The Open Theatre: An Introduction to Theatre

Open Educational Resource (OER)

You are invited to submit a proposal for possible inclusion in a brand new initiative to create a fully peer-reviewed Open Educational Resource for Introduction to Theatre classes, under the working title The Open Theatre. The Open Theatre intends to be a crowd sourced, curated set of course materials developed by experts in the field, covering the major historical, practical, and theoretical topics relevant to an Introduction to Theatre class. The Open Theatre seeks to challenge traditional methods of creating and disseminating such material, moving beyond pre-defined textbook pathways towards an open-ended, user and/or instructor defined pathway through the material of an Introduction to Theatre course.

Open Educational Resources are any digital educational materials that are freely available for students, instructors, and self-learners. They operate under Creative Commons licenses that permit no-cost access, use, repurposing, adaptation, redistribution, and revision. In addition to texts, this may include images, video, audio, Powerpoints, lesson plans, quizzes and tests, essay topics, and other suggested activities. OERs may be accessed entirely online, or may be printed off by students at College and University bookstores, or at commercial print shops. OERs help keep costs low for students and promote the wide dissemination of knowledge.

The Open Theatre seeks contributions that offer insight into what a truly “open” set of theatre resources means for instructors and students alike: how might a theme of openness create new space for students to engage meaningfully with the practice, history, and/or theory of theatre in various topics? What does free and open (noncommercial, freely adaptable, inherently democratic and non-discriminatory) access mean to the practice, history, and/or theory of theatre? How can we “open up” the study of theatre? The Open Theatre seeks submissions written in an engaging, straight-forward style befitting an introductory level course.

The Open Theatre seeks contributions including, but not limited to, the following areas, broadly conceived:

I. The Creators of Theatre

II. The Consumers of Theatre

III. The Materials of Theatre

IV. The History of Theatre

The Open Theatre will be licensed under the Creative Commons-Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. More information may be found here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

The Open Theatre invites proposals from faculty members, practicing artists, independent scholars, and graduate students. Proposals should be 500 - 750 words. Questions about the project, or proposals on any or several of the above areas, may be sent to Dr. Danny Devlin (Bismarck State College) and Dr. Scott Knowles (Southern Utah University) at opentheatreOER@gmail.com.

Proposals must be submitted by March 15th, 2018. 

are invited from potential contributors

to an edited volume entitled

War and Theatrical Innovation

The military strategist and theoretician von Clausewitz seems to have coined the term “theatre of war” and in so doing created a nexus that suggests some interesting commonalities: war as theatrical spectacle that takes place in designated areas of engagement, and when he defines the essential characteristic of war as a confluence of violent emotion, chance and rational calculation, he might well have been describing the essential nature of a theatrical performance.

This volume proposes to explore the connexion further with a particular focus on the impact of war on theatrical practices and indeed to suggest that some of these practices may have penetrated the conduct of war itself. Theatre has responded to the climacteric periods of war as they affected both states and individuals—particularly as social structures and personal relationships are destabilized and inevitably changed as the result of geopolitical conflicts. In such circumstances, we would therefore expect that the organization of theatre itself might be changed, that new forms of communication might find their ways onto a stage forced to accommodate and reflect the tensions which conflict has made evident, and that performers might themselves be required to assume new identities resulting possibly in alterations to the nature of their labour or compelling them “to dance to a different tune.”

 This of course forms an aspect of the search for identity, a preoccupation that has intensified since the 19^th century as modernist pressures and technological advances have contributed to violent oscillations between established certainties and new, often perilous explorations on the part of individuals and nation-states. Yet versions of this violence may well have characterised tendencies and tensions evident in many other geopolitical conflicts prior to the 19^th century and well into the 21^st as both nation-states and individuals have been forced into taking specific roles in conflicts driven by empire building or post-colonial imperatives.

The proposal is intended to cast a wide net both geographically and temporally and to have the contributions reflect this spread through their cultural diversity and inclusiveness. Contributions from performing arts scholars, archivists, military and cultural historians and social psychologists would be welcome.

Though in no way intended to be prescriptive, consideration might be given to such topic areas as:

·       Representations of war: new forms of communication and display

·       Wartime and the performance of propaganda

·       The effects of war on the nature of entertainment itself

·       The demands of war upon cultural institutions like the theatre

·       The appropriation of old theatre forms to foster new directions

·       The theatricalization of war itself: illusionism, make believe and misdirection

·       The interplay of new technologies

·       The position and status of performers in times of war

·       Case studies of individual performers caught up in wartime conflict and its effect upon them and their craft

·       Masks and faces: new roles and role-playing required in times of war

·       A new entertainment industry: its response to the needs of combatants during the two World Wars and continuing to this day through, for example, the British Combined Services Organization and the American United Service Organizations

In the first instance, expressions of interest should be forwarded to: Victor.Emeljanow@newcastle.edu.au

Victor Emeljanow is Emeritus Professor, School of Creative Arts, University of Newcastle, Australia. He is an experienced volume editor and is currently the general editor of the online journal Popular Entertainment Studies. He has two chapters relating to prisoners-of-war in World War 1 and 2 appearing in volumes to be published by Palgrave in early 2015.

Theatre Arts Journal: Studies in Scenography and Performance (TAJ), published by Tel-Aviv University and the Gordon Craig Society for Theatre Research, is a semi-annual scholarly, peer-reviewed, electronic and open-access journal, devoted to exploring current issues in scenography in performing arts (www.taj.tau.ac.il ) . The journal encourages original scholarly research that examines the visual and audial aspects of performance — performing space, props, costume, lighting and sound design, as well as theatre architecture, masks, puppets, and movement as a sensorial element — and their contribution to the construction of meaning in theatre, dance, multimedia performance, object theatre, contemporary live art, and visual theatre.

Theatre Arts Journal invites submissions on the following topics:

-  Gordon Craig’s legacy: a reassessment

-  representation in scenography, within the larger political, social, and aesthetic context, in the past as in the present

- the connections between the various visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, photography, film, computing design, etc.) and the stage in the past and in the present, as well as the formal, conceptual, and epistemological contributions and limitations that such connections entail

-  the challenges that stage design has to meet in a fast-moving technological environment that is constantly shaping and reshaping audience perception

- the interaction between the director and the designer and its effects on the performing space, performance, and audience reception

Articles (in English) should be accompanied by an abstract of 150-200 words and a brief curriculum vitae. Manuscripts should be double-spaced and no longer than 12000 words (including endnotes). They should follow the Chicago Manual of Style (15^th Edition) and use Microsoft Word 2003 (or later) format for PC. Illustrations in jpg format and short video clips (FLV format, max. 10 minutes) may be included, provided that the author has secured copyright permission. See also Submission Guidelines on the journal website at www.taj.tau.ac.il .

The journal will not consider submissions that have already been published in any other form or language.

Submissions for the Spring 2015 issue should be sent by March 31, 2015 to the Editor, Irene Eynat-Confino, by e-mail attachments for PC (eynconf@post.tau.ac.il).

Dr. Irene Eynat-Confino, Editor

Theatre Arts Journal: Studies in Scenography and Performance

e-mail:  eynconf@post.tau.ac.il

“Performing the Archives” Conference

National University of Ireland, Galway

22 – 24 July 2015

Co-sponsored by the National University of Ireland, Galway and  American Society for Theatre Research 

Speakers:

Professor Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern University)

Doug L. Reside (New York Public Library)

Professor Catherine Cole (University of California, Berkeley)

Dr. Hugh Denard (Trinity College, Dublin)

Professor Patrick Lonergan (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Professor Lionel Pilkington (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Dr. Emilie Pine (University College, Dublin)

In 2013, the Abbey Theatre and NUI Galway launched the digitization of the Abbey Theatre archive, the largest theatre archive digitization project ever attempted. When this project is completed, more than 1.5 million items including scripts, costume designs, prompt books and performances will be available to study for generations of scholars to come.

Building on this momentum, “Performing the Archives” will gather together scholars, artists and archivists engaged in working with archival materials on research and performance projects to explore the uses and possibilities of the archive today from theoretical and methodological perspectives. We will debate:

·      What is the status of archival research methodologies in published research and graduate training today?

·      What are the possibilities of collaboration between researchers and practitioners working together to remount work based on the archives or research on new material? What working models exist and what have yet to be imagined?

·      How has the digital humanities begun to reshape the possibilities of archival engagement?

·      How can we support the labour of not only archival research methodologies but the maintenance of the archives themselves? How does the holding location of archives (university vs. community archive) affect the circulation of these resources?  How can partnerships be expanded or reimagined? 

·      How has the cataloguing of new/recent archives contributed to new learning and change?

·      'From Stage to Street' – Connection of archives, theatre and society: Documentary theatre and socially responsive theatre

·      Theatre, Peace and Conflict – How memory of theatre and conflict, especially that of Northern Ireland, is newly understood and experienced through the archives and contributing to resolution and reconciliation

·      The craft of the playwright: Drafting, editing and writing for stage or radio

This conference capitalizes on NUI Galway’s unparalleled strength in Irish theatre and literary archives, taking advantage of holdings including the Abbey Theatre, the Druid Theatre, Lyric Theatre Belfast, Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, Thomas Kilroy, Siobhan McKenna and the Galway Arts Festival, among others, to facilitate a national and international conversation about the place of archives in not only theatre and performance research and teaching, but arts practice and perception of theatre history more broadly.

Coinciding with the Galway Arts Festival, the conference will immerse participants in the living performance culture of Galway as the Galway Arts Festival links together artists from around the world to mount Ireland’s largest international arts festival.

Participants will take part in intensive working group sessions as well as participate in keynote and plenary sessions with leading scholars, archivists and performers working at the intersection of practice and research.

Working Groups

As member of a working group, you will circulate 8-10 page papers or an equivalent length of in-progress creative materials in advance of the conference. Proposed research papers can address practical projects in the area of digitization, curation, or archives administration as well as presenting scholarly or theoretical case studies. You will then engage in hands-on workshop contact with archival materials at NUI Galway as well as intensive discussion with group members regarding your research or creative project.

You can apply to the following strands:

·      Archival Materials In/As Performance

·      Digitization: Methodology and Ethics

·      Early-Mid-Twentieth Century Irish Theatre

·      Irish Theatre After Beckett

·      Conflict, Memory and Trauma

·      Scenography and Theatre Technologies

Please submit a 500-word abstract for your proposed paper or creative project with brief bio by 15 March 2015

to performingthearchivesnuig@gmail.com.

For more information, please contact Barry Houlihan (barry.houihan@nuigalway.ie)

or Charlotte McIvor (charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie).

http://performingthearchive2015.wordpress.com/

http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/collections/archives/

http://www.nuigalway.ie/drama/

http://nuigarchives.blogspot.ie

Twitter

@NUIGarchives

@NUIGDrama

https://www.facebook.com/nuiglibrary

https://www.facebook.com/groups/NUIGDrama/

Now Accepting Submissions for a Special Issue of the

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism on Performance and Consciousness

The editorial staff of the peer-reviewed Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism welcomes articles for a special issue dedicated to the relationship between performance and consciousness, which will be co-edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and Peter Zazzali.  Articles drawing on themes from performance theory, cognitive science, phenomenology, actor training, psychology, and/or theatre history are especially encouraged.  Please send original articles of 8,000-10,000 words to Dr. Peter Zazzali at pzazzali@ku.edu by 15 January 2015.  For more on JDTC’s guidelines for submission, please see the journal’s website at https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jdtc.

16-31 October 2016

Locations throughout Ireland and the diaspora

Call for Project Proposals

“The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty,

equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens,

and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness

and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts,

cherishing all of the children of the nation equally.”

Proclamation of the Irish Republic

2016 is the centenary of the 1916 Rising – a rebellion mounted to achieve personal and political freedoms from contested ruling authorities on the island of Ireland. 

2016 is also the 20-year anniversary of the closure of the last Magdalene laundry in Ireland located on Seán McDermott Street Lwr in Dublin’s north city centre.

While many fought for an idea of home in 1916, others were confined and silenced in homes such as the Laundries, Mother and Baby homes, industrial and reformatory schools, orphanages and related institutions.

‘1916: Home: 2016’ calls for participants to join together to stage a national and international programme of multi-disciplinary creative arts projects responding to the homes we have made, the homes we hid, and the homes that we are yet to imagine and build. 

‘1916: Home: 2016’ is coordinated by an international committee of artists and academics including Patricia Burke Brogan, Mary Caulfield, Thomas Conway, Jo Egan, Evelyn Glynn, Declan Gorman, Miriam Haughton, Louise Lowe, Declan Mallon, Paula McFetridge, Aoife McGrath, Charlotte McIvor, Emer O’Toole, Emilie Pine, and Brian Singleton.

Events will take place in the second half of October 2016 throughout the island of Ireland and internationally to coincide with the anniversary of the closing of Ireland’s last laundry. For this preliminary call, artists will propose events that they would like to produce as part of this national and international programme. This programme is open to all creative communities, individuals and organizations. 

By grouping these projects together in time, ‘1916: Home: 2016’ will create spaces to reflect on a spectrum of stories that explore the hidden lives and narratives, both in Ireland and elsewhere, from 1916 to 2016 and beyond. 

Multi-disciplinary creative arts projects may utilise theatre, performance art, visual art (including fine art, photography, installation, sculpture), dance, music, and creative writing. Projects may be proposed to be fully produced or presented as staged readings, workshops, or exhibitions. 

Proposals may address themes including but not limited to:

·               Responses to institutional histories in Ireland and diaspora- perspectives from communities, individuals and political bodies

·               Religion and the state

·               Voices of resistance

·               Complicity and the bystander

·               Prostitution, sex work and the regulation of female sexuality

·               Adoption and child trafficking

·               Global Magdalene histories

·               Class and economics

·               Family, diaspora and emigration

·               Power and violence

·               Disability and exclusion

·               Ireland and shame

·               Silence and invisibility

·               Legitimacy and illegitimacy

·               Space, buildings, and physical infrastructures

·               Contemporary perspectives on institutional systems including the direct provision accommodation system for asylum seekers

·               Resilience and transformation

Interested individuals and parties should submit a concise outline of the proposed project including project title, format, summary of concept with supporting materials as appropriate, project location and proposed venue, and listing of possible collaborators or associates to miriam.haughton@nuigalway.ie and charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie by 1 February 2015. 

‘1916: Home: 2016’ is coordinated by an international committee of artists and academics including Patricia Burke Brogan, Mary Caulfield, Thomas Conway, Jo Egan, Evelyn Glynn, Declan Gorman, Miriam Haughton, Louise Lowe, Declan Mallon, Paula McFetridge, Aoife McGrath, Charlotte McIvor, Emer O’Toole, Emilie Pine, and Brian Singleton.

The programme will culminate in a multi-institution led conference bringing together participants from the project. Documentation of the events throughout October will occur through a follow-up edited collection and other archival measures. 

Further information will be released through the Irish Memory Studies Network association, with details on its website. If you would like to propose a project that cannot occur in October 2016, but will be related to the objectives of ‘1916: Home: 2016’, please contact us for further dialogue.

Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Conference

July 30-August 2, 2015—Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth Hotel-

Montréal, Québec, Canada

Submission Deadlines: October 17^th (individual papers only; send to Charlotte McIvor at charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie; November 1^st (complete panels; go to ATHE at www.athe.org) 

ATHE 2015: Je me souviens

(I Remember)

The Theatre History Focus Group (THFG) of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) invites proposals for next year’s conference to be held in

Montréal, Québec, Canada at the Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth Hotel from July 30-August 2, 2015.  Our 2015 conference theme, “Je me souviens (I remember),” actively invites participants to consider the relationship between memory and theatre as archive, practice and process.  If practicing theatre historiography implicitly demands we remain constantly vigilant to how we tell stories through our research, ATHE 2015 challenges us to put this awareness at the center of our approaches to this conference theme.  THFG invites you to consider this invitation not only through the case studies you propose, but through an even more pronounced engagement with historiography as a practice of remembering through research that not only reconstructs the past and historicizes the present but forces a reckoning the future of our field. 

As we work towards excavating “the silences, the unsaid, the gestures, the sub-text, the dangers, the misunderstandings, the non-discursive in the ‘in-between’ terrain between cultures, countries, and constituencies in Canada and beyond,” we invite proposals for panels and roundtables, as well as sessions that challenge traditional session formats through performance, workshops or other actions. 

Proposals might engage:

v Theatre historiography as a practice of critical memory

v The historical role of performance in the construction and transmission of memory

v Changing critical methodologies in the field

v Canon formation and minority voices in the theatre

v The contested nature of language as in the English appropriation of the French Canadian slogan, ‘Je me souviens’

v Limits of the archive and/or the repertoire

v Geography, memory and indigeneity in performance

v Pedagogy and training as historical practice

v The translation of our memories of theatre history as subject into our own classroom practices

v Digital humanities and the theatre history archive/classroom

v Engagement with how history/memory is incorporated into contemporary production practice

We especially invite submissions incorporating approaches that emphasize ‘inter/trans-national and inter/trans-cultural exchanges in performance texts, process, or production.’ THFG remains committed to giving voice to a diversity of methodological approaches and geographical emphases.

Tips for submitting proposals:

1.     Complete proposals for sessions (with all presenters assembled) should be submitted directly to ATHE through the website at www.athe.org. The deadline for all proposals is November 1, 2014. Please forward a copy of your proposal to THFG Chair and Conference Planner, Charlotte McIvor at charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie. 

2.     If you would like assistance in panel coordination, please use the THFG web forum (http://www.athe.org/group/TH) or Facebook group (ATHE Theatre History Focus Group), or email individual paper proposals to the conference planner at charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie no later than Friday, October 17, 2014 (note that the latter option does not guarantee submission/acceptance).  The Conference Planner will work to facilitate linkages with other submitted papers, but this submission does not guarantee being matched with a panel.

3.     Submissions may be either discipline specific or multidisciplinary. In general, we are interested in panel topics that address the history of theatrical practice, historiography, or the relation of theatre to history in a larger sense. We encourage proposals that include both senior and junior scholars, as well as graduate students. A senior scholar could well serve as a respondent. We also encourage collaborations with other Focus Groups and Committees of ATHE to develop dynamic multidisciplinary sessions. Please see below for specific rules and guidelines for multidisciplinary proposals.

For Theatre History-Specific Proposals:  If your session addresses primarily theatre history, then choose “Single Focus Group” in the first selection box of the online proposal form. For Session Sponsor, select number 18, “(TH) Theatre History.”  When the selection process begins, all THFG-targeted proposals will be sent to the THFG conference planner. The THFG Executive Committee will rank the proposals, and the conference committee will use those rankings to make final programming decisions. It is not necessary to contact the conference planner before submitting a THFG proposal, but please do forward a copy of your proposal to the conference planner once you have submitted it (see above, charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie). Also feel free to contact the conference planner if you have any problems or concerns or if you are curious as to whether or not your proposal is appropriate for THFG.

For Multi-Disciplinary (MD) Proposals: If your session addresses theatre history but is also appropriate for another Focus Group or Committee, consider THFG as one of your target focus groups. You must select 3 targeted Focus Groups or Committees for an MD panel to be considered. To make an MD proposal you must contact the conference planners for each of the targeted Focus Groups/Committees by email before submitting online in order to receive feedback and to make sure the proposals are appropriate for each FG /Committee. If one of your targeted focus groups is not enthusiastic, it is far better to know before submission and perhaps find another FG or committee to increase its chance of being accepted (MD proposals are ranked by each of its affiliated Focus Groups). See www.athe.org for contact information for Focus Group conference planners and Committee chairs.

Special notes for the 2015 Conference:

A. As you assemble proposals for the website, please avoid copying and pasting material from Word to avoid electronic translation errors. Instead, save your document as rich text (.rtf) and copy/paste from Notepad (Windows) or Text Edit (Mac) into the online session proposal form (found at http://www.athe.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=184).

B. Upon successful completion of a session proposal, the session coordinator should immediately receive a confirmation email from sessions@athe.org.

C. If you plan to use PowerPoint or other projected material, you must request an LCD projector at the time of proposal. While there is a $300 fee, please note that grant requests for technology are strongly encouraged and frequently awarded.

D. It will not be possible to request specific days for presentations. If selected, your session could be scheduled on any day of the conference. Session Coordinators should ensure that all participants know that they should be available for all days of the conference.

E. Participants will be limited to a maximum of two presentations. “Presentation” refers to the act of delivering a paper, serving on a roundtable, or serving in an equivalent role in a different type of session. There is no limit to the number of sessions that a person can Chair or serve as Session Coordinator.

Session coordinators should expect to hear whether or not proposals have been accepted or rejected by mid-March, 2015.

Questions?  Contact THFG Chair/Conference Planner Charlotte McIvor at charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie. 

Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) 2015 Conference

Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth Hotel — Montréal, Québec, Canada

July 30- August 2, 2015

Submissions Deadlines: 

●      November 1^st for complete panel proposals — online through the ATHE homepage (visit http://www.athe.org/ and click on the “Conference” tab.)

●      October 18^th for individual paper proposals — please email a 200-word abstract to Monica White Ndounou, BTA Conference Planner, at monica.ndounou@tufts.edu. 

The Black Theatre Association (BTA), a Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), invites complete panel proposals and individual abstracts for ATHE’s 2015 conference.  In light of the conference theme, “Je me souviens (I Remember),” BTA is particularly interested in panels, papers and creative presentations that explore black theatre’s engagements with processes of re-membering, forgetting and cultural transmission. The conference site of Montréal (where this provocative political motto evokes controversy) encourages us to interrogate the conference theme in a global context. How might the stage and the institutions that house these stages be transformed to foster and support an empowered remembrance of black cultures, histories and performances?  How does the representation of Haitians, Native Americans and various minority groups of people of color in Quebec and throughout Canada encourage remembrance of Diasporic cultures on the world stage?  How can institutions in theatre and higher education best support and serve diasporic communities in their quests to remember and reconcile cultural heritage and national identity?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

•       Concepts of memory: rememory, blood memory, emotion-memory, muscle memory, and prosthetic memory, institutional memory, etc.

•       Theatre as a vehicle for engaging individual or collective retrospection

•       The role of the theatre practitioners and/or scholars in shaping what and how audiences remember

•       The role of art, film/video or new technology in solidifying institutional memory

•       Historical and contemporary examples of staging Diasporic memories

•       Strategies for staging memories of slavery, emancipation, migrations and movements of people of color in Africa and the New World

•       Remembering pedagogies of theory and practice

•       Staging or dramatizing memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, etc.

Black Theatre Association encourages session formats that go beyond the reading of scholarly papers.  We encourage proposals that include short play readings, performance workshops, networking and mentorship activities, or conversations about pedagogy and the academic profession that engage the conference theme. 

Proposers must submit all requests for audiovisual needs, conference grants, or guest passes with proposal submission.  Please note: ATHE limits all participants to 2 presentations/appearances at each conference.

You can use BTA’s new email list and online forums to discuss panel ideas with other scholars and artists and to solicit contributors for panel proposals. To connect with other BTA members and gain access to these tools, please “join” BTA by visiting our web page: http://www.athe.org/group/BTA. Multi-focus session proposals for sessions sponsored by a minimum of two (2) ATHE Focus Groups or Committees must have the approval of all sponsoring Focus Groups and/or Committees prior to proposal submission.  Anyone proposing a multi-focus session for ATHE 2015 must contact all the relevant Conference Planners and/or Committee Chairs for their approval, prior to proposal submission.  Contact information can be found on ATHE’s website: http://www.athe.org/ 

The Black Theatre Association (BTA) is an organization composed of scholars, graduate students, and theatre artists of differing ages, races, colors, genders, national origins, religious beliefs, shapes, and sizes.  Our unified interest in the critical study of Black theatre from a global perspective informs our collective desire to inform and promote the experiences of Black people as expressed in various forms of drama and performance. 

Black Theatre Association Officers, 2014-2015

Jonathan Shandell, President/Focus Group Representative

shandelj@arcadia.edu 

Monica White Ndounou, Conference Planner

monica.ndounou@tufts.edu

Tabitha Chester, Secretary

chestert@denison.edu

Nicole Hodges Persley, Member-at-Large

hodgespersley@ku.edu 

Isaiah Wooden, Member-at-Large

isaiah.wooden@gmail.com

Khalid Long, Graduate Student Representative

longky@umd.edu 

Le’Mil Eiland, Graduate Student Representative

lemileiland@gmail.com

Anndretta Lyle Wilson, Graduate Student Representative

anndretta@ucla.edu

Theatre History Symposium

Mid-America Theatre Conference (http://matc.us)

Kansas City, March 19-22, 2015

Inspiration

This year’s Theatre History Symposium invites proposals forwarding intellectually and artistically inspiring research questions and methodologies. From objects and images that provoke and challenge our presumptions about subjectivity to texts and performances that demand innovative analytical frames, we seek theatrical catalysts that inspire us to shift our way of thinking about and performing in the world—whether on a global or personal level.

If, as Walter Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, “Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming,” then what specific conditions (sociopolitical, cultural, geographical, environmental, or artistic) create such eddies? How might working in the archives, watching or creating a performance, analyzing dramatic literature and productions, or scrutinizing a design sketch lead to moments of rupture within or alternate routes through theatre history and its well-rehearsed “origins”? In what ways have particular artists, theorists, and events inspired new modes of theatre production, performance art, and scholarly research?

In a time of “economic austerity” and political unrest across the United States and abroad, what are the inherent risks or rewards of inspiring acts in artistic, educational, governmental, and cultural sectors? How does power manifest in these moments? What kinds of resistance to notions of inspiration—or aspiration—might our present moment demand and how are these acts reflected in our theatrical past? What insights might be gained by focusing on seemingly uninspiring (banal, quotidian, bland) subjects in research? We welcome your proposals encapsulating these or other rigorous scholarly questions encompassing the 2015 MATC theme of “Inspiration.”

Please submit proposals via email in Word or PDF Format to thsmatc@gmail.com and include the following:

Your name, title (student, faculty, independent scholar), academic affiliation (if applicable), and a brief biography.

Your contact information (particularly email).

The title and abstract for your paper. Please limit abstracts to 250 words.

Any audiovisual elements requested for your presentation. We cannot always guarantee audiovisual support, but will endeavor to take requests into account. Late requests may not be honored.

We also welcome proposals for full panels. Contact the co-chairs for more information.

Chrystyna Dail, PhD                            Joanne Zerdy, PhD

Ithaca College                                      Illinois State University

Theatre History Symposium Co-Chairs

thsmatc@gmail.com

All proposals must be received by October 15, 2014

Robert A. Schanke Award

The Robert A. Schanke Research Award is given annually to an untenured faculty presenter of the Theatre History Symposium and carries a cash award of $500 as well as consideration for publication in Theatre History Studies, the journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. To be eligible for the Schanke Award, candidates must submit full, conference-length versions of their paper to the co-chairs at the email address above by February 20, 2015.

The Productive Chaos of the Progressive Era

Mid-American Theater Conference

Kansas City, Missouri

March 19-22, 2015

During the Progressive Era (1890-1920), metropolitan centers such as New York City underwent significant transformation.  New immigration, the concentration of diverse ethnic groups into geographically-contained slum districts, the increasing stratification of classes, the rise of slumming as a spectacle of entertainment, the beginning of the Settlement House Movement and the Social Gospel Movement all contributed to a redefined urban landscape. Changes like these inspired an assortment of competing and even contradictory theatrical performances and productions, including immigrant theaters (Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish theater), vaudeville (Lew Bloom’s “The Tramp”), and Broadway (Edward Sheldon’s Salvation Nell) for very different theatergoing audiences. What, by extension, did these performances/productions inspire?

This panel proposes to explore the ambiguities and contradictions which functioned as fodder for creative energies in the overlapping venues of Broadway, vaudeville, and immigrant theaters. What did they inspire in terms of characters, narratives, and performance styles? What did they contribute in terms of changing epistemological and ideological definitions of class and poverty, ethnicity and nativism, gender and sexuality, temperance and intemperance, and literature and leisure? Finally, what/whom did they inspire in the playwrights and theater companies that came after them? We welcome presentations that consider these ambiguities during the Progressive Era in terms of theater history, performance studies, reception theory, and cultural studies.

Please send 250-word abstracts to Max Shulman (mxshulman@gmail.com) by October 1, 2014.

Articles-in-Progress Session

The 36^th Annual Mid-America Theatre Conference

Conference Theme: Inspiration
Sheraton Hotel at Crown Center, Kansas City, MO
March 19-22, 2015

MATC is pleased to offer a pair of workshops at the 2015 conference for scholars and practitioners working on articles in the areas of Theatre History, Performance, Pedagogy, Theory, and/or Practice. The workshops will offer participants the opportunity to meet in a closed session with journal editors who have read their work in advance and who will offer suggestions for improvement as well as strategies for submitting to academic journals.

Recent Articles-in-Progress sessions have included editors from:

Ecumenica

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

Journal of Religion and Theatre

New England Theatre Journal

Theatre Annual

Theatre History Studies

Theatre Journal

Theatre Survey

Theatre Topics

If you have an article you are preparing to submit for publication and would like critical feedback from journal editors, please email a proposal document (not the full article) as a Word attachment by NOVEMBER 15, 2014 to session coordinators Robert B. Shimko (rbshimko@central.uh.edu) and Jocelyn L. Buckner (jocelynbuckner@gmail.com).

All proposals must include: 

• your name
• your academic affiliation, if any
• your title (identifying whether you are faculty, a student, or an independent scholar—all are invited to submit)
• your contact information
• a 500-word abstract of the essay
• a one-page works cited list

Session coordinators will select essays for  two workshops—one for graduate students and one for faculty and independent scholars—based on the overall clarity of the project and the time limitations of the conference itself. Authors initially selected must submit full versions of their essays by January 31, 2015 and register for the conference to participate in the session. For more information, visit:  http://matc.us/.

Special Issue

“Possible Worlds”

Call for Papers

Recent critical attention to space and geography (for example, by proponents of site-specific performance) has helped articulate the detail of ‘location’ in theatre and performance. But there are numerous means of exploring space and place beyond those offered through conventional geography, as the Situationists International, among others, explored in past decades. Other significant spaces include mythic and psychic locations; or zones that may or may not be fixed by geographical coordinates. This special issue investigates the performance of possible and actual worlds that contribute to the shaping of space and place.

An alternative geography may be a vestige of history: for instance, assumptions made by early European geographers about the nature and location of southern lands were shaped by myth and suppositions. Simply by being ‘not here,’ such locations take up spaces of otherness, some characteristics of which remain in the public imaginary, despite the precision of contemporary mapping tools. Multimedia, meanwhile, describes a differently situated ‘geography of elsewhere.’ Doreen Massey has argued in For Space that “[s]pace […] is about contemporaneity (rather than temporal convening), it is about openness (rather than inevitability) and it is also about relations, fractures, discontinuities, practices of engagement. And this intrinsic relationality of the spatial is not just a matter of lines on a map; it is a cartography of power” (85).

How might the qualities that Massey identifies be performed? How do non-geographic ‘spaces’ such as capital or marginalized subjectivities intersect with conventional geography? This issue seeks interventions in the ways in which theatre’s metonymic performance of geography can expand our understanding of spatiality in performance, and of performance itself.

This special issue will be edited by Theatre Journal co-editor Joanne Tompkins. Submissions (6000-9000 words) should be e-mailed to managing editor Bob Kowkabany (doriclay@aol.com) no later than 10 April 2015.

Italian Contemporary Performance, the Theatre of Emma Dante and Beyond

A Symposium

The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Thursday, September 4^th – Friday, September 5^th, 2014

Twenty years ago, in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994), Italian theorist and philosopher Rosi Braidotti re-envisioned “nomadism” as a means of thinking about female subjectivity through a fluid, interactive exploration of identity that called for “blurring boundaries without burning bridges.” Over the last twenty years, Italian stage director and deviser Emma Dante (b.1967) has undergone, through her work, a fluid exploration of her own identity that has blurred the boundaries between the national and the regional. Her productions have carved a niche for highly physical, devised new works that speak to the whole nation from a marginalized position. Operating in Palermo, Sicily, away from the traditional Italian centers of cultural power, and juxtaposing Italian and regional languages with gendered bodies, Dante’s artistic output interrogates larger social, political, and economic issues related to gender, identity, and disenfranchisement. Directly or indirectly, this has contributed to the re-positioning of female identity, gender issues, and LGBTQ issues in the national Italian context during and after the Berlusconi Era.

This multidisciplinary symposium frames itself around Rosi Braidotti’s work on nomadism with the work of Emma Dante as a point of inception. We invite proposals that focus on contemporary Italian performance, or other contemporary theatre work that addresses issues of female subjectivity, gender and sexuality, women directors and playwrights, physical theatre, political theatre, company created devised work, and multilingual performance (understood in terms of dialects and languages).

This symposium is proudly brought to you by the Department of Theatre, the Department of French and Italian, the Division of Arts and Humanities, the Graduate Theatre Syndicate, the Humanities Institute, the Women’s Place, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The symposium will take place on September 4^th and 5^th in Columbus, Ohio in conjunction with the North American premiere of Sud Costa Occidentale, sponsored by The Ohio State University and the Columbus Foundation. Premiere events will include the performance of Operetta Burlesque by Emma Dante, the screening of the documentary Sud Costa Occidentale by Clarissa Cappellani at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute exhibition on the works of Emma Dante.

Proposals are due by June 13^th, 2014

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250-words, along with your name, contact information, affiliation, 100 words biography, and any A/V requests. Submit proposals and any questions to osublurringboundaries@gmail.com.

Note that the conference proceedings will be published in digital and video form. 

• The body as place/space/scene/site of performance
• The symbiotic relationship of body and place
• The body at/as home; the homeliness of the body
• Race, place and the body
• The ordered body; the body out of order
• Bodies kept in place; the consigned body
• Bodies, class and classification
• The displaced body; the body out of place

• How does performance place the body in space?
• How does performance analysis/documentation place the body in performance?
• How does performance address/enact the social and cultural positioning of bodies according to status, standing, class, rank?
• The emergence toward the end of the 20th century of site-specific and site-responsive theatre has continued in the form of encounter- and experience-centred events that often oppose themselves, or are opposed, to 'traditional' theatre. Such events make claims for the embodiment of the spectator and against the disembodiment of traditional forms of staging. In what cases, and to what extent, are these claims legitimate? How do particular site-specific/responsive or traditional-site performances situate bodies and illuminate the social situation of bodies?

Theatre Survey

Special Issue on  
RACIAL HYBRIDITIES  

This special issue spotlights the mixing, blending, blurring and/or (re)appropriation of race and ethnicity within the theatre and embodied performing arts. It interrogates the work of artists who test and challenge the logic of an essential racial/ethnic identity by foregroundingcross-racial encounters within their performance projects. Prospective contributors are encouraged to consider how the creation of multiracial ensembles, the privileging of biracial or mixed race experiences, and/or the performing of another’s racial identity have informed racial discourse throughout theatre’s long history.  

A few (of the many) possible topics:

• Staging xenophobia in ancient Greek and Roman theatre  
• The experience of mixed race characters, from Hippolytus to Trouble (in Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood)  
• The history of multiracial theatre companies and artistic collectives, such as Free Street Theatre or Silk Road Rising  
• The identity performances of conceptual artist Nikki S. Lee  

This special issue will be edited by Theatre Survey Associate Editor Harvey Young. Submissions (4000-6000 words) should be e-mailed to Harvey Young at astreditor@gmail.com and formally submitted to the journal via Scholar One: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatresurvey no later than 1 April 2014.

Call for Papers

Hrotsvit 2014: Pageants and Pioneers Conference

To be held on Saturday 31 May 2014 at University of Hull, England

In January 1914 in London, England, the Pioneer Players theatre society produced a remarkable and disturbing play about prostitution.  This play was written by Hrostvit, the tenth century nun from Gandersheim.  Known also as ‘strong voice’, Hrotsvit has been claimed as the first female dramatist.  Edith Craig’s production of the play for the Pioneer Players theatre society and Christopher St John’s translation was part of a programme of encouraging women’s writing for the stage in the period of the campaign for women’s suffrage.  The play featured the punishment of the prostitute, Thais, by imprisonment, providing a topical allusion in 1914 to the brutal treatment of suffragettes in London.  

This interdisciplinary international conference will mark the centenary of this remarkable production and provide an opportunity for a reassessment of Hrotsvit’s drama, bringing together researchers interested in the modern production of the play as well as the Medieval text and context.

Dr Anna Birch will lead a workshop reading of Paphnutius and a discussion, which will be filmed as part of the ongoing project on Pageants and Pioneers begun in May 2011 with Fragments & Monuments performance and film of A Pageant of Great Women. We look forward also to Pageants and Pioneers 2015, 2016 and 2017.

Confirmed Speakers:  Professor Katharine Cockin, Professor Lesley Ferris, Dr Anna Birch, Dr Helene Scheck

 Send abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers by 6 January 2014 to k.m.cockin@hull.ac.uk

Call for Papers: A Symposium 

               The First Actresses: 1660-1930s

                  Friday, May 23 and Saturday, May 24, 2014

            Finally, women. Reflect on the whole history of women:

          do they not have to be first of all and above all else actresses?

                                    Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science, 1881

Arriving centuries late to the theatre profession, women have met with hostility, censorship, bans, and working conditions often well below those available to their male

counterparts, not least of which was economic security much lower than that of actors. This symposium focuses on the actress with a view to promoting, identifying and encouraging research and scholarly directions on the work and lives of actresses from the 17th through the early 20^th centuries.

In addition to keynote speaker Sharon Marcus (The Orlando Harriman Professor at Columbia University), the symposium will present two performances and an exhibition.

Addressing the centuries long prohibition on women acting, The First Actress  by Christopher St. John (Christabel Marshall) features one of the women purported to be the ‘first actress’ to take the role of Desdemona in Othello  in 1661. This short play from 1911 Britain is a touchstone for the symposium as it addresses a range of issues: the prejudice against the women performing, their ‘natural’ inadequacies as artists in the public realm, and women’s agency in demanding access to both the public stage and the right to vote. The second performance, a premiere of a solo work, looks at the life of the celebrated Columbus, Ohio artist with an international reputation Elsie Janis (1889-1956).  This piece is commissioned for this symposium and will be created by Victoria Matsos, from the Theatre Research Institute’s Elsie Janis Collection. Finally we will mount an exhibition on the actress drawn from multiple collections of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute.

The symposium with presentations, exhibition, and performances will provide a forum for scholarship to be shared, work by practitioner/researchers to be experienced, and for future directions on the study of the actress to emerge. We seek paper proposals from all disciplines working on issues related to the symposium theme and from graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty.

 Email 300 word abstract, 100 word bio to both the symposium organizers: Nena Couch (Head, Thompson Library Special Collections, The Ohio State University Libraries) couch.1@osu.edu and Lesley Ferris (Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of Theatre) ferris.36@osu.edu by March 15, 2014.

http://theatre.osu.edu/news/call-papers-first-actresses1660-1930s

Sponsored by The Ohio State University’s Department of Theatre and University Libraries’ Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute. With support from Arts and Humanities Research Grant, and the Women’s Place.

The American Theatre and Drama Society once again offers the Vera Mowry Roberts Research and Publication Award of $200 and a one-year membership in the Society for the best essay published in English (essays must appear in a refereed scholarly journal or edited collection). The essay must focus on Theatre and/or Performance in the United States (recognizing that notions of "America” and the United States encompass migrations of peoples and cultures that overlap and influence one another). The award recipient will be recognized at ATDS’s annual meeting in Scottsdale, AZ during the annual convention of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) in July 2014.

Deadline: April 20, 2014

Eligibility: The author must be a degreed (no longer enrolled in a graduate program) but untenured scholar at the time the essay is published. The competition is also open to independent scholars, or scholars working in adjunct, or full-time, non-tenure track positions.  Eligible essays must have been published between March 15, 2013 and March 15, 2014.

Nomination: Nominations may come from the author of the essay, any member of the American Theatre and Drama Society, or the editor of a journal or collection in which the essay appeared. Authors may nominate only one essay. Editors may nominate one essay per volume or collection.

Submission: Electronic submissions only.  Email a pdf to Robert A. Schanke:  schanker@aol.com.

Evaluation: The awarded essay will be evaluated by a selection committee on the basis of originality, critical rigor, demonstration of a broad knowledge of the topic and field, and the promise of future professional development of the author.

Notification: The award recipient will be notified by May 31, 2014.

The IFTR Performance and Consciousness Working Group will be meeting at the next IFTR World Congress in Warwick, UK, 28 July to 1 August 2014. This WG welcomes contributions pertaining to any aspect of the relationship between performance and consciousness, particularly, but not necessarily, in relationship to the conference theme of Theatre and Stratification. Papers drawing on themes from performance theory, cognitive science, phenomenology, actor training, psychology, and/or theatre history are especially encouraged. To contribute a paper, please submit an abstract and other details through the Cambridge Journals Online at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/memServHome?name=IFTR.  Before submitting an abstract you will be prompted to buy or renew your IFTR membership. In addition, please send a copy of what you submit to the WG convener for the conference, Professor Peter Zazzali, pzazzali@ku.edu.

Pushing Form:

Innovation and Interconnection
in Contemporary European Performance

25 - 26 April 2014

Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway

Keynote Speakers

Dr Milija Gluhovic, University of Warwick, author of Performing European Memories (Palgrave, 2013)

Sodja Lotker, Artistic Director, Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space

Roundtable Panelists

Joe Devlin (Focus Theatre), Junk Ensemble, PaperDolls and Willie White (Dublin Theatre Festival)

European and Western performance discourse historically has often presumed a hegemonic and majority white field of practice despite an increasingly diverse European population. How does the present reality of European theatre and performance challenge traditional assumptions? And how specifically does formal innovation provide the space for critiques of power and hierarchy that may rework the concept of "Europe” as realized through performance? How have artists responded through form to neoliberalism and globalization in the wake of the most recent world economic crisis and how does their specifically European context set the terms of this response?

This conference queries what it means to define the field of European performance. As such, we are committed to supporting the publication and wide dissemination of our conference proceedings. We invite submissions that will consider key debates in terminology surrounding innovative emerging work, seeking also to build on older genealogies of practice in Europe and beyond. For the purpose of this discussion, we use "European performance” to designate work that happens within the continent as opposed to the European Union exclusively, although these differential power dynamics will be crucial to our inquiry.

By considering macro-European trends in relation to national case studies, "Pushing Form” will explore the meaning of "contemporary,” "European” and "performance” in relation to each other. We hope to map not only the current field, but what may lie just beyond it.

Presentations might address topics including but not limited to:

• Trends in experimental contemporary performance from a national and/or international perspective. For example, how has Live Art transformed in its journeys across Europe from its origins in the UK?
• Theoretical debates: The postdramatic and beyond?
• The relationship between theatre and performance practices more broadly as sites of innovation
• The status of written drama in the 21st century
• Arts infrastructure and funding post-economic crisis
• The ways in which language and visual aesthetics in performance relate to making and disseminating work through European networks
• The politics of arts festivals and touring
• The impact of territorial disputes, ethnic conflicts and migration on, not only national, but European identities more broadly
• The role of theatre and performance in culture schemes for the European Union
• Hierarchies of prestige within and outside the European Union
• Linkages between European performance and other world trends including individual or networked relationships between European artists and companies and other international colleagues

Abstracts (max 500 words) outlining proposed presentations can be submitted as email attachments to each of the conference organizers on or before 1 February 2014:

Dr Charlotte McIvor, NUI, Galway: charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie

Dr Siobhán O’Gorman, Trinity College Dublin: siobhanmogorman@gmail.com

Dr Miriam Haughton, University of Ulster: miriamhaughton@hotmail.com

CFP for the International Society for the Study of European Ideas 2014 conference, "Images of Europe: Past, Present, and Future,” hosted at the Universidade Católica Portugeusa in Porto, Portugal (August 4-8).

 For more on the conference, see http://www.issei2014.com/Home.html

Workshop Title: In Search of Adorno’s Legacy in Performance Theory and Practice  

Chairs: Peter Zazzali, University of Kansas, USA

and David Garfinkle, MacEwan University, Canada 

Theodor W. Adorno is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s premiere thinkers in the areas of cultural criticism, aesthetic theory, philosophy, Marxism, and the sociology of culture, among others.  A trained musician, his scholarship demonstrates an unusual balance of intellectualism and artistry, a combination that distinguishes his work from many other theorists.  Whether addressing the so-called "culture industry’s” commodified degradation of art or applying a dialectical analysis to defend modernism, Adorno can be seen as a pioneer in the reciprocal critique of art and society.  

Is his work, however, relevant today?  Moreover, what does it mean for performance scholars and practitioners?  Many respected theorists have dismissed Adorno as an elitist whose attacks on popular culture constitute an oversimplified argument arrogantly and negatively condemning the consumption of artistic goods.  A smaller chorus of supporters, such as J.M. Bernstein and Martin Jay, has posited his work as a nuanced and prescient critique of aesthetics in the context of capitalism.  In keeping with ISSEI’s conference theme for 2014, this workshop will explore the "Past, Present, and Future” of Adorno’s cultural criticism, with particular attention given to its relevance for performance.  This working session therefore welcomes paper submissions that use Adorno’s oeuvre to address matters that could include—but are not limited to—topics such as the relationship between art and society, global capitalism’s impact on cultural production, the role of performance in the context of the culture industry, the distinctions between modernism and postmodernism, and numerous other possible subjects.  

Prospective contributors should submit a paper abstract of no more than 500 words to Dr. Peter Zazzali pzazzali@ku.edu by 31 January 2014.  

Call for Papers: Embodiment
TDGSO 2014 Annual Graduate Students Conference, UW Madison
February 28--March 1, 2014

The University of Wisconsin’s Theatre Graduate Student Organization invites abstract submissions for its 2014 annual conference on the topic of embodiment.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Professor Harvey Young of Northwestern University (Chicago), as well as a workshop by Rhodessa Jones, Co-Artistic director of Cultural Odyssey (San Francisco), actress, teacher, singer, and writer.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Performing race and ethnicity
  
• Performing gender or sexuality
  
• Bodies in space
  
• Acting as embodiment
  
• Spectatorship
  
• Embodiment in theatre theory (Copeau, Meyerhold, Artaud, Grotowski, Barba, etc.)
  
• Narratives of the athletic body
  
• Enacting national identity
  
• Representing (dis)ability
  
• The non-human body on stage
  
• Physicalizing culture
  
• Performing simultaneity in drag, mask, puppetry, etc.
  
• The life of props

• your name
• academic affiliation, if any
• title (identifying whether you are faculty, a student, or an independent scholar)
• contact information
• a two-page abstract of the essay
• a one-page works cited

International Conference, 6–8 July 2014

University of Leeds, UK

Call for Papers (deadline Monday 4 November 2013)

Sponsored by the Worldwide Universities Network Fund for International Research Collaboration project ‘Music, Memory and Migration in the Post-Holocaust Jewish Experience: Renewal and Transformation’

www.mmm.leeds.ac.uk

Displacement has been an integral part of the twentieth-century Jewish experience. Whether forced due to Nazi persecution, compelled by other oppressive factors, or entered into voluntarily in the hope of a new start, migration, internment and exile have affected musical, theatrical and literary output by Jewish artists in myriad ways. For example, members of the conference committee are currently researching topics including the music of Jewish immigrants to South Africa; the works of composers, playwrights and authors before, during and after incarceration in the Terezin/Theresienstadt ghetto; Holocaust songbooks; and Jewish artistic expression in the Soviet Union. They are also investigating the question: what does it mean to perform these works today, or even create new artistic works stimulated by them?

Conference themes

We invite proposals for papers, panels, workshops and performances that address the following questions and related topics:

•  How do artists represent, or resist representing, displacement in their works?
• What other types of traces does displacement leave upon the artists‟ works (e.g. hybrid styles, transitions into different languages or musical and theatrical idioms, etc)?
• How do artists represent the „before‟ and „after‟ -- the old home and the new?
• How has displacement affected the archives in which these works have been found -- what was brought from home, what was recreated in a new land, what has been irretrievably lost?
• How does cultural production function as an archive, and what does it preserve? How do artistic works represent rupture or continuity -- or even effect rupture or continuity -- from a time before exile, through the period of transition, into a new milieu?
• How do the works represent continuity of or rupture with particular styles (e.g. cultural modernism) and social/political movements (e.g. socialism, Zionism)?
•  Why and how are such works performed and published today? Why are present-day audiences drawn to these works, and what do they take away from them? How do performers, producers and publishers frame such works for the audience, and to what ends (e.g. memorialisation, commemoration, education, indoctrination)?
• What are the aesthetic, political and ethical issues surrounding such performances and publications?
• Can artistic works created in environments such as concentration camps, or in culturally repressive/religiously hostile societies, ever „stand on their own‟ as aesthetic works, without reference to their context? Should they?
• What are the aesthetic, political and ethical issues surrounding the creation of new works inspired by the cultural output of sites such as concentration camps?

For information on

• submitting a proposal for a paper, panel, performance or workshop
  
• financial support for students and early career researchers

please see the attached PDF, or go to http://www.mmm.leeds.ac.uk/conference/.

Notifications of acceptance or otherwise will be sent at the beginning of December 2013. The full provisional conference programme will be announced early in 2014.

Conference committee

Michael Beckerman (New York University), David Fligg (Leeds College of Music), Helen Finch (University of Leeds), Stephen Muir (University of Leeds), Lisa Peschel (University of York), Joseph Toltz (Sydney Conservatorium, University of Sydney), Bret Werb (Music Curator, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC)

Working Title:

Performance and Pedagogy:

A Scrapbook for Imaginative Teaching and Learning

The proposed volume seeks to collate and critically assess a range of approaches related to teaching and learning in the arts, humanities, and sciences, particularly in terms of the contribution that the emergent area of Performance Studies is making in the meta-disciplinary use of performance in educational practice. One of the greatest challenges in the relatively new, though highly contested disciplinary formation of Performance Studies has been to not simply extend the horizon of subjects worthy of research and study, but to expand the ways of thinking about or discovering these subjects. This has called for great experimentation and efforts in pedagogical practices, as educators push for new ways of teaching and research, while simultaneously establishing new subjects as worthy of being taught. The larger, profound transformations that education is undergoing in the current era of globalization, ranging from the increasing vocationalization and privatization of university education, to a modification of the discourses in a particular discipline, to a call for alternatives to hierarchical training, further highlight the urgency to rethink and interrogate pedagogical insights from the field of performance.

The intertwining of performance and pedagogy thus carries profound philosophical and theoretical implications on the one side, while raising very practical questions related to the enterprise of teaching on the other. The proposed volume seeks to address these questions of pedagogical practice in and through performance, and bring together knowledge that has been largely ignored or perceived as secondary to the quality of teaching, or to the subject taught. These practices encompass general issues of curricular construction, sites of instruction, classroom dynamics, assessment, teacher-learner relationships, collective self-education, as well as specific issues related to methods and tools for dealing with a particular topic.

This collection of essays will document, explore, and interrogate intersections between performance and pedagogy, envisioning our classrooms as performative, or sites where knowledge is formed, meanings are made, and behaviors are constituted. Discussions in the Performance and Pedagogy Working Group at PSi (Performance Studies international) conferences since 2007 have focused around the necessity for a scrapbook of practical experiences relating to the limits and potential of performance in teaching, as well as a discussion of lessons learnt from the field.

We seek two different kinds of submissions, essays and shorter pieces detailed below.

Essays: Performance Studies meets Pedagogical Theory

We are seeking eight essays (approximately 4000 words each) designed to provide an introductory framework for reflection on the epistemological shift that emerges when Performance Studies intersects Pedagogical Theory. Critical essays are invited from scholars, practitioners, artists and cultural activists invested in one or more of the following fields:

The relationship of performance to conceptions and visions of education:

How close has the educational sector come towards fulfilling Ivan Illich’s radical call to deschool society (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971), or usefully practicing Paulo Freire’s critique of the banking method of education (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970)? What are the contributions of Performance Studies to this goal, be it conceptually (e.g. how notions such as performativity or representation inform the way we understand the learning process), epistemologically (e.g. how new research paradigms such as practice-based research reshape teaching paradigms), or in the aesthetic realm (e.g. how the recognition of non-text based knowledge serves to question the authority of text based learning)? How does scholarship in the field of theatre/performance, for e.g. the changing relationship between actors and spectators provide scope for a changed relationship between teachers and learners (Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 2004)?

The relationship of performance to educational institutions and their practices:

In what way does the field of performance challenge the verticality and increasingly market-driven institutional constraints of the university, by providing alternative and creative models and experiments in training, knowledge production and collective teaching/learning? How does performance question or re-imagine the custodianship of knowledge, by proposing new ways of sharing, deep learning and new ways of understanding expertise and erudition, aided by but not restricted to technological knowledge management (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Introduction,” from An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 2012)?

The relationship of performance to theory, history, methodology, praxis:

How does the broadening horizon of subjects of study in performance enrich or broaden the horizon of ways of teaching and learning what is conventionally taught through frontal means?

Essays that address educational theories and insights relating to various teaching practices are encouraged. We seek contributions that not only critically examine performance pedagogy but also that address applied teaching methods.

Shorter Pieces: Scrapbook for Learning Teachers

We are seeking 20 shorter pieces (approximately 2000-2500 words) that will provide a ‘scrapbook’ of classroom teaching examples, drawing from localized interventions with particular institutions, people and sites.

We particularly welcome reflections or ethnographies of practice about specific classroom activities or the range of practices associated with linking performance and pedagogy. Additionally, we encourage authors to consider how institutional practices and requirements impact our classrooms (such as assessment or grading).

Each scrapbook entry will follow a fixed format:

Title for exercise/method/game:

Aims and/or Learning Outcomes:

Number of participants:

Time:

Teaching Framework: (undergrad, postgrad, seminar, workshop…)

Material and technical Requirements:

Description of facilitation process:

Abstracts (500 words) for essays or scrapbook entries are sought by December 1, 2013. All selected contributors will be asked to submit completed manuscripts by April 30, 2014.

Please include a 150-word bio. Abstracts and manuscripts should be sent as MS Word attachments via email to Sruti Bala - S.Bala@uva.nl and Monica Stufft - mostufft@sandiego.edu

Works Cited:

Illich, Ivan. 1971. Deschooling Society. Cuernavaca: CIDOC.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Ranciere, Jacques. 1994. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. "Introduction" from An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Theatre History Studies Volume 35, 2015

Call for Papers

Theatre History Studies is issuing an open call for papers for the 2015 annual edition (Volume 35). Papers will be considered on a wide variety of topics within performance and theatre studies.

Theatre History Studies is the official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference and is published by the University of Alabama Press. Since its premiere issue in 1981, Theatre History Studies has published essays on a wide range of subjects within the field of theatre history, embracing multiple perspectives and methodologies. The journal is devoted to presenting high quality scholarship in theatre studies in order to promote understanding and discovery of world theatre and performance.

Please send manuscripts prepared in conformity with the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style and the University of Alabama Press style sheet located on the MATC website (http://matc.us). Illustrations are encouraged. Essays should be between 6,000-10,000 words and use endnotes rather than footnotes. Consulting editors will review the manuscripts, a process that takes approximately three months. The journal does not normally accept studies in dramatic literature unless there is a focus on actual production and performance.

Electronic submissions are preferred and are accepted in Word or WordPerfect. Please do not submit a pdf. Hard copies should be submitted in duplicate.

Submission Deadline: February 1, 2014

Anticipated Publication Date: September 2015

Please direct manuscripts and inquiries to:

Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix

mullener@miamioh.edu

Editor, Theatre History Studies

College of Creative Arts

Miami University

Center for the Performing Arts

Oxford, OH 45056

Call For Papers: 

Theatre History Focus Group (THFG) Sessions

Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Conference

July 24-27, 2014—Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Hotel—Scottsdale, AZ

Submission Deadlines: October 16^th (individual papers only; send to Charlotte McIvor at charlotte.mcivor@athe.org; November 1^st (complete panels; go to ATHE at www.athe.org)  

ATHE 2014—Dream Acts:

Performance as Refuge, Resistance, and Renewal

The Theatre History Focus Group (THFG) of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) invites proposals for next year’s conference to be held in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Fairmount Scottsdale Princess Hotel from July 24-27, 2014.  Our 2014 conference theme, "Dream Acts: Performance as Refuge, Resistance and Renewal,” actively invites participants to consider the interface between historical and contemporary imaginings through performance- from tracing the changing function of dreams as theatrical trope to considering the multiple histories living beneath the geopolitical landscape of Arizona that we will inhabit together in July 2014. 

In considering how "the conjoining of dreaming to action engages the particular work of performance,” we invite proposals for panels and roundtables, as well as sessions that challenge traditional session formats through performance, workshops or other actions. 

Proposals might engage:

v Production histories as a space of dreaming that chart the shifting role of dramatic texts as a place of rooted imagining over time

v Critical theatre historiography as a strategic methodology for reimagining and challenging linear/limited received knowledges

v The interplay between dreaming and action in the theatre history classroom

v Working with the frame of theatre history as activist strategy in the classroom and beyond

v The im/possibilities of working with gaps in the archive and imaginative responses to archival limits

v The changing role of the imagined relationship between politics, resistance and efficacy as an aspiration of theatre makers over time

v The cross-cultural and intercultural scope of theatrical genealogies that may enhance or limit theatre and performance as sites of shared refuge between/among diverse cultures

We especially invite submissions incorporating transnational or non-Western perspectives and those focused on indigenous performance.  THFG remains committed to giving voice to a diversity of methodological approaches and geographical emphases. 

Tips for submitting proposals:

1..     Complete proposals for sessions (with all presenters assembled) should be submitted directly to ATHE through the website at www.athe.org. The deadline for all proposals is November 1, 2013. Please forward a copy of your proposal to THFG Chair and Conference Planner, Charlotte McIvor at charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie. 

2.     If you would like assistance in panel coordination, please use the THFG listserv (theatrehistorylist@athe.org) or Facebook group (ATHE Theatre History Focus Group), or email individual paper proposals to the conference planner at charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie no later than Wednesday, October 16, 2013 (note that the latter option does not guarantee submission/acceptance).

3.     Submissions may be either discipline specific or multidisciplinary. In general, we are interested in panel topics that address the history of theatrical practice, historiography, or the relation of theatre to history in a larger sense. We encourage proposals that include both senior and junior scholars, as well as graduate students. A senior scholar could well serve as a respondent. We also encourage collaborations with other Focus Groups and Committees of ATHE to develop dynamic multidisciplinary sessions. Please see below for specific rules and guidelines for multidisciplinary proposals.

For Theatre History-Specific Proposals:  If your session addresses primarily theatre history, then choose "Single Focus Group” in the first selection box of the online proposal form. For Session Sponsor, select number 18, "(TH) Theatre History.”  When the selection process begins, all THFG-targeted proposals will be sent to the THFG conference planner. The THFG Executive Committee will rank the proposals, and the conference committee will use those rankings to make final programming decisions. It is not necessary to contact the conference planner before submitting a THFG proposal, but please do forward a copy of your proposal to the conference planner once you have submitted it (see above, charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie). Also feel free to contact the conference planner if you have any problems or concerns or if you are curious as to whether or not your proposal is appropriate for THFG.

For Multi-Disciplinary (MD) Proposals: If your session addresses theatre history but is also appropriate for another Focus Group or Committee, consider THFG as one of your target focus groups. You must select 3 targeted Focus Groups or Committees for an MD panel to be considered. To make an MD proposal you must contact the conference planners for each of the targeted Focus Groups/Committees by email before submitting online in order to receive feedback and to make sure the proposals are appropriate for each FG /Committee. If one of your targeted focus groups is not enthusiastic, it is far better to know before submission and perhaps find another FG or committee to increase its chance of being accepted (MD proposals are ranked by each of its affiliated Focus Groups). See www.athe.org for contact information for Focus Group conference planners and Committee chairs.

Special notes for the 2014 Conference:

A. As you assemble proposals for the website, please avoid copying and pasting material from Word to avoid electronic translation errors. Instead, save your document as rich text (.rtf) and copy/paste from Notepad (Windows) or Text Edit (Mac) into the online session proposal form (found at http://www.athe.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=184).

B. Upon successful completion of a session proposal, the session coordinator should immediately receive a confirmation email from sessions@athe.org.

C. If you plan to use PowerPoint or other projected material, you must request an LCD projector at the time of proposal. While there is a $300 fee, please note that grant requests for technology are strongly encouraged and frequently awarded.

D. It will not be possible to request specific days for presentations. If selected, your session could be scheduled on any day of the conference. Session Coordinators should ensure that all participants know that they should be available for all days of the conference.

E. Participants will be limited to a maximum of two presentations. "Presentation” refers to the act of delivering a paper, serving on a roundtable, or serving in an equivalent role in a different type of session. There is no limit to the number of sessions that a person can Chair or serve as Session Coordinator.

Session coordinators should expect to hear whether or not proposals have been accepted or rejected by mid-March, 2013.

Questions?  Contact THFG Chair/Conference Planner Charlotte McIvor at charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie. 

Deadline: October 15, 2013

Editors: Jocelyn L. Buckner (Chapman University) and Aimee Zygmonski (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Contact Email: nottageanthology@gmail.com

Playwright Lynn Nottage has expanded the theatrical parameters of storytelling through her bold depictions of African diasporic experiences across time, geography, and circumstance. Nottage’s plays reflect her passion and curiosity surrounding humanitarian, historical, and historiographic issues. From an African dwarf in the court of Louis XIV (Las Meninas), to female victims of war in the Congo (Ruined), to working class African Americans navigating the challenges of urban life (Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Intimate Apparel), among others, her body of work sheds light on lives, histories, and communities previously silenced and invisible on the stage. Her work has been critically lauded and recognized with numerous awards including a Pulitzer Prize for Ruined (2009), an Obie Award for Fabulation (2005), a MacArthur Genius Grant (2007) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005).

In an effort to celebrate and expand the scholarly conversation surrounding Nottage’s contributions to the fields of U.S., feminist, and African American theatre, we seek contributors to an anthology offering the first critical compliment to her work, a collection of essays dedicated to the scholarly examination of her plays, production history, artistic collaborations, and activism. We seek essays that engage with Nottage’s oevure, situating her within broader contemporary theatre practices while acknowledging her position within the specific realm of African American women dramatists. Proposed essays may address or extend beyond the following:

· Provide close readings of her plays on the page and especially in production

· Explore overarching meta-critical and theoretical discussions of thematic connections between her work and other artists, genres, and/or other aspects of contemporary theatre

· Examine Nottage’s positionality in a lineage of African American female playwrights from the nineteenth to twenty-first century

· Critique or contest the political themes and humanitarian issues addressed by Nottage

· Analyze Nottage’s negotiation of stereotypes in her approach to characterization and identity politics

· Assess the role of humor, irony, and satire in Nottage’s plays

· Address the pedagogical opportunities and challenges associated with teaching Nottage

· Investigate the role of history in Nottage’s dramaturgy in order to illuminate her talent for revising our understanding of the past while pointing to concerns of the present

Send abstracts of 500-750 words by October 15, 2013 to editors Jocelyn L. Buckner and Aimee Zygmonski at: nottageanthology@gmail.com. We welcome any inquires or questions about the anthology prior to submission. We have received strong interest in this project from a major press and have every reason to believe it will be accepted for publication.

Theatre History Symposium

Mid-America Theatre Conference (http://matc.us)

Cleveland, March 6-9, 2014

Revision

We seek high stakes choices in theatre production. For MATC’s 2014 Theatre History Symposium we ask participants to engage the question: What might high stakes history look like and what roles might "revision” play in that process?

‘Revision’ conjures multiple meanings: crisis, rebirth, renaissance, struggle, restoration. For the historian, the question of ‘revision’ brings to the fore acutely challenging questions: whose stories get told? How? When? By whom, for whom and to what ends? Stephanie Leigh Batiste writes, "The performance acts as an embodied commitment to a hypothetical present and a possible future,” suggesting a certain contingency between performance and revision. Where or how does history figure in such a formulation?

Historian Sam Wineburg cautions, "the relevance of the past may lie precisely in what strikes us as its initial irrelevance,” while Anais Nin astutely reminds us, "It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.” As historians, how do ideas of revision challenge our relationship to geographical, cultural, and temporal sites beyond our own? To the ‘seemingness’ of sites we presume to be our own? How do Wineburg, Batiste, and Nin dare us to look anew—perhaps revise—our interpretations not only of the theatrical past, but also of the present and future of our field?

Possible topics might address the above questions or explore one or more of the following:

§ What does one lose and what does one gain through revision?

§ How is the labor or process of revision made visible in our historiography?

§ What roles does revision play in how we commit to and formulate projects of theatre history?

§ What is the relationship between political imperatives, the moment of the event, and the way the event is historicized over time?

§ What are the opportunities and challenges of categorical reconfigurations of space (i.e., "global,” "world”, "transatlantic,” "Americas”)?

Please direct proposals and queries to the Theatre History Symposium co-chairs:

Dr. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta Dr. Chrystyna Dail

University of Pittsburgh Ithaca College

theatrehistorysymposium2014@gmail.com

Please submit proposals via email in Word or PDF Format to the gmail account above, including the following:

—Your name, title (student, faculty, independent scholar), academic affiliation, and a brief biography.

—Your contact information (particularly email).

—The title and abstract for your paper. Please limit abstracts to 250 words.

—Any audiovisual elements you request for you presentation. We cannot always guarantee audiovisual support, but will endeavor to take requests into account. Late requests may not be honored.

—We also welcome proposals for full panels. Contact the co-chairs for more information.

All proposals must be received by October 15, 2013

Robert A. Schanke Award

The Robert A. Schanke Research Award is given annually to an untenured faculty presenter of the Theatre History Symposium and carries a cash award of $500 as well as consideration for publication in Theatre History Studies, the journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. To be eligible for the Schanke Award, candidates must submit full, conference-length versions of their paper to the co-chairs at the addresses above by February 15, 2014.

With these questions in mind, a key precept underlying this book is that "improvisation” risks becoming a master trope that erases the multiple differential practices to which it generally refers. We intend for this collection to examine the astonishing diversity of practices that improvisation entails in ways that challenge monological notions of improvisation as a global practice that means the same thing in all circumstances. In that light, the volume explores "sound changes” as the word "changes” oscillates between its function as verb and as noun. The phrase "sound changes” thus references both the differential contexts in which improvisatory sound occurs (and how those change a sound’s meaning) and the ways in which sound itself is productive of changes that have an impact on wider spheres of human being.

The editors seek proposals for essays that address a wide range (geographically and culturally) of performance contexts in which improvisation is present as well as a diversity of critical traditions that have been, or should be, brought to bear on improvisatory practices. We are interested in work about music and sound, but also work that examines related improvisational forms such as dance, theater, intermedial performance practices, community organization and activism, transcultural encounters, and so on. As a means of addressing some of the key issues outlined above, we hope to include essays that address one or more of the following questions: How do improvisatory practices build from and challenge social norms and rules in different cultural contexts? How do transcultural exchanges lead to the emergence of hybrid improvisational forms? How do the assumed meanings of improvisational forms change as they travel between and across cultural contexts? How are transcultural, improvisational exchanges enhanced by emergent technologies, and to what extent do emergent technologies define the limits of improvisation as a social practice in certain contexts? How does a cross-cultural understanding of improvisation call into question existing theoretical and political assumptions guiding its study?  How does cultural difference determine how improvisation operates in wider spheres of cultural practice? How do "sound changes” signify these differences in ways that mark improvisatory discourses as a site of dissonance rather than consonance?

We are open to work that focuses on other questions as well and authors interested in pursuing other related lines of inquiry and research should contact us directly. To submit a chapter proposal for this edited collection please send an Abstract of no more than 300 words to Daniel Fischlin (dfischli@uoguelph.ca ) and Eric Porter ( ecporter@ucsc.edu ). If selected, chapters should be approximately 6000-10,000 words in length. The deadline for Abstract submission is October 15, 2013.

The 2008 worldwide economic crisis brought scholars of theatre and performance to re-examine how neoliberalism, economic nomadism, and transnationalism affect artistic practices. Trans as a prefix connotes directional movement  "across, to or on the farther side of, beyond, over” (OED), but it can also signify the flexibility and multiplicity of the movement. When applied to theatre and performance, the prefix can be used to describe geographical and material movements (such as tours and festivals) as well as the movements of experience and praxis (such as collaborations and intercultural performances). With the special joint issue of Theatre Research International and Theatre Survey, the editors aim to further the discussion on how theatre and performance intersect with transnationalism and economy. The editors invite essays that investigate how the recent economic developments have profoundly reoriented theatre within the broad framework of transnationalism. The essays should also explore how the economic impact is being experienced, understood, and represented by the many different constituencies involved.Subjects and questions essays might address include:

Successful cultural exchanges or transfers, or anywhere the unsuccessful transfers across cultural and geopolitical boundaries created unintentional positive or negative consequences.

• Transfers sponsored by or involving the State: What roles do official geopolitical entities/governments play or not play in the transnational movement of performance? What impact do non-state actors, like NGOs, have, especially as States concede more and more cultural humanitarian functions to NGOs? What are the histories of such practices?
• How do the communities formed in the transnational flow of culture, performance practices, and performers create non-national, imagined communities? Do such experiences emphasize the "trans-" over the "national" in such formulations?
• How can we investigate and understand the audience experience in the context of the transnational? How do such performances define the spectator, as well as prioritize certain spectatorial experiences over others?
• Are there emerging scholarly methods or approaches that are the most useful tools for discussing the growing traditions of transnational theatre and performance?

Please submit full articles (4,000-10,000 words) in electronic format and include a brief abstract of the essay (250 words) by using the online submission link available on the Theatre Survey web page (at http://journals.cambridge.org/tsy) and indicate on the cover letter that it's for the joint special issue. Be sure to read and follow the "Submission Guidelines.”  Inquiries can be sent to Charlotte Canning (TRI) at charlottecanning@mail.utexas.edu or Esther Kim Lee at theatresurvey@astr.org (TS). The editors reserve the right to determine in which journal the accepted article appears.

Deadline Extended:   6 January 2014

** Dance and Literature: Interwoven and Untangled ** 

Dance and literature weave the stuff of everyday human life—movement and language—into art.  They share the common goal of communication, embracing processes of questioning, theme-formation, exploration, investigation, articulation, feedback, and revision. Yet their materials, forms, and domains of expression and response are often distinct. This special theme issue will explore how these textures and threads are woven into both literary and choreographic works, and how patterns of expression shift, highlight, or obscure the partnering of these forms. We invite research submissions to a special issue of Dance Chronicle devoted to the theme, "Dance and Literature: Interwoven and Untangled,” to be edited by Lynn Matluck Brooks and Joellen A. Meglin. Papers might address such subjects as those listed below and other related topics proposed by authors: 

• Particular literary works have been sources of choreography. How does analysis of the relationship between a work of literature and its adaptation to dance reveal ways that these expressions overlap and diverge?
• Dance has played a role in many works of literature and poetry (think of William Butler Yeats, Willa Cather, or Jane Austin, or Gustave Flaubert for example). What makes dance a pivotal element in literary unfolding?
• Dancers have written their own manifestos, letters, and, more recently, blogs and websites. How do dancers think as writers?
• Some choreographers engage writing in the creative process—their own and that of their collaborators (dancers, musicians, and others). What are the functions and results of such writing-to-dancing practices?
• Since the early twentieth century, dancers have explored use of text in choreography. What role does text play for dance in these cases? What does it add to a dance? What does it say that dance alone cannot? How do audiences respond to this admixture?
• The roots of Western ballet lie in musical-theatrical forms with written scenarios or libretti. What led to separation of dance from this theatrical/literary context? What has it gained, and what lost, as a result? Does this context endure in some form?
• Dance is often referred to as a language. What makes it like or unlike verbal language? Is this analogy appropriate? Is it misleading?
• Can modes of literary analysis be applied to dance analysis? Can dance-specific methodologies help us to understand embodiment in literary works?  

Authors may wish to consider Taylor & Francis’s capacity of publishing material electronically concurrently with the printed version, so that readers can follow digital recordings of music and dance (examples) referred to in the article text. All manuscripts will receive double blind peer review.  Submissions will be accepted at any time before Mar. 1, 2014.  Send manuscripts or inquiries to Lynn Matluck Brooks at lynn.brooks@fandm.edu or Joellen Meglin at jmeglin@temple.edu. Style and formatting guidelines are available as "Instructions for Authors” at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=0147-2526&linktype=44

Changes of text, star, technology and audience can unsettle the apparent stability of a Broadway hit and this conference aims to deal head on with this discomfort/instability. Film scholars, musicologists, practitioners, historians and sociologists are equally encouraged to participate in this truly interdisciplinary conference. The keynote speech will be given by Professor Geoffrey Block (author of "Enchanted Evenings"), and the conference respondent will be Professor Stephen Banfield (author of "Sondheim's Broadway Musicals").

Innovative presentation formats are strongly favoured. In particular, we would like to encourage panels in which scholars and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds will have the opportunity to discuss ideas including (but not limited to) the following:

• The impact of changing star performers between stage and screen
• Problems of condensing or retaining material for the screen
• Ideas of authenticity and faithfulness in reproducing stage shows on the screen
• Archival evidence illustrating the adaptation process
• Analytical comparisons of parts of the stage and screen versions of a musical
• Sociological discussions regarding changes of audience resulting in screen adaptation (e.g. from New York to a global audience)

Proposals for twenty-minute papers, panels or other presentation formats should besubmitted electronically byTuesday 10 September 2013, 11:59 p.m.Students wishing to present developmental work are warmly encouraged to apply to speak for 5-10 minutes if they prefer.

Abstracts should be around 250 words and may be accompanied by a CV. Please send files in .doc or .pdf formats.

Send all proposals to restagingthesong@gmail.com

It is expected that some of the presenters will be invited to develop their papers into chapters for a subsequent book publication.

For queries, please contact conference convenor Dominic McHugh at d.mchugh@sheffield.ac.uk.