‘Introduction: Stir and mix’, in Tracy C. Davis and Paul Rae (eds) The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–36.
Davis, Tracy C. and Rae, Paul, eds (2024) The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guy, Georgina (2017) ‘From visible object to reported action: The performance of verbal images in visual art museums’, Theatre Journal 69(3): 339–59.
Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An introduction to actor-network-theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Linsley, Johanna and Guy, Georgina, eds (2023) ‘Hear tell: Describing, reporting, narrating’, Contemporary Theatre Review 33(4): 331–438.
Love, Heather (2010) ‘Close but not deep: Literary ethics and the descriptive turn’, New Literary History 41(2): 371–91.
Love, Heather (2013) ‘Close reading and thin description’, Public Culture 25(3): 401–34.
Love, Heather (2016) ‘Small change: Realism, immanence, and the politics of the micro’, Modern Language Quarterly 77(3): 419–45.
Marcus, Sharon, Love, Heather and Best, Stephen, eds (2016a) ‘Description across disciplines’, Representations 135(1): 1–149.
Marcus, Sharon, Love, Heather and Best, Stephen (2016b) ‘Building a better description’, Representations 135(1): 1–21.
Puchner, Martin (2003) Stage Fright: Modernism, anti-theatricality, and drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Society of American Archivists (2025) ‘Dictionary of archives terminology: Reparative description’, https://
Sontag, Susan (1966) Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Tinius, Jonas (2024) ‘Fieldwork as method in theatre and performance studies’, in Tracy C. Davis and Paul Ra (eds) The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 190–212.
Vitellone, Nicole, Mair, Michael and Kierans, Ciara, eds (2021) ‘Thinking with description’, Qualitative Research 21(3): 313–460.
Format
Authors are invited to submit 300- to 400-word abstracts (with a 100-word author bio) for articles (6,000 words), critical essays and provocations (3,000 words), including short essays (3,000 words), interviews, practice-research essays, poetic interventions and other contributions that attend to (but are not limited to) any aspect(s) of the above. Non-standard formats such as artist pages, highly illustrated articles and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies are welcome.
The editors are committed to diversity and inclusion, and warmly encourage contributions from all sections of the academic and artistic community, including those who are likely to be under-represented in scholarship.
Issue contacts
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:
Email: Helena Grehan, h.grehan@ecu.edu.au; Caroline Wake, c.wake@unsw.edu.au
Schedule:
Proposals: 3 September 2025
Outcomes: October 2025
First drafts: January 2026
Final drafts: January 2027
Volume 31, Issue 4 - On Description
Deadline: 3 September 2025
Issue Editors: Helena Grehan and Caroline Wake
Typically associated with action, the history of theatre and performance is nonetheless punctuated by passages of description. Some examples might include the many messengers who report on past action and choruses who comment on the present, whether it be in ancient Greek and Roman tragedy, Shakespearean and early modern drama, Sanskrit drama or Japanese Noh theatre. Other examples include the diegetic theatres of various modernists, as identified by Martin Puchner who distinguishes between ‘printed diegesis (stage directions, descriptive and diegetic speech in closet drama)’ and ‘performed diegesis (diegetic speech spoken by a chorus, choruslike commentators or narrating or descriptive characters)’ (2003: 26). Still other examples might include contemporary genres of autobiographical and testimonial theatre, audio theatres, or performances that evoke absent artworks, unstageable scenes and impossible futures (Guy 2017). Description simultaneously expands theatrical action and eases the burden of theatrical production, since, for example, it is far easier to report a battle than to enact it. Yet description also draws attention to itself, to the fact that we are in a theatre, and to theatre’s inevitable shortcomings. Description, then, facilitates both anti- and meta-theatrical modes of performance.
If the history of performance is punctuated by description, then so too is the history of performance studies. The field understands description not only as an object of study but also as a method: a mode of attention and apprehension. Indeed, it is perhaps the method most central to the field, so naturalized, accepted and taken for granted that it merits no separate entry in the most recent book on methods (Davis and Rae 2024), though it is mentioned in reference to actor-network theory, affect theory, content analysis, material and object theory, reception theory and speech-act theory (Davis 2024: 16–25) and later fieldwork (Tinius 2024: 191). Unlike scholars in, say, literary studies, those in performance studies can never assume that their readers have – or had – access to the same text: for even if we read the same play, we did not necessarily see the same production; even if we saw the same production, we did not necessarily see the same performance; and in some modes, such as immersive theatre, even if we saw the same performance, we did not see the same scenes; and even if we saw the same scenes, we would describe what we saw differently. Description is thus a methodological necessity, which can be foregrounded or backgrounded but rarely avoided, as scholars in other fields might claim to do.
In revisiting description, we seek to converse not only with performance studies but also other disciplines currently rediscovering, reconceiving of and otherwise reckoning with description. Previously dismissed as ‘impossible … ideological … and insufficiently critical or even tautological, because it simply repeats what anyone can see and hear’, description is now being revalued as part of the broader move away from modes of close reading and critique towards modes of distant, surface, reparative and materialist reading (Marcus et al. 2016b: 4). Nowhere is this more evident than in two journal issues published five years apart: Marcus, Love and Best’s special issue of Representations devoted to ‘Description across disciplines’ (2016) and Vittelone, Mair and Kierans’ response ‘Thinking with description’ in Qualitative Research (2021). It is striking that theatre and performance are absent from both of these issues – which range widely across literary studies, art history and criticism, psychology, anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies – and yet performance persists. Indeed, in their introduction, Marcus, Love and Best meditate on two smiles delivered by two different actors and cite Richard Schechner on ‘restored’ behaviour (Marcus et al. 2016b: 14–15). Elsewhere, Love has praised theorists central to performance studies, including Ray L. Birdwhistell, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, and Gilbert Ryle (Love 2010, 2013, 2016). Perhaps, then, it is time for performance studies to join or rejoin the conversation.
In fact, this conversation is already underway via Johanna Linsley and Georgina Guy’s special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on ‘Hear tell: Describing, reporting, narrating’ (2023). We seek to extend their work and the issue’s interest in performance, documentation and description by contemplating new genres of pre-emptive description (publicity blurbs, content warnings, social stories), contemporaneous description (audio descriptions) and retrospective description (reviews). If Susan Sontag’s was the era of ‘descriptive’ criticism (1966: 12–14), is ours the era of ‘post-descriptive criticism’ (Davis 2015) or something else again? If everything is documented and distributed via smart phones and social media, do we even need to describe anything anymore? Or does the opposite apply: do detailed, accurate – even forensic – descriptions matter more than ever in a time of misinformation and deep fakes?
The mention of the digital provides one final provocation: the relationship between data, metadata and description. For archivists, description is a ‘set of data crafted to identify and represent an archival resource or component thereof’ (Society of American Archivists 2025). Relatedly, ‘reparative description’ is the ‘remediation of practices or data that exclude, silence, harm, or mischaracterize marginalized people in the data created or used by archivists to identify or characterize archival resources’ (ibid.). What might reparative description look like for theatre and performance databases, archives, and museums? Lastly, and perhaps inevitably, there is work to do on computational modes of description, including automated description, algorithmic description and generative artificial intelligence (AI).
If not already clear, this journal issue conceives of description broadly, generously and generatively. We follow Bruno Latour in asking, ‘What is so wrong with “mere descriptions”?’ (2005: 136) and wondering whether ‘writing a true and complete report about the topic at hand’ (127) might not be ‘the highest and rarest achievement’ (137). In short, this issue invites contributors to think of description as nothing more and nothing less than part of the ‘the collective, uncertain, and ongoing activity of trying to get a handle on the world’ (Marcus et al. 2016b: 4).
Submissions are invited on (but not limited to) the following themes:
· Printed descriptions, such as stage directions
· Performed description, such as diegetic speech and reported action and its problems and possibilities
· Pre-emptive descriptions, such as publicity blurbs, content warnings, social stories and trailers, and how they influence the audience’s horizon of expectations
· Contemporaneous descriptions, such as audio descriptions, and their impact on the audience experience
· Retrospective description, including types of criticism
· The role of figures such as messengers, envoys, reporters and witnesses
· The functioning and importance of modes of audio theatre and performance
· Descriptions that produce mental images in the mind’s eye and, conversely, audiences with aphantasia or the inability to visualize mental images
· Theatre and performance databases, data models, and metadata as description
· Archival practice and reparative descriptions within theatre and performance
· Famous or infamous descriptions and their significance
· Description as method, whether as part of fieldwork or as central to a work
· Pedagogies of description and how these change over time and location
Select references
Davis, Ben (2015) ‘Superscript 2015L: Keynote: Post-descriptive criticism’, www.youtube.com/
Davis, Tracy C. (2024) ‘Introduction: Stir and mix’, in Tracy C. Davis and Paul Rae (eds) The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–36.
Davis, Tracy C. and Rae, Paul, eds (2024) The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guy, Georgina (2017) ‘From visible object to reported action: The performance of verbal images in visual art museums’, Theatre Journal 69(3): 339–59.
Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An introduction to actor-network-theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Linsley, Johanna and Guy, Georgina, eds (2023) ‘Hear tell: Describing, reporting, narrating’, Contemporary Theatre Review 33(4): 331–438.
Love, Heather (2010) ‘Close but not deep: Literary ethics and the descriptive turn’, New Literary History 41(2): 371–91.
Love, Heather (2013) ‘Close reading and thin description’, Public Culture 25(3): 401–34.
Love, Heather (2016) ‘Small change: Realism, immanence, and the politics of the micro’, Modern Language Quarterly 77(3): 419–45.
Marcus, Sharon, Love, Heather and Best, Stephen, eds (2016a) ‘Description across disciplines’, Representations 135(1): 1–149.
Marcus, Sharon, Love, Heather and Best, Stephen (2016b) ‘Building a better description’, Representations 135(1): 1–21.
Puchner, Martin (2003) Stage Fright: Modernism, anti-theatricality, and drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Society of American Archivists (2025) ‘Dictionary of archives terminology: Reparative description’, https://
Sontag, Susan (1966) Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Tinius, Jonas (2024) ‘Fieldwork as method in theatre and performance studies’, in Tracy C. Davis and Paul Ra (eds) The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 190–212.
Vitellone, Nicole, Mair, Michael and Kierans, Ciara, eds (2021) ‘Thinking with description’, Qualitative Research 21(3): 313–460.
Format
Authors are invited to submit 300- to 400-word abstracts (with a 100-word author bio) for articles (6,000 words), critical essays and provocations (3,000 words), including short essays (3,000 words), interviews, practice-research essays, poetic interventions and other contributions that attend to (but are not limited to) any aspect(s) of the above. Non-standard formats such as artist pages, highly illustrated articles and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies are welcome.
The editors are committed to diversity and inclusion, and warmly encourage contributions from all sections of the academic and artistic community, including those who are likely to be under-represented in scholarship.
Issue contacts
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:
Email: Helena Grehan, h.grehan@ecu.edu.au; Caroline Wake, c.wake@unsw.edu.au
Schedule:
Proposals: 3 September 2025
Outcomes: October 2025
First drafts: January 2026
Final drafts: January 2027
| For more information, see: | https://www.performance-research.org/editorial-callsforsubmissions.php |
