CfP Australasian Drama Studies  Focus Issue: New Dramaturgies of Sound and Vision

We invite submissions for this special issue of Australasian Drama Studies, Issue 79, October 2021.

ADS Sound and Vision, guest edited by Pia Johnson and Miles O’Neil, is a special issue focusing on the nexus of theatre and technology. At the sharp end of 2020, it was only natural for a confrontation between theatre and technology to arise. The pandemic has forced the technological hand, as theatre artists have navigated the performative possibilities of the internet, both professionally and pedagogically. While acknowledging the pandemic, this issue is not exclusively focused on pandemic or Zoom performance, but takes this histori-cultural moment as a pivot point that prompts a wider interrogation of the relationship between performance and technology.

New Dramaturgies of Sound and Vision examines contemporary dramaturgies of the aural and visual in performance. As narratives of sound and vision become increasingly technologically embedded within theatre and live performance, the issue aims to render these developments and mechanisms visible and audible. We argue that the pandemic has accelerated an existing movement towards the digitised, connected and recorded in performance, but that these concerns sit within a broader landscape of persistent but shifting artistic practices of sound and vision through time.

The issue will actively pursue practitioners and people interested in expanding the journal article form, aiming to prioritise innovation in form and content that may incorporate new ways to present, analyse and critique sound and vision in performance. 

 

Contributions to the issue may address the following topics:

Technological innovation in contemporary Australian performance

Merging of technologies – sound, vision, performance

Sound as presence or character

Internet as performance space

Technodrama and mixed reality

Virtual actors and digital scenery

Creative form and its ghosts, its evidence / residue

Dramaturgies in vision and sound 

Social media and/as performance

Performance in the digital age

Revealing the mechanisms behind the form (technician, camera, creative)

Visual documentation and its value

Pandemic constructs of performance and presentation

 

Submissions may be in the form of an abstract or a full draft. Full drafts are preferred from emerging scholars. Essay abstracts should be no more than 400 words, stating the title and author/s, and should give a clear sense of the proposed argument or investigation. Essay length is a maximum of 6,000 words including bibliography. Please also submit a brief biography and set of key words.

We also welcome shorter pieces, reflections and notes from the field (2000 word maximum). Please note that the journal is now published online, so we welcome the integration of rich digital format such as images, video footage, or sound files.

 

Submission of abstracts/drafts: Friday March 19^th to guesteditor.ads@adsa.edu.au

Authors will be advised whether their submission has been successful by the end of April, and full drafts are due by Friday August 6^th, 2021. The issue will be published in October, 2021.

 

Dr Yoni Prior, Editor: Australasian Drama Studies 

**NEW REVISED DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS**


The Centre for Critical and Creative Writing presents a symposium on 
Adaptation and the Australian Novel.

Wednesday June 24 to Friday June 26 2020 
The University of Queensland, St Lucia campus, Brisbane.

Landmark Australian novels are being adapted for the stage and screen at a rate we’ve not seen for many decades. In the 2015 to 2020 period alone, what was previously a steady trickle has become a flood as the nation’s various mediums of cultural transmission have offered reimagined versions of much-loved novels, including: Ruth Park’sThe Harp in the South, Kenneth Cooke’s Wake in Fright, Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Carey’s Bliss, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones,  Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded, The Slap, and Barracuda, Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, Tim Conigrave’s Holding the Man, Madeleine St John’s The Women in Black, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, and Helen Fitzgerald’s The Cry.

Meanwhile Andrew Bovell’s adaptation of Kate Grenville’s contentious classic The Secret River has toured to the heart of the former empire whose violent colonisation of Australia it depicts, playing to broad acclaim in both Edinburgh and at London’s National Theatre. This builds on Bovell’s body of work adapted from novels, including Head On and A Most Wanted Man. 

The CCCW is very proud to announce that keynote speeches will be provided by international critical adaptation theorist Frances Babbage (University of Sheffield, and UQ’s 2020 S.W. Brooks Fellow) and internationally-acclaimed stage and screen writer, and adaptor of the landmark The Secret River text, Andrew Bovell. We will also host a special in-conversation-with session between novelist Christos Tsiolkas and Andrew Bovell, discussing Bovell’s adaptation of Tsiolkas’s iconic novel Loaded to the screen.

Questions that arise here include: Why the rush on Australian adaptation now? What’s fuelling the appetite for this locally themed work, and why is it being distributed internationally via digital platforms such as Amazon and Netflix? Is there a ‘house style’ emerging either at particular theatre companies or television production houses who are leading this push? Whose stories are being canonised in this tranche of largely Anglo-Celtic authored works, and whose voices are doing the adapting? What version of Australian national identity becomes enshrined in this process, and whose perspectives are elided or omitted?

We invite individual proposals from critical and creative writers for 20 minute papers that address the following themes, topics and questions as they pertain to the current state of Australian writing, publishing, production and performance:
-          Adaptation as an act of creative writing
-          Adaptation and the Australian literary canon
-          Adaptation and the popular novel
-          Adaptation and Indigeneity, race and ethnicity
-          Adaptation and gender
-          Adaptation and landscape
-          Adaptation across mediums and social platforms
-          Adaptation in the digital era
-          Adaptation and the international
-          Adaptation and young audiences
-          Theatre companies and adaptations

Abstracts due by              14 February 2020.
Acceptances issued by   28 February 2020.
Cost of symposium         Free.

We particularly welcome applications from scholars and practitioners traditionally under-represented in higher education, or whose voices are under-represented amongst the range of those we have identified in the above symposium description. The Centre for Critical and Creative Writing aims not only to champion and celebrate Australian writing in all of its many forms, but also to lead important national debate around questions of representation, opportunity, and identity.

Send proposals and queries in the first instance to: Associate Professor Stephen Carleton, Director of the Centre for Critical and Creative Writing, on cccw@uq.edu.au.