ADSA

Issue 47

Sat, 1 Oct 2005












CfP ADS: New Dramaturgies of Sound and Vision

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Rea Dennis
Status: Current
Date Posted: Thu, 25 Feb 2021

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 19th 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 6th, 2021. The issue will be published in October, 2021.

 

Dr Yoni Prior, Editor: Australasian Drama Studies 


CFP: Adaptation and the Australian Novel.

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Wed, 4 Dec 2019
**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 LoadedThe 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.
 

CFP: ADS Special Issue: The Actress in 21st Century Australasia

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Thu, 20 Sep 2018
Edited by Mary Luckhurst

This edition of Australasian Drama Studies (ADS) celebrates the wealth and diversity of extraordinary actresses in Australasian theatres and performance and investigates how their work challenges, enriches and advances the theatre industry and debates about acting. Authors are asked to consider the implications of the bigger picture of their argument as well as the specifics of their focus.

Subjects for essays might include:
  • Actresses and the negotiation of celebrity
  • The representation of actresses in the media/by critics/in academe
  • Female roles on the 21st century stage
  • Actresses and indigeneity
  • Constructions of the female on stage
  • Working processes and the actresss
  • Actresses and independent/underground theatre
  • Resistive stage constructions and the actress
  • Actresses and mainstream stages
  • Actresses and their audiences/fans
  • Actresses, voice and accents
  • The actress/director
  • Actresses and musical theatre
  • Age and the actress
  • The female body on stage
  • The actress and star studies
  • The actress and the archive  
  • National stereotypes, nationalism and the actress
  • Actresses and hierarchies of power in the acting industry
  • The acting industry, ethics and the actress
  • Formally trained and untrained actresses
  • Comediennes and their craft/burlesque and the actress
  • Technology and the actress
  • Actresses, costume and fashion

Essay abstracts should be no more than 400 words and clearly state the title, author/s and give a clear sense of what the argument or investigation will be. Essay length is a maximum of 6,000 words including bibliography. The deadline for essay abstracts 1 November 2018. Contributors will receive notification about acceptance by mid November. The deadline for final essays is 30 April 2019 and the journal will be published in October 2019. Please send essay abstracts to Mary Luckhurst m.luckhurst@unimelb.edu.au

 

Conference CfP: 6th annual Dance and Somatic Practices

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Rea Dennis
Status: Current
Date Posted: Tue, 22 Nov 2022

Reconnections: Looking back, moving forward, enacting change
2023 Dance & Somatic Practices Conference

Deadline for the submissions: 30th November 2022.
Proposals should be submitted online via Google Forms please follow this
link: https://forms.gle/sh7zP2bjvQUg1qqM7


Confernce dates: Friday 14th to Sunday 16th July 2023
Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University, Coventry, UK.
To be held at the ICC Building, Coventry University, Parkside, Coventry, CV1 2NE, UK.

Call for Papers
The Dance & Somatic Practices Conference invites practitioners, dance artists and scholars from a range of somatic practices and disciplines to debate and share investigations in the field of somatic informed movement practices.
The conference will take place in-person with the opportunity to present online.

The conference – Reconnections: Looking back, moving forward, enacting change – will offer a space to collectively engage with themes pertinent to the field of somatic practices internationally and to consider recent world events and concerns such as COVID-19, social justice and the climate emergency. Historically, the Dance & Somatic Practices Conference has been a moment for all areas of somatic practice, research and other modes of somatic enquiry to meet and share experience, knowledge and
connection. This year we have recognized a need and desire in the wider somatic community to gather together in this way again. Welcoming different perspectives from the ever-enrichening field, we also want to acknowledge, celebrate and honour who and what has come before, to reflect on what has happened in recent years and to collectively explore current and future priorities for our community.
We invite proposals for papers, panels, workshops, presentations and other formats that we may not have thought of that, through somatic movement and enquiry, engage with the following questions:
• What do you consider are key topics of enquiry in the field today?
• What do you consider are the pressing questions that will need to be
addressed into the future?
• What do you consider are the emerging topics of enquiry and how are
these supported by the legacies in the field?
• How do you imagine we might continue to develop sustainable formats
for somatic practice and research, whether through conference, journals or
other modalities?
• What, in your opinion, has been missed in our explorations of somatics
so far?

The call is open to themes and perspectives such as but not limited to: screendance; dance science; spirituality; body and environment; social justice; climate emergency; pedagogy and performance; politics and trauma; embodiment; ethics; care; technology; and non-Western perspectives.

Submissions
We are accepting proposal submissions via Google Forms, you will be asked to include the following:
• Your proposal (max 500) words including the key theme(s) you will be examining please leave out any personal details as the proposals will be reviewed anonymously by the conference committee.
• Details of any collaborators
• Biographies
• Your preference for presenting in person or online
• Technical requirements - noting that only low-level technical requirements can be accommodated. Unfortunately, we cannot provide performance level technical support.
If you have any issues with the form or need any additional support with the form please contact lily.hayward-smith@coventry.ac.uk.

Call for Papers: On Invasion, Performance Research 28(2)

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Helena Grehan
Status: Current
Date Posted: Mon, 16 May 2022

Call for Papers

Performance Research, vol. 28, no. 2, 2023

"On Invasion"


Proposal Deadline: 27 June 2022
Issue Editors: Helena Grehan (Murdoch U) and Miriam Haughton (NUI Galway)

We live in a world of unpredictability, fracture and powerlessness. Acts of violence, invasion and oppression, both seen and unseen, pervade all aspects of life and threaten the viability of the planet. Yet, perhaps because of this powerlessness and fracture, this is also a time of solidarity, of acts of resistance both large and small, and of friendship, love and bravery. It is a confusing and confounding time and one in which we must yet again consider the role, value and power of art to intervene, to destabilize, to disrupt and to question. As Hannah Arendt points out:
 
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind [sic] had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence… and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. (Arendt 1951: vii)
 
Arendt wrote the lines above in the Preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianismin 1951, which resonates strongly with the crises of today. However, let us also reflect on Seamus Heaney’s verse adaption of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, first published in the early 1990s as sectarian violence in the north of Ireland seemed beyond hope. 

History says, Don’t hope 

On this side of the grave… 
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave 
Of justice can rise up, 
And hope and history rhyme. (Heaney 1990)
 
We draw from them now to acknowledge the powerlessness of so many, while hoping for a ‘longed-for tidal wave/Of justice…’ The topic of ‘invasion’, in the context of the current world order, is an apt topic for an issue of Performance Research. We call for submissions to ‘On Invasion’ to consider the idea and reality of invasions – of communities and nations, of the body, the imagination and the environment, and of artistic response. 

What does and might invasion mean in the current tumultuous world? How indeed might performance and artistic practice more broadly respond to or enact this concept? We may, for example, understand the theatre as an invasive force, following Antonin Artaud, one that seeps into the body of the performer and/or spectator—one that infiltrates slyly, demands an audience or bombards sonically; think of the work of Romeo Castellucci, Sarah Vanhee, Tania Bruguera, 
Milo Rau, Bashar Murkus, ANU Productions, or Back to Back Theatre, for example. 


In what ways might performance equip us to withstand these and other kinds of invasions – outside and beyond the performance space? How might it operate to alter this status quo of fear, fracture and disruption? When we think of invasion as a concept and a reality, we conjure up images of war, isolation, refugees, climate destruction, the Anthropocene, racial division and oppression, ecological devastation and infiltration, political rupture, technological interference and surveillance, medical procedures and immersive dramaturgies, among myriad others. But what is the value in an issue on this fraught and huge topic? What might artists and scholars make of it? What examples can they draw on to flesh out this pervasive reality? Whose voices do we most need to hear from on this theme?


We invite essays, manifestos, artists pages and other meditations on the topic that consider ‘On Invasion’ in the broadest possible terms. 
Submissions might consider, but are not limited to, the following areas:
  • Theatres and performances of invasion, of resistance.
  • Disciplinary invasions: borrowing or stealing perhaps, from theatre to elucidate other arguments or fields, and what of performance’s disciplinary invasions or incursions?
  • How do we negotiate in performative terms invasions of bodies, minds, through persecution and war and/or the drive for geo-political expansion?
  • What are the contemporary artistic strategies that invade social space?
  • How does theatre and performance alter the status quo?
  • What of ecological invasion? Rising sea levels, species decline, fire, drought, pestilence, flood?
  • Bombing, loss of life, dislocation and fear in the face of military oppression.
  • Resistance, refusal, solidarity and stealth.
  • Hope and renewal; can signs of resolution or peace be found among the wreckage of tragedy?
  • Increasing surveillance and control via digital platforms and media and our willingness to participate, despite the risks. How much is one’s identity worth these days?
  • Controlling viruses and the associated impacts on the arts sector. How much is too much? 
  • Saving lives and economic viability at what social cost?
  • Do sanctions and boycotts seem useful strategies to halt invasion?
  • What role might hacking and resistance, fighting back against ‘oppressors’ play?
 
References
Arendt, Hannah (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism, Berlin: Shocken Books.
Heaney, Seamus (1990) The Cure at Troy: A version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, London: Faber in association with Field Day.
 
Schedule
Proposals: 27 June 2022
First Drafts: October 2022
Final Drafts: January 2023
Publication: March 2023
 
Format
Alongside long-form articles, we encourage short articles and provocations. As with other editions of Performance Research, we welcome artist(s)’s pages and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies, combining words and images, as well as more conventional essays.
 
Issue contacts
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org
 
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:
Helena Grehan: h.grehan@murdoch.edu.au
Miriam Haughton: miriam.haughton@nuigalway.ie
 
General guidelines for submissions:
  • Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website (www.performance-research.org ) and familiarize yourself with the journal.
  • Proposals will be accepted by email (Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF)).
  • Proposals should not exceed one A4 side.
  • Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.
  • Please include the issue title and issue number in the subject line of your email.
  • Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that all attachments do not exceed 5 MB, and there is a maximum of five images.
  • Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
 
If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On the final acceptance of a completed article, you will be asked to sign an author agreement for your work to be published in Performance Research.

CFP: Reimagining Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis, or, Greta Thunberg Goes to Theatre School

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Wed, 7 Aug 2019
What might we teach Swedish student activist Greta Thunberg if she were to choose post-secondary education in theatre? As she says, she has no reason to fear speaking the truth: what approach to acting and theatre-making might we take with someone who declares to an international assembly, “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is; even that burden is left to us children”? We doubt that Thunberg would decide to embark on a program of actor training as part of her university education—she seems headed for a career in politics—but by the law of averages many millions of teenagers who are participating in the world-wide movement of school strikes for climate action will decide to do so. What will we contrive to teach them that will be worthy of the predicament we are in, and the needs they will have in the face of it?

What is the theatre pedagogy of a global emergency? Is there such a thing? How does the point of intersection between theatre pedagogy and practice engage the ‘hyperobject’ (Morton) that is climate change? One must also ask: does the transformation of planet earth by anthropogenic global warming foreclose all meaningful representation of it, artistic or otherwise? Putting this reasonable objection aside for the moment, co-editors Conrad Alexandrowicz (University of Victoria) and Dr. David Fancy (Brock University) invite proposals from a variety of disciplines that have bearing on this all-encompassing subject for a co-edited collection of essays, provocations, workbooks, formulae and other interventions. This might include inputs from curriculum studies, performance studies, environmental studies, philosophy and aesthetics, psychology and applied theatre, in addition to studies in acting pedagogy, stage design, theory and criticism. (Please note that we have initial interest from a major academic publisher.)

What would it mean in theoretical and practical terms to reimagine and reconfigure the entire ecology of theatre education through the lens forced upon us by the rapid heating of the planet?
Topic areas might include, but are not limited to, the following:
  • Playing the other-than-human as a way to model a transformed relationship to ‘Nature’: what might this mean? What pedagogical and creative lineages support this approach?
  • As Canadian climate activist Naomi Klein argues in This Changes Everything indigenous peoples are on the front lines of the fight against climate change: "some of the most marginalized people in my country … are taking on some of the wealthiest and most powerful forces on the planet" (379). Are there specific insights, practices, philosophies available in global indigenous communities that may be brought into further conversation with ‘Western’ theatre pedagogies?
  • Climate theatre and/as activism: does the sole remaining respectable function for theatre lie in training to create and perform events such as those staged by the Extinction Rebellion? protesters? Would these approaches—and only these—satisfy Greta Thunberg and others with her understandably urgent convictions? What are the potentials of theatre as “agitprop” in the third decade of the 21st Century? Alan Filewod writes in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism: “Now widely used as a catchall term to describe politically combative or oppositional art, ‘agitprop’ originated from the early Soviet conjunction of propaganda (raising awareness of an issue) and agitation (exciting an emotional response to the issue), as theorized by Lenin in What Is To Be Done (1902) and institutionalized in the many departments and commissions of Agitation and Propaganda in the USSR and the Comintern after the Russian Revolution.”
  • Climate theatre and/as therapeutic intervention: Students of all ages are experiencing increasing anxiety and depression as a result of the knowledge that their generation will face particularly worsening effects of climate change. Many of the arts are used in therapeutic contexts, such as art therapy and dance therapy. Does this mean acting instructors themselves need new forms of training?
  • Curriculum design: most post-secondary actor training includes at least some devising, even in conservatory settings, including monologues in text-based acting classes, and collaborative pieces arising from movement work. Does the climate crisis necessitate a new ratio of skills acquisition to creative endeavour in order to satisfy the need that theatre serve interventionist aims?
  • The implications for community engagement: how does adapting theatre education for climate action prompt a new notion of outreach on the part of post-secondary institutions into various communities?
  • Aesthetic considerations: politicizing the aesthetic frequently results in art practices marked by didactic qualities or even pedantic dead ends. In what ways can traditional and non-traditional embraces of aesthetic experience at the point of theatre training contribute to more vibrant theatrical practices better able to withstand, as well as guide us through, the emergent crisis of anthropogenic climate change?
  • Indigeneity and creative theatrical practice: are there specific insights, practices, philosophies available in global indigenous communities—from shamanic work to the more traditionally representational work of storytelling and theatre creation—that may be brought into conversation with ‘Western’ theatre pedagogies?
Prospective contributors are asked to submit a 500-word abstract as well as a brief bio—no more than 200 words—to  both co-editors no later than September 15, 2019:
Conrad Alexandrowicz (University of Victoria): conrada@uvic.ca 
David Fancy (Brock University): 
dfancy@brocku.ca

 

Adaptation and the Australian Novel Symposium - 6 & 7 April (online)

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Rea Dennis
Status: Current
Date Posted: Tue, 23 Mar 2021

Online Symposium: Adaptation and the Australian Novel
Centre for Critical and Creative Writing, University of Queensland

Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 April 2021

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’s The Harp in the South, Kenneth Cooke’s Wake in Fright, Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones,  Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded, The Slap, and Barracuda, Madeleine St John’s The Women in Black, and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. This trend has continued into 2021, with screen adaptations including The Dry from Jane Harper’s novel, and stage premiĆØres including Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe (QT/MTC) and Ruth Park’s Playing Beattie Bow (STC). 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.

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 are pleased to invite ADSA members to join UQ’s Centre for Critical and Creative Writing for a two-day online symposium that interrogates  adaptation, the Australian novel, and what it means to perform the canon in the 2010s and 2020s. Attendance at the Symposium is free, and all sessions will be presented via Zoom. We also seek to elevate practitioner perspectives alongside academic ones; the Symposium programme features paper panels and keynotes, as well as ‘in conversation’ sessions with leading adaptors.

Please register for the Symposium at this link. This will give you access to the Zoom links for all of the panel sessions, the keynotes by Andrew Bovell (on The Secret River) and Professor Frances Babbage, and the in conversation sessions with Anita Heiss (on Tiddas), and Andrew Bovell and Dan Giovannoni (on Loaded). The full program for the Symposium is available here. Any questions can be directed to Stephen Carleton on cccw@uq.edu.au.


Call for Papers: 2022 CCCW Symposium, UQ

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Stephen Carleton
Status: Current
Date Posted: Fri, 3 Dec 2021


The Centre for Critical and Creative Writing (CCCW) presents a symposium on

Wicked Problems and Speculative Futures: Writing the Anthropocene

22-23 June, 2022
Hosted at St Lucia campus Brisbane/Meanjin and online by the University of Queensland (UQ)


Timothy Morton has termed global warming a wicked problem, ‘one you can rationally diagnose but to which there is no feasible rational solution’ (36). For Morton, living in the Anthropocene comes with an uncanny knowing – a ‘weird weirdness’ – underpinning our awareness that this wicked problem is one of our own making. Theatre scholars Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh have gone so far as to suggest that this wicked problem is an Absurd one – ‘Absurd’ with a capital ‘A’ – calling for a rethinking and a ‘greening’ of the Theatre of the Absurd. According to their analysis, we are once again, like our post-war forebears, living in existential times, and need to re-read that movement through the eco-critical lens of the present. Morton’s sense that we are living in uncanny times  of weather, indeed of a planet and its behaviour that is at once deeply familiar but behaving deeply strangely lends itself also to a Gothic reading of literature, theatre, film, and visual art depicting the Anthropocene. After all, we are living in a period where we are reaping what we have sown since we first started pumping carbon into our atmosphere. The return of the repressed is erupting into the present with violent force in the form of climate catastrophe. So how are our artists and critical theorists engaging with the climate change and its material effects? What are the most appropriate literary forms and genres to be tackling the issue, and how are artists bending them to their own needs in the twenty-first century? In short, how do we write the Anthropocene?

The CCCW is very proud to announce that keynote speeches will be provided by international climate fiction theorist Professor Adeline Johns-Putra (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China) and internationally-acclaimed Australian novelist James Bradley. We will also host a special in-conversation-with session between Noongar speculative writer Claire G. Coleman and UQ’s Professor Kim Wilkins, and another with journalist-activists Garry and Anne Charnock and UQ’s Dr Helen Marshall.


Questions that arise here include: How do we portray or speculate about the future in literature, theatre, film and visual art in uncanny times, where the present is more alarming than some of the direst of future predictions have been? Are we living in a futuristic Gothic dystopia, or is there hope that this is a wicked problem that we can fix? How do we solve it through art? How do we map the ways in which the Anthropocene has been portrayed in cli fi across the twenty first century? As we move from Kyoto to the Paris Agreement to the Glasgow Climate Pact, how is the artistic response to the Anthropocene tracking? Towards ever-more dystopic depictions of doom, or to cautious narratives of hope? Is there a pragmatic in-between?

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 wicked problem of writing the Anthropocene:

  • Droughts and floods: the absence and/or the omnipresence of cli-fi narratives on page, stage, screen and gallery
  • Narratives of hope vs narratives of doom
  • Dystopia/Armageddon fatigue
  • Environmental rhetoric in the Anthropocene
  • Technical communication and wicked problems
  • The ethics of speculation in an age of fake news
  • The limits, opportunities and obligations of naturalism
  • Writing speculative futures in a time where ‘the future’ is intruding into/become the present 
  • World building and techniques for describing the future
  • Science writing on the Anthropocene
  • The Anthropocene and colonialism
  • The Anthropocene and race
  • Art and the real world: collaborations between artists, scientists and activists
  • The cottagecore movement and the aesthetics/ethics of everyday living 
  • Gothic pasts and futures

ā€‹ā€‹ā€‹ā€‹ā€‹ā€‹ā€‹Abstracts due by: 31 January 2022.
Acceptances issued by: 28 February 2022.
Cost: Free. 


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. 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.

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.


Indicative Reading List:

Bradley, James. Ghost Species. Hamish Hamilton, 2020.

Coleman, Claire G. Terra Nullius. Hachette, 2017.
Freestone, Elizabeth and Jeanie O’Hare. 100 Plays to Save the World. Nick Hern Books, 2021.
Johns-Putra, Adeline, ed. Climate and Literature. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Lavery, Carl and Finburgh, Clare, eds. Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage. Bloomsbury, 2015.
Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia UP, 2016.
Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilisation. City Lights Publishers, 2015.
Taylor, Melanie Benson. “Indigenous Interruptions in the Anthropocene.” PMLA, vol. 136, no. 1, 2021, pp. 9-16.
Todd, Zoe. “Indigenizing the Anthropocene.” Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 241-254.


CfP Performance Paradigm 17: Perform or Else? Surveying the state of the discipline for the post-pandemic world

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Rea Dennis
Status: Current
Date Posted: Tue, 23 Feb 2021
Call for Papers: Performance Paradigm 17 (2022)
Perform or Else? Surveying the state of the discipline for the post-pandemic world

Edited by Emma Willis (University of Auckland), Chris Hay (University of Queensland), and Nien Yuan Cheng (University of Sydney)

Proposals of approximately 300 words due 11 April 2021.
 

 
In Perform or Else (2001)Jon McKenzie outlined three performance paradigms – the cultural, the organisational and the technological – to argue that the imperative to perform had replaced Foucault’s description of discipline, hence the book’s subtitle: “from discipline to performance.” McKenzie’s insights partially inspired the name of this journal and our first issue “Performance in the Information Age” (2005) featured his work. This issue returns to McKenzie’s seminal text to ask what the imperative to perform looks like when performance is thwarted – for many, 2020 was marked by a “hyper-stasis” (Reynolds 2011, 516), with change happening all around us as we were (and continue to be) stuck in place. To do this, we take each of McKenzie’s three paradigms in turn, asking how they might be interpreted in the time of COVID-19.
 
Firstly, how is the playbook of performance management being mobilised at this time? University staff, for example, are currently being asked to consider ‘enhanced leaving,’ or ‘voluntary separation.’ What happens when the paradigm of performance measurement is mobilised against scholars and practitioners of performance, as we’re told “you’re obsolete, liable to be defunded, junkpiled, or dumped” (McKenzie 2001, 15)? How might we reclaim performance as a discipline, a mode of measurement, an act of political resistance? While performance has been defined as “restored behaviour,” Colbert, Jones and Vogel argue that formula can also be reversed. In other words, it can also be a mode of “behaved restoration”, repair, meaning, and becoming (Colbert, Jones, and Vogel 2020, 13)?
 
Secondly, how have “the worldwide circuits of performative power and knowledge” (McKenzie 2001, 25) aligned to techno-performance been amplified by COVID-19 and what does this amplification tell us about the distribution of such power? For artistic works, how has techno-performance itself performed? What happens when software programs made for business conferences and webinars become the performance spaces of the many artists forced to adapt to these new circumstances? In addition, techno-performance has also brought about new practices in documentation and archiving. What will be the “performance remains” (Schneider  2011, 100) of the pandemic — and, given the imbrication of performance space and commercial product, to whom will these remains belong?
 
Thirdly, performance studies, like many other disciplines, was facing demands for paradigm shifts in both teaching and research — even before the pandemic. In Perform or Else, McKenzie rehearses the “intellectual history” (2001, 33) of performance studies as located in its relationship with anthropology without fully critically acknowledging anthropology’s violent legacies of cultural and political imperialism. Twenty years on, “decolonisation” has become a buzzword within and beyond the university––but have things really changed? As Bhakti Shringarpure asks, “what counts as ‘authentic’ decolonisation in 2020?” (2020). As a journal with a focus on the Australasian and Oceanic region, we are particularly interested in how this question bears out in this part of the world.
 
Lastly, and more recently, McKenzie sketches another three “additional paradigms of performance research”: government performance, financial or economic performance, and environmental performance (2006, 37-38). Each of these paradigms has been implicated by the COVID-19 crisis, which has brought with it comparison graphs on national infection rates, vaccination performance reports, and so on. Could we even suggest that pandemic performance might soon form a paradigm of its own?
 
The above lines of inquiry proposed by this issue are far-ranging; nonetheless, they resonate with one another, bound together by an interest in revisiting and advancing the ideas explored by McKenzie 20 years ago. We ask not only what it means to “perform” in the shadow of a global pandemic, but also what is its “or else?” (McKenzie 2001, 5). This issue therefore seeks essays or interviews in response to the four areas sketched above:
1) the mobilisation of our field for neoliberal measurement purposes;
2) the impacts of techno-performance on our work and our experience as scholars, artists and citizens;
3) the question of how to decolonise performance studies and what that might look like; and
4) the rising paradigms of governmental, financial and environmental performance.
 
Please send proposals of approximately 300 words to Dr Emma Willis (emma.willis@auckland.ac.nz) by 11 April 2021. Full articles will be due on 1 November 2021 for publication in Performance Paradigm 17, July 2022.

Please feel free to contact the issue editors with any questions. For more information about them, see here:
Dr Emma Willis, emma.willis@auckland.ac.nzhttp://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/people/ewil077.
Dr Chris Hay, chris.hay@uq.edu.au, https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/19715.
Dr Nien Yuan Cheng, nien.cheng@sydney.edu.au.
 

 
Works Cited:
Colbert, S., Jones, D., & Vogel, S. (Eds.). (2020). Race and Performance after Repetition. Durham, London: Duke University Press.
McKenzie, J. (2001). Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge, 2001.
---- (2006). “Performance and globalization.” In The SAGE handbook of performance studies, edited by D. S. Madison and J. Hamera, 33-45. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Reynolds, S. (2011). Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addition to its Own Past. London: Faber & Faber.
Schneider, R. (2011). Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge.
Shringarpure, B. (2020). “Notes on fake decolonization. “Africa is a Country, 18 December. https://africasacountry.com/2020/12/notes-on-fake-decolonization.

CFP: IFTR CONFERENCE 2018 // THEATRE AND MIGRATION POLITICAL PERFORMANCES WORKING GROUP

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Mon, 4 Dec 2017
We would like to invite researchers to submit their work for discussion at the Political Performances Working Group meeting at the 2018 IFTR conference, which will take place on 9-13 July in Belgrade, Serbia.
 
Presentation formats

For IFTR 2018 we plan to curate presentations in a variety of formats, including 15/20 min papers, performance presentations, shorter provocations, and round tables. If you have a preference for a particular presentation format or would like to team up with other colleagues for a panel, please indicate so in your abstract submission. Depending on the type of presentation, colleagues may be asked to share their work with other members in advance of the conference to facilitate deeper and longer discussions at the conference.

IFTR 2018: Call for Papers

The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Theatre and Migration’, a pressing area of enquiry that directly relates to the preoccupations of the Political Performances Working Group. As such, we encourage colleagues to address the general CFP for specialist discussion within the Working Group meetings. As noted in the CFP, possible topics include but are not limited to:

 
·       Migration/ national identity/ national theatre
·       Performing borders
·       Access and mobility
·       Theatre history and historiography of migration
·       Migrating histories
·       The nascence and consequences of stasis
·       Creating and deconstructing stasis
·       Identity politics and the ‘humanism of the other’
·       Gender, race, ethnicity, and performances of belonging
·       Language and translation
·       Performing migratory geographies
·       Stasis as a counterpoint in a world of velocity and constant movement
·       Staging the paradox of hospitality
·       Theatres of migration, mobility, and citizenship
·       Performing stasis
·       Stasis as a possible solution to the postmodern state
·       Postmodern stasis as vacuum filled with or without meaning
·       Political theatre and migration
·       Performing community and displacement
·       Theatre of migrants/theatre for migrants
·       Ethics and agency of staging the Other
·       Open, closed and mobile spaces of performance
·       Migrating aesthetics
·       Theatre, migration & spectatorship
·       Migrating audiences
·       Migration, mutation, appropriation
·       Migration as the release of tensions
·       Performances of inclusion—migration and cultural policy
·       Migration, participation and delegated performance
·       Media, migration, theatre
·       Affect and efficacy
·       Theorizing migration and theatre
·       Ecologies of theatre and migration
 
Delegates

The Political Performances Working Group welcomes new members and is keen to hear from academics across all career stages and geographical locations.

Submitting your abstract

Abstracts for the Political Performances Working Group should be submitted through Cambridge Core by 15th January 2018.

In order to make a submission, you will need to become a member of IFTR first. If you already have a Cambridge Core account, you can download instructions on how to join IFTR here. If you do not have a Cambridge Core account, you can download instructions on how to join IFTR here.

CFP Special Issue: Carcerality, Theatre, Rights. Research in Drama Education

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Wed, 9 Jan 2019
Schedule:
Abstract due: 30 September 2019.
Notification of Acceptance: 31 October 2019.
First drafts due: 31 January 2020.
Final copy: February 2021.
Publication: Aug 2021, 26.3

This special issue on Carcerality, Theatre, Rights invites submissions exploring the role of theatre and performance in challenging and resisting incarceration in its various forms. In particular, this issue is interested in practice and scholarship that engages with rights discourse in order to highlight the role of theatre and performance in resisting pervasive logics and technologies of carcerality. What role can theatre and performance play in highlighting the rights of those experiencing state sponsored marginalisation, control and imprisonment? And what role can theatre and performance play in challenging the exclusionary structures of carcerality?

Carcerality
Within the context of mass incarceration and surveillance, carcerality is becoming an increasingly urgent interdisciplinary field of research and praxis. With etymological origins to the Latin ‘carcer’ for ‘prison’, carcerality today covers a wide range of ‘spaces’, from missions, reserves and residential schools established to contain Indigenous peoples, to immigration detention centres, and the use of ‘black sites’ or secret prison facilities used to detain enemy combatants in the global war on terror. Carcerality also involves considering how surveillance and incarceration are connected to issues of race, class and gender. Currently more than 10.35 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, and since 2000 the world prison population has grown by almost 20% (Walmsley, 2016). This global trend, coupled with the increasing privatisation of justice, raises concerns about the potential negative impact of commercial interests on prison populations as well as concerns about the long-term sustainability of prison institutions and facilities (Jacobson, Heard, & Fair, 2017). Moreover, the colonial legacy of disadvantage, over-policing and over-incarceration continues to disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations such as Canada, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand (Cunneen & Tauri, 2016; Webb, 2011). From the world’s largest open-air prisons of Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to the refugee camps in Europe and the Pacific, to the immigration detention centres in the US, we are locking up and controlling more people than ever before.

Theatre and Incarceration
The ability of theatre to imagine new futures for incarcerated communities was documented in James Thompson’s seminal publication Prison Theatre (1998). Michael Balfour’s Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice (2004) recorded developments in the field since Thompson’s publication. Certain recurring themes are present within this field: how practitioners frame theatre projects with incarcerated communities; the privileging of transferrable skills and therapeutic benefits that come from participating in performance; and the need for critical and methodological models to help evaluate these benefits to promote the use of theatre and performance within criminal justice. It is now 20 years since Thompson’s publication first questioned whether theatre in prisons is about humanising the system or about transforming it (Thompson, 1998, p. 16). Yet much scholarship and practice is still preoccupied with notions of utility. While this special issue does not seek to question the validity or benefits of theatre and creativity to incarcerated communities, we seek contributions that shift the discussion from considerations of ‘use’ to arguments that highlight the importance of art as a fundamental human right, and a potent form of resistance. We seek contributions exploring forms of socially engaged performance that are informed by activism and rights discourse. We also welcome contributions that embrace Indigenous, non-Western or de-colonising approaches to theorising the practice.

Rights
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” (UN General Assembly, 1948). Cultural rights are inseparable from human rights, as recognized in Article 5 of the 2001 UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity, and can be defined as the right of access to, participation in and enjoyment of culture (UNESCO, 2001). Moreover, the rights of Indigenous peoples to their culture and intellectual and cultural property has been recognised by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (UN General Assembly, 2007). Despite their recognition within international law, individuals, groups and communities continue to be denied their cultural and artistic rights. Moreover, a recent report assessing the global state of artistic freedom warns of the emergence of a new global culture of silencing others (Freemuse 2018). According to this report, in 2017, on average one person every week was prosecuted for expressing themselves artistically, while thousands of pieces of visual art, music, theatre, dance and literature were censored, vandalised or destroyed (Freemuse, 2018, p.6). Further, authorities might silence cultural expression within sites of confinement as a strategy for removing identity and agency, or use access to arts experiences as a form of leverage to encourage good behaviour and impose discipline.

We invite artists, scholars, activists and community workers to submit abstracts for proposed articles that engage with the three key terms of this special issue: ‘carcerality’, ‘theatre’, and ‘rights’. We are particularly keen to hear from practitioners and scholars exploring theatre in prison. Possible areas of focus include:
  • Theatre and decolonising corrections.
  • Performance, incarceration, control and disobedience.
  • Performance and arrest as civil disobedience.
  • Theatre, incarceration and structures of exclusion.
  • Theatre, incarceration, participation and inclusion.
  • Performance, incarceration and the ethics of representation.
  • Performance in confined spaces and notions of immersive theatre.
  • Theatre and performance that resist cultures of mass incarceration.
  • Theatre and performance that resist cultures of surveillance and control.

This special issue will be co-edited by Dr. Rand Hazou (Massey University) and Dr. Sarah Woodland (Griffith University). Abstracts should be submitted by 30 September 2019 to r.t.hazou@massey.ac.nz and s.woodland@griffith.edu.au

Dr. Rand T. Hazou – Senior Lecturer in Theatre
School of English and Media Studies, Massey University.
Rand is a theatre academic and facilitator with experience working across a variety of creative and community contexts. In 2004, he was commissioned by the UNDP to travel to the Occupied Territories in Palestine to work as a theatre consultant running workshops for Palestinian youths. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Theatre in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University. His research explores theatre that engages with issues of social justice. His research on Asylum Seeker and Refugee Theatre has been published in a series of international journal articles. In Aotearoa he has recently led teaching and creative projects engaging with both prison and aged-care communities.

Dr Sarah Woodland- Research Fellow
Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, Griffith University
Sarah is a researcher, practitioner and educator in arts, theatre and performance, with over 20 years' experience in the arts and cultural sectors in Australia and the UK. Sarah has facilitated projects with a number of community groups, including Daughters of the Floating Brothel (Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre 2015), a participatory radio drama exploring the history of female incarceration in Australia. Sarah is currently leading the project Listening to Country, a collaboration with incarcerated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women to create an immersive audio work for the purpose of stress relief and cultural connection. Sarah's research interests are in Participatory Arts, Socially Engaged Arts, Community Arts and Cultural Development, Applied Theatre, and Prison Theatre.

References
Balfour, M. (Ed.) (2004). Theatre in prison: Theory and practice: Intellect Books.
Cunneen, C., & Tauri, J. (2016). Indigenous criminology. Bristol: Polity Press.
Freemuse. (2018). The State Of Artistic Freedom Retrieved from https://freemuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Freemuse-The-state-of-artistic-freedom-2018-online-version.pdf
Jacobson, A., Heard, C., & Fair, H. (2017). Prison: Evidence of its use and over-use from around the world. Retrieved from http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/global_imprisonment_web2c.pdf
Thompson, J. (Ed.) (1998). Prison theatre: Perspectives and practices. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
UN General Assembly. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. Paris: United Nations. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
UN General Assembly. (2007). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. New York: United Nations. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html
UNESCO. (2001). UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001246/124687e.pdf#page=67
Walmsley, R. (2016). World prison population list(Eleventh edition). Retrieved from http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/world_prison_population_list_11th_edition_0.pdf
Webb, R. (2011). Incarceration. In T. McIntosh & M. Mulholland (Eds.), Ma?ori and Social Issues (pp. 249–262). Wellington: Huia Publishers.
Williams, F. C. (2013). The embodiment of social dynamics: a phenomenon of Western pop dance within a Filipino prison. Research in Dance Education14(1), 39-56

CFP Performance Paradigm 15, Performing Southern Feminisms

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Mon, 4 Feb 2019
Co-editors: Caroline Wake (University of New South Wales) and Emma Willis (University of Auckland), and section editors (TBC)

From Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the United Nations to comedian Hannah Gadsby on Netflix—the women of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia have rarely been more visible on the international stage. Like their sisters around the world, the women of the Asia-Pacific raised their hands and voices in 2017 to say #metoo. However, regional differences mean that the movement has unfolded differently here. In Australia, strict defamation laws have stymied the naming of perpetrators and instead facilitated the effective “weaponisation” of the #metoo movement (Maley 2018). In China, women were using the hashtags #??? (#IAmAlso) and #MeToo??? (#MeTooInChina) until the tags were banned, at which pointed they switched to the user-generated nickname for the movement, ??, which translates as “rice bunny” but is pronounced as “mi tu” (Zeng 2018). [I apologise that the eurocentric operating system won't import Chinese characters - Prez] In other instances, the movement served to reanimate previous efforts, for example the Australia Council of the Arts’ report Women in Theatre (Lally and Miller 2012) and in the Republic of Korea, Seo Ji-hyun’s complaint against her senior colleague in 2010 (Haynes and Chen 2018). Now, twelve years after Tarana Burke first tweeted #metoo, and one year after it went viral, women are also asking themselves—what next?

The aim of this issue of Performance Paradigm—an open-access, peer-reviewed journal now in its 15th year—is twofold. Firstly, to document and analyse the theatre, performance, dance and live art being made by and with cis- and trans-women across the Asia-Pacific. Secondly, and more ambitiously, to develop a theory and vocabulary of “Southern feminisms” for theatre and performance studies. In their recent issue on “Feminisms Now,” Sarah Gorman, Geraldine Harris and Jen Harvie remark on “the inadequacy of the term ‘feminist’ for non-white artists and scholars” (2018, 280). This “inadequacy” has particular regional resonances. For example, on the experiences of Pacific women, artists Lana Lopesi and Louisa Afoa write that, “The liberal feminist idea of a universal women’s experience can be unrelatable for women from cultures who have been victim to colonisation” (2015). Similarly, in her analysis of Hot Brown Honey, Sarah French draws on the work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka nation, to argue that “Australian feminism has consistently excluded Indigenous women and … there are necessarily limitations to Indigenous women’s involvement with white feminists” (Moreton-Robinson 2000, cited by French 2018, 322).

These remarks reiterate the argument Celia Roberts and Raewyn Connell make in the introduction to their special issue on “Southern Feminism” (2016). Drawing on Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1997), they point out that: “Theory is normally produced in the metropole and exported to the periphery, while the periphery normally produces data and exports this raw material to the metropole. All academic disciplines show these patterns; viewed as a whole, feminist, women’s and gender studies are no exception” (Roberts and Connell 2016, 135–36). Neither are theatre and performance studies, both historically dominated by North American and European scholars. Rather than solely seeking to add some Asia-Pacific data to feminist theatre and performance studies, this issue sets out to develop a theory. It asks: what might Southern feminist performance—and performance theory—look like if we were start with our own “peripheral” selves?

We therefore invite contributions that problematise, extend and challenge what Southern feminism means in a wide variety of performance contexts including theatre, dance, performance and live art, ritual, activism, burlesque and voguing. Here we are thinking of everything from Arden’s diplomacy and Gadsby’s comedy to anything in between. We are interested in ensembles, solo artists, choreographers, company leaders, and community workers. Moreover, we invite appraisals of both feminist-identified performances and works that may not identify as “feminist” but that engage with the relationship between gender and power by way of their own cultural and aesthetic frameworks. While we do not wish to “colonise” artists who do not identify as feminist by naming them so, we do wish to broaden the parameters of the discussion in order to enrich the critical discourse. 

Topics may include but are not limited to:
 
  • Pacific feminisms, mana wahine
  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander feminisms, Indigenous/indigenous feminisms
  • Feminism, allyship, and “decolonising solidarity” (Land 2015)
  • Queer, trans and non-binary feminisms
  • Cultural paradigms that provide their own matrices for articulating the relationship between gender, power and cultural expression in performance
  • Feminism and religious identities
  • Feminism, migration and performance
  • Feminist epistemologies and dramaturgies
  • Feminist performance on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and beyond
  • Pink/pynk aesthetics
  • Intergenerational feminist performance
  • Ecofeminism and performance
  • Xenofeminism and performance
  • Postfeminism
  • Issues of industry, participation and representation

Please send proposals of approximately 300 words to Caroline Wake (c.wake@unsw.edu.au) and Emma Willis (emma.willis@auckland.ac.nz) by Monday 18 February 2019. Full articles will be due on 31 May 2019 for publication in December 2019.


Works Cited

French, Sarah. 2018. “‘Talkin’ Up to the White Woman’: Intersections of Race and Gender in Hot Brown Honey.” Contemporary Theatre Review 28 (3): 320–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2018.1475357

Gorman, Sarah, Geraldine Harris and Jen Harvie. 2018. “Introduction: Feminisms Now.”
Contemporary Theatre Review 28 (3): 278–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2018.1487192

Hountondji, Paulin J. 1997. “Introduction: Recentring Africa.” In Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails, edited by Paulin J. Hountondji, 1–39. Dakar: CODESRIA.

Land, Clare. 2015. Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles. London: Zed Books.

Lopesi, Lana, and Louisa Afoa. 2015. “Body Language.” The Occassional Journal 2015 (“Love Feminisms”). http://enjoy.org.nz/publishing/the-occasional-journal/love-feminisms/body-language#article

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2000. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Roberts, Celia, and Raewyn Connell. 2016. “Feminist theory and the global South.” Feminist Theory 17(2): 135–140. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1464700116645874

 

Australasian Drama Studies Issue 77 now available

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Rea Dennis
Status: Current
Date Posted: Tue, 23 Feb 2021
The latest Issue (77) of Australasian Drama Studies is published and now available on the ADS website. Edited by Jennifer Beckett, Rachel Fensham and Paul Rae, this focus issue examines cultural activity in regional, rural and remote Australasia.

Diverse contributors include:

Article authors

Asher Warren and JaneWoollard
Ailsa Brackley du Bois
Miles O’Neil,
Anna Loewendahl
Ariel Songs
Angela Campbell, Tanja Beer, Richard Chew and Kim Durban
Abbie Victoria Trott
Sarah Woodland Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

Interviews with
Chloe Flockhart and Paul McPhail
Elena Carapetis and Anthony Peluso
Jude Anderson and Joe Toohey
Ros Abercrombie, Paul McPhail, Anthony Peluso and Joe Toohey

Edwin Lee Mulligan and Dalisa Pigram Ross

Review essay Angela Conquet

Save the Theatre and Performing Arts Collection

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Rea Dennis
Status: Current
Date Posted: Thu, 11 Mar 2021
Dear Members,
Announced this week, the V&A Museum is planning major cuts in staffing that will heavily impact curators and librarians and directly impact the Theatre and Performing Arts Dept which is earmarked for closure as part of the cuts.

The V & A houses the national collection for the UK’s performing arts community. This year V & A Theatre and Performance partnered with AusStage to better understand how to move their collection online – this news disrupts these plans.

Please sign and share the petition:


Save the Theatre and Performing Arts Collection
https://www.change.org/p/tristram-hunt-director-v-a-performing-art-heritage


The loss of the knowledge and skills accrued through sustained care and practice by the custodians of cultural and artistic histories will be catastrophic for our field. Without their presence in the museum these stories will remain buried in archives until the artefacts become dead pieces of information.

Please also sign and share this petitions to protect people’s jobs.

Save the National Art Library
https://www.change.org/p/victoria-albert-museum-stop-the-cuts-and-access-restrictions-at-the-national-art-library-v-a?recruiter=1183901351&recruited_by_id=e8263fa0-7c2f-11eb-96a4-535df5a0b61c&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard


More information about the staff cuts can be found here:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/mar/07/guardians-of-uks-literary-jewels-at-risk-in-va-plan-to-cut-key-library-staff






 

CFP: New Stage Idioms: South African Drama, Theatre And Performance In The Twenty-First Century

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Thu, 8 Sep 2016

An international conference organized by the UniversitƩ Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
May 11-13, 2017

In the years that followed the end of Apartheid, South African drama, theatre and performance were characterized by a remarkable productivity, which entailed a process of constant aesthetic reinvention. In the post-apartheid period, South African playwrights and theatre makers sought to come to terms with the traumatic legacy of the pre-democratic past. Witness thereof are performance works documenting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. After 1994, the “protest” theatre template of the apartheid years morphed into increasingly more diverse forms of stage expressions, detectable in the works of Mike van Graan, Craig Higginson, Zakes Mda, Lara Foot, Paul Grootboom, Omphile Molusi, Fatima Dike, Nadia Davids, Aubrey Sekhabi, Magnet Theatre, Yael Farber, and Neil Coppen to name only a few. This conference will seek to document the various ways in which the “rainbow” nation has forged these new stage idioms, inviting contributions about different forms of performance modes. In order to foreground theatre, the keynote speakers will be active figures from the contemporary post-apartheid stage: Mike van Graan, Craig Higginson, Greg Homann, Nadia Davids, and Omphile Molusi. Here is a list of potential topics for consideration:
--Contemporary theatre makers working in English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and/or other African languages. How can Indigenous playwriting be defined?
-- New thematic and aesthetic trends in playwriting.
-- Impact of globalization on South African playwriting and stage practices.
-- Theatre making from marginalised voices (expressing gender, social or ethnic differences; LBGT voices on the stage; playwriting by women) and other issues of identity representation.
-- Contemporary township and community theatre.
-- Reinterpretations of European classics for the South African stage;
-- How are of issues of trauma, violence and cultural memory/amnesia enacted on the contemporary stage?
-- New forms of political theatre.
-- Alternative dramaturgies (installation art, site-specific performance, contemporary dance).
-- The politics of festivals; politics of funding.
A selection of conference presentations will be considered for publication. 

Prospective participants should send a short proposal and a brief vita to the convenor, Professor Marc Maufort, UniversitƩ Libre de Bruxelles, by 26 September 2016 (mmaufort@ulb.ac.be). Notifications of acceptance will be sent in late October 2016.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Mike van Graan, Craig Higginson, Greg Homann, Nadia Davids, and Omphile Molusi.
An evening of readings from these playwrights' and theatre practitioners’ works will be held during the conference.


Publication: Performance Paradigm 17 (2022)

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Emma Willis
Status: Current
Date Posted: Mon, 13 Mar 2023

 

 

Performance Paradigm 17 (2022)

Perform or Else? Revisiting Jon McKenzie's Work in the Post-Pandemic World

Performance Paradigm 17 is online now!

This latest issue revisits Jon McKenzie's Perform or Else, reflecting on the book's influence on performance studies and beyond over the last two decades, and thinking about what its insights mean in a post-pandemic era.

The issue is edited by Emma Willis, Chris Hay and Nien Yuan Cheng and features an interdisciplinary range of long and short articles, as well as interviews with McKenzie and artist pages. 

Contributors include: Tim Edkins, Ioana B. Jucan, Ali Na, Shuntaro Yoshida, Natsumi Fukasawa, Esther Neff, Nien Yuan Cheng, Chris Hay, Emma Willis, Jon McKenzie, Edward Scheer, Sara Baranzoni, Paolo Vignola,  Helen Dickinson, Fabian Muniesa, Anna Islind, Anthony Gritten, MiÅ”ko Å uvaković and Goran Sergej PristaÅ”.
 

Job Listing: Lecturer (Performing Arts), WAAPA

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Jonathan W. Marshall
Status: Current
Date Posted: Tue, 28 Sep 2021
WAAPA is hiring! We are currently looking for a Course Coordinator for our BPA Performance Making course.

It’s a rare opportunity: being in the BPA Performance Making course represents a chance to shape a course that allows new, innovative artists to develop their unique voice in the performing arts. The opportunity has come up due to current staff moving on to new roles in the organisation. With WAAPA moving into a new CBD building with new venues and studios in 2025, it’s a particularly exciting time to join our faculty at WAAPA.

Please feel free to share with your networks.

The link to the advert and the submission portal is now live at ECU employment opportunities: 220/2021 — Lecturer (Performing Arts). It is also visible on the following job sites: SeekLinkedIn; and UniJobs
 
The advert is set to close on Wednesday 27 October 2021 at 5.00pm (AWST)

CFP:Hybrid Practices: Methodologies, Histories, and Performance

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Wed, 12 Sep 2018
Annual Conference hosted by the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta

13, 14, 15 March 2019

Keynote Speakers
Anne Bogart (Co-founder and Artistic Director – SITI Company)
Nicola Dibben (Department of Music, University of Sheffield)
Royona Mitra (Dance and Theatre, Brunel University London)

Convenors
Frank Camilleri (University of Malta)
Paul Allain (University of Kent)

The sixth Annual Conference of the School of Performing Arts (University of Malta) considers hybridity in relation to performance, in particular the making, reception, and study of performance as practices emergent from heterogeneous sources. 

In its most fundamental sense, hybridity refers to mixture and fusion, of species, races, plants, or cultures. The contemporary application of the term can be traced across various disciplines, from biology and chemistry, to linguistics, politics, racial theory, and popular culture. Developed from its roots as a biological term, hybridity is invoked in discourses about identity, multiculturalism, and globalisation. 

The conference explores hybridity in an expanded sense that marks the coming together of performer and environment, materials and practitioners (including directors, designers, and technicians), performance and reception, event and analysis. Hybridity, therefore, as encounter, fusion, or grafting that informs and forms performance: as compositional and production strategy, as ensemble and assembly, as inter- and intradisciplinary endeavour, as inter- and intracultural phenomenon. 

We call for presentations that investigate the ways in which performance and its study is bound up with questions of environment, encounter, and evolution that the concept of hybridity entails. We welcome case studies and conceptualisations that address these issues, whether or not they come from the performing arts. We are particularly interested in hybridity as it cuts across various aspects of performance, including the methodologies and processes that go into its production as well as the historical (analytical and archival) accounts of performance. 

Presentation topics might include, but are in no way limited to, issues and themes of hybridity in relation to practice, methodology, technology, spaces/sites, and fluid identities. For example:

•    the hybridisation of physical and digital elements in performance (intermediality, multimedia, mixed media, MOOCs, use of mobile apps) 
•    inter/multicultural performance 
•    analytical frameworks like postcolonialism, postphenomenology, sociomaterialism, and interdisciplinarity in performance
•    historiography and ethnography as hybrid and evolving practices that involve diverse methodologies and technologies from various sources
•    training processes and compositional strategies like devising, choreography, and ensemble work
•    practice as research case studies and applied performance as hybrid methodologies and practices
•    issues related to genre, including performance art, ‘total theatre’, opera, and other forms like music theatre, mime, and dance that can be conceived in hybrid terms

Abstracts of a maximum of 300 words should be submitted in Word doc by 17 December 2018 to the conference convenors, Prof. Frank Camilleri (University of Malta) and Prof. Paul Allain (University of Kent), on this address: p21.spa@um.edu.mt. Acceptance will be confirmed in early January 2019. If an official invitation is required earlier for research funding purposes, please contact the convenors and ensure that you submit your abstract as early as possible. Abstracts should also include a brief bionote and any technical equipment you might need. Primarily, the conference will take the form of conventional 15-/20-minute presentations, but presenters wishing to suggest other forms are also encouraged to contact the conference convenors.

The conference is organised under the auspices of Performance 21: Twenty-First Century Studies in Performance – one of the research groupings within the School of Performing Arts. P21 is committed to studying the twenty-first century through performance, to seeking new means and new meanings in the dynamic collisions of twenty-first-century practices, technologies, and theories, with the emerging knowledge benefiting practitioners and scholars across its transdisciplinary boundaries.

The conference is supported by the European Theatre Research Network (ETRN) of the School of Arts at the University of Kent (UK).

New Publication from Gillian Arrighi and Jim Davis: Cambridge Companion to the Circus

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Rea Dennis
Status: Current
Date Posted: Fri, 23 Jul 2021

New Publication, Out now

The Cambridge Companion to the Circus, edited by Gillian Arrighi and Jim Davis

A terrific volume with 16 chapters over 2 parts. Gillian has shared the Cambridge 20% discount flyer, see attached.

From the back cover:

The Cambridge Companion to the Circus provides a complete guide for students, scholars, teachers, researchers, and practitioners who are seeking perspectives on the foundations and evolution of the modern circus, the contemporary extent of circus studies, and the specialised literature available to support further enquiries. The volume brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars working across the multi-disciplinary domain of circus studies to present a clear overview of the specialised histories, aesthetics and distinctive performances of the modern circus. In sixteen commissioned essays, it covers the origins in commercial equestrian performance during the late-eighteenth century to contemporary inflections of circus arts in major international festivals, educational environments, and social justice settings.


Table of Contents


                                         
Timeline            timeline of the circus, 1537-2018 (16 pages)                                                                                                            

Introduction       Gillian Arrighi and Jim Davis
The Circus: reflecting and mediating the world                                                        

Part One: Trans-national Geographies of the Modern Circus


1          Matthew Wittmann                                 
The Origins and Growth of the Modern Circus                                                         

2          Sakina Hughes   
Reconstruction, Railroads, and Race: The American Circus in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era                                                                                                

3          Gillian Arrighi               
Circus, Colonialism and Empire: the circus in Australasia and Asia                             

4          Julieta Infantino             
The Criollo Circus (Circus Theatre) in Argentina: the emergence of a unique circus
form in connection with the consolidation of the Argentine nation state            
           
5          HanuÅ” Jordan and Veronika Å tefanovĆ”                   
The Past and Present of Czech Circus                                                                     

6  
Rosemary Farrell

Catching On: Chinese Acrobatics from China to the West in the Twenty-First Century                                                                                                            

Part Two: Circus Acts and Aesthetics


7          Kim Baston                   
The Equestrian Circus                                                                                         

8          Peta Tait                       
Animals, Circus and War Re-enactment: Military Action to Colonial Wars                   

9          Louise Peacock              
Circus Clowns                                                                                                   

10         Kate Holmes      
Aerial Performance: Aerial Aesthetics                                                                    

Part Three: Circus: A Constantly Evolving Form

11         Catherine M. Young        
Circus and Somatic Spectacularity on Stage in the Variety Era                        

12         Agathe Dumont              
Becoming an Art Form: from ‘Nouveau Cirque’ to contemporary circus in Europe         

13         Alisan Funk                   
Risky Play and the Global Rise in Youth Circus                                                       

14         Jennifer Beth Spiegel                  
Social Circus: The rise of an ‘inclusive’ movement for collective creativity                   

Part Four, Circus Studies Scholarship

15         Charles R. Batson and Karen Fricker                     
Methodologies in circus scholarship                                                                       

16         Anna-Sophie JĆ¼rgens                  
Through the Looking Glass: multi-disciplinary perspectives in Circus              

Works Cited                                                                                                                              

Index                                                                                                                                       



 

CFP International Interdisciplinary conference: INDELIBLE (Eng) / INDELEBILE (It)

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Fri, 22 Feb 2019
INDELIBLE (Eng) / INDELEBILE (It) –
Representation in the arts of (in)visible violence against women and their resistance
23-25 October 2019 – Adelaide (South Australia)
 
Visual arts, performing arts and literature are instrumental in exposing the complexity of the numerous forms that violence against women and girls can take in the contemporary world, as well as exploring new and old forms of resistance. 

Our interdisciplinary conference aims to contribute to the ‘glocal’ conversation on the topic of gendered violence and at the same time raise awareness of the global extent of the problem, by analysing ways in which both such violence and resistance to it are represented in the arts. While a key strand of the conference will concern the arts in contemporary Italy, its scope will be broad, encouraging comparison with other societies across space and time.

In line with this aim, we welcome papers engaging with any of the following (and associated) topics, in relation to poetry, literature, theatre, opera, music, cinema or other visual arts:
 
Family violence
Places and sites of violence
War, conflict and violence
Migration, diaspora and violence
Resistance vs politics
Language and images of violence and resistance
Myth in representations of violence
Historical developments and representations viewed through a contemporary lens
Activism and international campaigns (including #MeToo / #wetoogether / #TimesUp / Se non ora quando / Non una di meno / La violenza non ĆØ amore / Panchine rosse)
 
Key-note speaker: Dacia Maraini (writer, dramaturg, screenwriter)
 
Please send a 250-300 word abstract (in Italian or English) and a short bio to Luciana d’Arcangeli, luciana.darcangeli@flinders.edu.au, in an email titled “ACIS 2019 INDELIBLE-INDELEBILE”, by 15 March 2019. A selection of papers will be published in a special issue of a highly ranked journal or dedicated volume.

This conference is supported by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) and is part of the ACIS Visual and Performing Arts Research Group project
INDELIBLE (Eng) / INDELEBILE (It)
THE REPRESENTATION OF (IN)VISIBLE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
AND THEIR RESISTANCE
 
https://acis.org.au/visual-and-performance-studies/
 

Masterclass with David Diamond: Theatre for Living Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 June 2017 9.00am - 5.00pm Theatre Lab, Massey University, Auckland campus

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Thu, 6 Apr 2017
Theatre for Living has evolved from Brazilian Director Augusto Boal's ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’. It is a way of communicating and working with people so that the 'living community' can tell its stories. Theatre for Living techniques have been applied to mainstream theatre, interdisciplinary work, personal, community and team development, anti-racism and violence prevention, environmental action, education and counselling. Using a symbolic language, participants develop ‘emotional intelligence’, move towards open communication and begin to create their desired realities in an active and entertaining way.

This workshop is specifically designed for theatre-makers and community workers. The two-day workshop will explore Image Theatre and the evolution of Rainbow of Desire and their applicability in reconciliation issues and as tools to foster dialogue and interaction between disparate groups of people.
 
This training will be invaluable for anyone who seeks skills and techniques to use theatrical language to explore community dialogue.
Cost: $200 for two days
Register Online via the Massey University Webpage:
http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/learning/departments/school-english-media-studies/newsand-
events/masterclass-with-david-diamond-theatre-for-living.cfm


For More Information Please Contact:
Dr. Rand T. Hazou - Senior Lecturer in Theatre
School of English and Media Studies | Massey University
T: +64 9 414 0800 | Ext. 43342 | E: r.t.hazou@massey.ac.nz

 

Job Opportunity: Lecturer in Theatre Studies, U of Melbourne

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Sarah Balkin
Status: Current
Date Posted: Fri, 17 Mar 2023


Job Opportunity: Lecturer in Theatre Studies, University of Melbourne


Job listing: https://jobs.unimelb.edu.au/caw/en/job/912123/lecturer-in-theatre-studies.
Closing date: 11 April 2023.

The University of Melbourne is seeking an experienced lecturer, specialising in popular and/or contemporary theatre and performance. Applicants with research specialisations in areas that complement existing staff expertise through a focus on Indigenous, culturally diverse or socially engaged performance are particularly encouraged to apply. This is a full-time, ongoing level B (lecturer) position in theatre studies based the University of Melbourne, Parkville. 

Applications can be submitted through the Univeristy of Melbourne Careers portal here. Applications close at 11.55pm (AEST) on 11 April 2023. Enquiries about the role can be directed to Associate Professor David McInnis (mcinnisd@unimelb.edu.au). 
 

Save the Date: 2023 ADSA Conference

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Chris Hay
Status: Current
Date Posted: Wed, 29 Mar 2023


2023 Annual Conference

SAVE THE DATE: 27 NOVEMBER — 1 DECEMBER


The 2023 Conference theme, Archives, Artists & Absences, invites ADSA members to reflect on what is remembered and what is forgotten in our discipline, in the work that we study, and in the work that we make. We will also take this opportunity to celebrate AusStage's 21st birthday, as we chart together new courses for the database.

The 2023 conference will be held in-person on Kaurna land in Adelaide, and the Call for Papers will be issued in April 2023. Stay tuned for more information! 
 

ADSA 2021 Conference Update

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Chris Hay
Status: Current
Date Posted: Thu, 23 Sep 2021
Dear members, 
  
ADSA Conference 2021
Performers, Makers, Methdologies – Crafting conditions for decentring scholarship and pedagogy
30 November to 3 December, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria

As you know, we are based in regional Victoria so have been monitoring the current national and local health orders regarding pandemic management. Currently across Australia there are lockdowns in the Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra metropolitan areas, as well as lockdowns in various regional centres across these states. There is also an ongoing lockdown in Auckland. Mostly, Australian states in which there is no Covid detected have their borders closed to anyone from other states, and also have quite stringent policies in regard to residents returning from other states.

While there is an Australian national program of opening when 80% of the population have their first vaccine dose, this is not tested and is likely to allow freedom of movement in local areas, or intrastate, but does not give us any optimism that interstate travel will be simple. When taking the precarious nature of these projections into account, we have made the call to move the 2021 ADSA conference fully online.

We have now met with our venue partner and can move ahead with the changed delivery mode. We are currently updating the website and finalising the program to accommodate this adjustment. We are disappointed as we had retained our determination to host you here at Deakin's Waterfront campus in Geelong. However, we know you will understand and will join us online in December.

Thank you for your continued support and understanding.
Rea, Kate, Miles, and Ashlee.
2021 ADSA Conference Committee

AusAct 2020 Dec 8 - Dec 9 - Call for Proposals

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Wed, 9 Sep 2020
The performing arts sector has been significantly hit by the impact of COVID-19. In 2020, we have seen theatres close, productions cancelled and many arts practitioners losing jobs. In addition to this, acting teachers in institutions and the private sector moved swiftly to online learning; some even transitioning to rehearsing and performing productions online. Online coaching is not a new phenomenon, as teachers have been coaching actors using video conferencing tools for most part of the decade, however, this pandemic has highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of learning in this way. Actors, while in isolation, need to maintain their skills and keep active. They are also looking at different ways in which they can keep connected with other performers. This crisis has reawakened actor training, inspiring communities and theatre companies to work on the sustained wellbeing of all actors who wish to perform and train. These teachers and artists have rapidly adapted their arts practice with new ways of working.

Overall, questions may stem from, but not limited to, the following points concerning new developments in Australian performance pedagogies:

• How are we teaching acting to the current digital generation?
• What methods have actors been working on during this time of isolation to maintain their skills?
• What new methods and practices have been developed by teaching acting online?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of teaching acting online?
• What adjustments have acting teachers made adjusting in this new environment?
• How have rehearsals and performances adjusted in this new environment?
• Are there are gaps recognised in training and process, and what would be helpful to fill those gaps?
• What are some new developments in Australian actor training that have surfaced this year in response to the ever-changing world?
• How are we adapting actor training due to financial pressures facing the tertiary sector?
• What does the post COVID-19 landscape look like for actor training?

ABSTRACT AND INFORMATION SUBMISSION
Participants who are interested in presenting a paper and/or conducting a workshop must submit an abstract up to 250 words to Dr Robert Lewis: robelewis@csu.edu.au. Applicants who are interested in submitting an abstract for a workshop must clearly state the level of participation, e.g., beginners, intermediate or advanced, the aims and objectives of the workshop, influences/inspiration behind the work, and any other requirements needed. Applicants who are interested in staging a performance must indicate cast size, length of performance and any other helpful information. Technical requirements must be kept to a minimum. Abstract for papers, panel presentations and workshops due Friday October 2.

PUBLICATION
Presenters have the option to submit their papers to be considered for the peer reviewed International Journal of Practice Based Humanities (IJPBH). Presenters will be invited to submit an article version of their conference paper for inclusion early 2021. This edition of the IJPBH aims to make a contribution to the field offering new insights into Australian acting pedagogies in the past and in the present. It will consist of a selected number of essays from submissions drawing on papers presented at AusAct 2020 Conference. This volume will aim to engage with national and international debates on the nature and practices of Australian actor training as research as a scholarly methodology and/or as pedagogical practice. An expression of interest form will be available through the conference website: www.ausact.com.au. Every contributor must also fill out a ‘Publication Expression of Interest’ form in order to indicate whether or not they would like to: have their paper published in the special edition of IJPBH without being double blind peer reviewed; have their paper double blind peer reviewed to be considered for publication in the special edition of IJPBH; submit creative works and or other projects of equivalent scope; only attend the conference and present without any publication outcome. Timelines, important dates and other information relating to the publication are listed in the ‘Publication Expression of Interest’ form at: www.ausact.com.au

SCHEDULE 
  • Call for proposals: Monday September 7
  • Friday October 2: Abstracts for papers due
  • Friday October 16: Notification of acceptance
  • Early Bird registrations close: Friday November 6
  • Full Registration: Saturday November 7
  • Registration close: Thursday December 1
  • Conference: Tuesday Dec 8 (half day) and Wednesday Dec 9 (half day)

REGISTRATION
Early Bird: $55
Full: $90
Student/Concession: $20
Click here to register

The conference will be held via Zoom, and all details regarding schedules, zoom link and structure will be forthcoming. 

 

Public Symposium (Melbourne): Climate Collaborations: Art, Science and Future Scenarios

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Peta Tait
Status: Current
Date Posted: Tue, 13 Sep 2022

Climate Collaborations: Art, Science and Future Scenarios
A public symposium to be held at the University of Melbourne and Keynote address by special guest Professor Peter Eckersall, City University of New York.

Tuesday 27 September 2022 
9:00 – 5:00
Discursive Space (553), Arts West - North Wing (148A)


Climate Collaborations interrogates urgent questions for our time: what causes eco-anxiety and fear? What offers hope and enchantment? And what can art do in a climate emergency? Bringing together artists, activists, scientists, academics and curators, the symposium explores the relations between knowledge, aesthetics and culture in a climate emergency and beyond.

The symposium is sponsored by the Australian Research Council, the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne, and the Macgeorge Visiting Speaker Award.
Part of the The FUTURE SCENARIOS – PERFORMANCE, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY series at the University of Melbourne


Please note: This is a mask-friendly event. As it is held indoors, the University of Melbourne’s current advice strongly recommends mask use in indoor settings. See the University’s current COVID Safe guidelines here: https://www.unimelb.edu.au/coronavirus



 

CFP: AusAct 2019: BEING RELEVANT

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Wed, 17 Apr 2019
Charles Sturt University and Queensland University of Technology Present

AusAct 2019: BEING RELEVANT

THE AUSTRALIAN ACTOR TRAINING CONFERENCE

CONFERENCE INFORMATION
Queensland University of Technology are hosting the 2019 AusAct: Australian Actor Training Conference on Friday August 9 to Sunday August 11. This three-day conference, training and performance event is a presentation of actor training scholarship by researchers, practitioners and pedagogues working with original performer training methods developed within the Australian context. It is an event focusing on Australian actor training pedagogies and research and its relationship to place, space, land, environment, culture and technologies. The conference will provide an avenue for the sharing of original materials and knowledge in dialogue within the Australian performer training context. The conference aims to celebrate, interrogate and showcase actor training methods that have been created and developed in Australia. We invite individual papers (20 minutes duration), workshop sessions (up to 90 minutes duration) and panel presentations (60 minute duration).

The conference will have three main parts: ConferenceTraining and Performance.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
In response to this theme, the 2019 AusAct conference calls for papers that consider how actor training can maintain its relevance in Australia, as well as drawing upon relevant methods, approaches and aesthetics that reflect contemporary and future Australian actors. Not only do we need relevant content material to reflect the ever-changing social climate, we need relevant artists who create works through which they can better connect to the world around them.

What do we gain for moving beyond the conventional methods and focusing on more relevant forms of training, and what is to gain or lose in ‘being relevant’?

Questions may stem from, but not limited to, the following points concerning being relevant in light of Australian performance pedagogies:
  • Relevance of Australian actor training
  • The relevance of training for performance
  • Relevance of international actor training methods in Australian performance practice
  • The development of relevant performance training in Australia
  • The relevance of place, space and environment in Australian actor training
  • The relevance of technology in performance training
  • The relevance of health and wellbeing in actor training
TRAINING
Professionals will be invited to propose workshops based on their research and practice. The material must be original and align with the conference themes.
 
PERFORMANCE
Public performances by performance practitioners who identify as having a unique place in Australian performing arts industry through their development of new, original work, or original processes.

Performance practitioners, directors, teachers, academics, postgraduate students and performers are invited to attend to discuss and demonstrate their original pedagogies and methodologies that have been developed in Australia that have been inspired by the environment, land, the Australian performing arts industry, the Australian values and culture. This is also an opportunity to propose futures for Australian performer training methods.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
Participants who are interested in presenting a paper, conducting a workshop or staging a performance must submit an abstract up to 250 words to both Robert Lewis: robelewis@csu.edu.au and Andrea Moor: al.moor@qut.edu.au Applicants who are interested in submitting an abstract for a workshop must clearly state the level of participation, e.g., beginners, intermediate or advanced, the aims and objectives of the workshop, influences/inspiration behind the work, and any other requirements needed. Applicants who are interested in staging a performance must indicate cast size, length of performance and any other helpful information. Technical requirements must be kept to a minimum. Abstract for papers, panel presentations and workshops due Friday April 5.

PUBLICATION
Presenters have the option to submit their papers to be considered for the peer reviewed Fusion Journal. Presenters will be invited to submit an article version of their conference paper for inclusion late 2019. This edition of the Fusion Journal aims to make a contribution to the field offering new insights into Australian acting pedagogies in the past and in the present. It will consist of a selected number of essays from submissions drawing on papers presented at AusAct 2019: BEING RELEVANT. This volume will aim to engage with national and international debates on the nature and practices of Australian actor training as research as a scholarly methodology and/or as pedagogical practice. An expression of interest form will be available through the conference website: www.ausact.com.au. Every contributor must also fill out a ‘Publication Expression of Interest’ form in order to indicate whether or not they would like to: have their paper published in the special edition of Fusion Journal without being double blind peer reviewed; have their paper double blind peer reviewed to be considered for publication in the special edition of Fusion Journal; submit creative works and or other projects of equivalent scope; only attend the conference and present without any publication outcome. Timelines, important dates and other information relating to the publication are listed in the ‘Publication Expression of Interest’ form at: www.ausact.com.au

SCHEDULE 
Call for proposals: Friday April 5
Monday May 13: Abstracts for papers, performances and workshops due
Monday May 27: Notification of acceptance
Early Bird Registrations Close: Sunday July 14
Full Registration: Monday July 15
Registrations close: Thursday August 1
Conference: August 9 – 11

September 6: Final papers submitted for publication

REGISTRATION
Early Bird: $340
Full: $420
Student/Concession: $280
Registrations:
ausact.shop.csu.edu.au



For further information, please contact:

Dr Robert Lewis (Charles Sturt University)
robelewis@csu.edu.au

Dr Andrea Moor (Queensland University of Technology)
al.moor@qut.edu.au
 

Call for Papers EXTENDED: Performance Paradigm 18 (2023)

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Chris Hay
Status: Current
Date Posted: Mon, 21 Feb 2022

The Art of Subsidy / The Subsidy of Art
Performance Paradigm 18 (2023) — Call for Papers

CALL EXTENDED TO 3 JUNE 2022
 

Throughout the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, artists around the world have imagined new, better futures for subsidy: in America, Jeremy O. Harris invoked the Federal Theatre Project; the third edition of the UNESCO report Reshaping Policies for Creativity in 2022 recommended minimum wages and labour protections; and in Aotearoa New Zealand, artist Nisha Madhan wondered “what the long-term game plan is. Is it just to survive a few weeks? Or to take a moment to think about what might be possible that hasn’t already happened? Is this the moment, when physical access to live performance is cut off to the privileged, that we finally figure out how to open the arts up to everyone?”. As parts of the world begin to adjust to Covid-normal, how might we keep hold of this spirit of reimagination and possibility? This issue seeks to examine both the impact of Covid 19 on funding for the arts and what this ‘break’ in status quo reveals about the nature of the relationship between artists and not just governments but also other funding mechanisms.

Our starting point here follows Julian Meyrick, who declares “it is the fact of funding that demands attention” (139). Certainly, economic subsidy is one of the core points of imbrication between artists and the state. As Jen Harvie points out, in the United Kingdom and current and former Commonwealth nations, this link historically “marks an economic relationship, but it also articulates state and social attitudes to the importance of the arts, to social responsibility for the arts, to social relations and to society itself” (150). In this issue, we hope to curate a documentation of subsidy’s effects and operations, the specific challenges that come from funding live performance, and subsidy’s hermeneutic relationship with arts policy and cultural capital, recognising

what is missing is a study not of institutional change . . . or of culture’s social and economic entanglements (which are endless, culture being simultaneously everywhere and infused into particular forms), but an analysis of the bureaucratic regulation of artistic practice: of the logic of culture as it applies in a time of democratic provision. (Meyrick, 142)

We ask how value and benefit are defined in this context, and what government responses to crisis in the performing arts sector tells us about this. While artists have always been attuned to the shifting sands of government arts funding – even small changes can have a seismic impact on career progression and work development –the wholesale suspension of live performance due to public health orders magnified these industrial concerns to existential threats. In the Anglosphere, the motley collection of ad hoc initiatives to support arts companies and arts workers throughout the Covid-crisis has to some extent exposed the priorities of the neoliberal state, within which the creative industries remain radically under-funded. Indeed, as Miriam Haughton wrote of the Irish context, “Covid-19 is not only a sectoral emergency, it’s the latest sectoral emergency” (2021, 51). This is a particularly apposite moment to consider both government subsidy and broader funding mechanisms; as Haughton remarks, “Covid-19 has brought the economic livelihood of the state and the arts sector to the cliff edge at the same time, forcing a conversation regarding survival and sustainability” (50).

In this issue of Performance Paradigm, then, we seek to capitalise on this moment to reflect on the art of subsidy, and on the subsidy of art. We invite contributions that expand the frame of reference beyond the Anglosphere to other national models of live performance subsidy. Across academic pieces, artist responses, interviews, and other performance documentation, we envisage potential contributions might address:

  • Historiographies of subsidy across performance forms and national traditions, particularly attending to subsidy in its historical context and between government-led and patronage-led models;
  • The resistant potential of private subsidy in forms old (sponsorship, patronage) and new (crowd funding);
  • Historical accounts of particular funding agencies or subsidy schemes that trace and reveal the impact of the subsidy in the art that they funded;
  • Subsidy of First Nations and Indigenous performance around the world as a policy priority, and the (inter)national priorities these programs reveal;
  • The role of subsidised performance in legitimising the neoliberal state, including queer strategies for subversion and re-visioning of subsidy;
  • Subsidy as a marker of national distinction and cultural capital;
  • The role of subsidy in the lived experience of arts practitioners, including artists’ wellbeing and proposals such as the living wage for artists;
  • Polemical re-imaginings of subsidy’s form and function;
  • Subsidy’s hermeneutic relationship with arts policy across time and different models of arms-length and in-house government funding;
  • Subsidy across and beyond the Anglosphere, including comparative studies across different national and continental traditions; and
  • The dramaturgy of subsidy.
Please send proposals of approximately 300 words to Chris Hay (chris.hay@uq.edu.au) by 3 June 2022. If successful, full articles will be due on 1 December 2022 for publication in Performance Paradigm 18, August 2023.

Issue Editors
Chris Hay, University of Queensland
Lawrence Ashford, University of Sydney
Izabella Nantsou, University of Sydney

References
Harris, Jeremy O. “American theatre may not survive the coronavirus. We need help now.” The Guardian, 25 Jan. 2021.
Harvie, Jen. “Public/Private Capital: Arts Funding Cuts and Mixed Economies.” Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 150-91.
Haughton, Miriam. “As much graft as there is craft: Refusal, Value and the Affective Economy of the Irish Arts Sector.” Performance Paradigm 16, 2021, pp. 40-58.
Madhan, Nisha. “Live (Why I’m Not in a Hurry).” Words By Nisha Madhan, 1 Apr. 2020.
Meyrick, Julian. “The Logic of Culture: The Fate of Alternative Theatre in the Post-Whitlam Period.” Australasian Drama Studies, vol. 64, 2014, pp. 133-54.
UNESCO. Re-shaping Policies for Creativity: Addressing Culture as a Public Good. Third Edition, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 2022.

Symposium: Power and Performance: Revaluing Theatre in the 21st Century Murdoch University, April 23-24, 2019

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Glen McGillivray
Status: Current
Date Posted: Mon, 4 Mar 2019
We are delighted to invite you to attend the Power and Performance in the 21st Century Symposium to be held at Murdoch University on 23 and 24 April 2019.  Please find attached a detailed program to explain the framing, the key provocations and the key ideas to be addressed.  This is the final public event for the ARC Discovery on this topic.  The event is supported by the ARC and Murdoch University and the hosts are Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall.  Please do circulate this invitation widely to colleagues, students and friends in the arts and beyond, and do come along if you can.
 
We are really pleased to have gathered together a stellar line up of participants including a Keynote by Professor Janelle Reinelt entitled:
 
The Power of Performance: Retrieval, Recuperation, Transformation.
 
And presentations by: Asher Warren, Alexa Taylor, Eddie Paterson, Lara Stevens, Carissa Lee Godwin, Josephine Wilson, Paul Rae, Glenn D’Cruz, Janelle Reinelt, Peter Eckersall, ReneĆ© Newman, Helena Grehan (Caroline Wake and Ed Scheer via Skype).
 
Please do join us to help celebrate the end of this major research project by contributing to and continuing the discussion.

All those interested are welcome to attend. To register please email:
arts@murdoch.edu.au with the Symposium title in the subject line.


 

Job Opportunity: Positions in Acting, WAAPA

Type of post: Association news item
Sub-type: No sub-type
Posted By: Jonathan W. Marshall
Status: Current
Date Posted: Fri, 22 Sep 2023

 

Job Opportunity: Positions in Acting, WAAPA


Details and application link: https://www.ecu.edu.au/employment-opportunities/overview
Applications close: 13 october 2023, 11.30pm (AWST). 

The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) is seeking skilled and experienced acting teachers to join the creative and forward-looking BA Acting team as we prepare to move into Edith Cowan University's new state of the art City Campus in the heart of Perth.

Following recent staff retirement the following roles are open: Applicants requiring further information may contact Dr Frances Barbe (Associate Dean - Performance) on +61 8 9370 6161 or f.barbe@ecu.edu.au.