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).