Download and Kristen Smiarowski () by May 31st 2010

EMBODYING POWER: WORK OVER TIME
JOINT CONFERENCE OF
THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THEATRE RESEARCH,
THE THEATRE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION,
AND THE CONGRESS ON RESEARCH IN DANCE
Seattle, WA
18-21 November 2010
The Renaissance Seattle Hotel
CALL FOR PAPERS & PARTICIPANTS FOR WORKING SESSIONS
DEADLINE: May 31, 2010*
The following contains summaries for the collection of 42 seminars, working groups, working
sessions, research groups, and the reading group convening at the 2010 conference, followed by
detailed Calls for Participants and submission requirements for each.
Please Note:
All selected participants must become members of ASTR or CORD.
CORD/ASTR guidelines ask that individuals APPLY TO ONLY ONE working session.
For more information about ASTR working sessions see:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
For more information about CORD working sessions see:
http://www.cordance.org/2010-conference
*Some working sessions have deadlines a few days earlier than May 31. Please see individual
submission guidelines for details.
SUMMARIES:
Massed Bodies, Mass Power - This seminar will explore cultural dreams of creating an
embodied politics through mass performance.
Activist Choreographies: Pas de Deux, Mashups, and Other (In)Elegant Partnerships –
This seminar will take Susan Leigh Foster’s “Choreographies of Protest” as an invitation to
consider the difficult activist reality of multiple “dancers” moving together--sometimes
competitively—within the same political space.
The Body (Un)censored: Eastern European Performance and Physical Politics - This
working session invites papers that focus on the ways in which physical expression in
performance has been shaped by or has reacted against political regimes in Eastern Europe
during the last century.
The Power of Absent Bodies - This seminar asks how the dead and absent body might disrupt a
reading of power through the inability to securely identify past practice or present form or,
alternately, how that corporeal power still works on and through the absent(ed) body.
New Cartographies: Mapping Identity Politics in Theatre and Dance - This working session
is devoted to exploratory creative projects, scholarship, or research based on contemporary and
historical performances that examine or use dance in theatrical performance or the development
of theatrical dance to address issues of identity politics.
Racial Impersonation?: Blackface Minstrelsy, Many Times, Many Places - This seminar
invites papers that consider specific moments and places within the longue durée of blackface
performance, analyzed in relation to local cultures and distinct social realities.
Research Group: Cognitive Science in Theatre and Performance This research group
solicits proposals for papers that focus on one or more of three terms central to defining the
relation between cognitive science, theatre and performance: mirror neurons, empathy and
embodiment.
Embodying Genre: Adaptation and Transformational Power - This roundtable session posits
whether adaptation is its own genre by exploring the collaborations, real and imaginary, that
occur on every level of adaptation, and the cultural “bending” that results when adaptations
overshadow their originals.
Power and Performance: War on Stage – This working group seeks papers that bring together
a broad range of scholarship and approaches to help investigate this pertinent area.
Televisuality and Embodiment - This seminar examines the mediatization of corporeal space,
time and energy by inviting response to several questions.
Bodies at Play - This working session explores the performative dimensions of “bodies at play,”
which we define as physical, mediatized, and / or imaginary “corporeal scenarios” where the
mind and body engage in “play,” broadly construed.
The Performance Research Working Group invites artists, scholars and artist-scholars to
participate in an interdisciplinary dialogue focused on the epistemological and methodological
questions raised by work that explores what anthropologist Dwight Conquergood calls
performance as a way of knowing.
The Open Texts Working Group seeks to exchange and analyze existing (published) written
material that is potentially ripe for dance-theatre performance collaborations in a working group
environment.
Contaminating Bodies: The Threat of Women on Performative Display- This working
session invites scholars who are interested in finding cross-disciplinary/cross-theoretical ways of
examining how recurring ideas/images of women impacted practices involving the public display
of female bodies, control over such display, and, consequently, women’s participation in public
performances.
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The ASTR 2010 Reading Group asks participants to read David Savran’s Highbrow/Lowdown:
Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class.
Moveable Feasts: Methods and Theories for Analyzing Food Performance - this working
group will explore the politics operating at the intersection of performer, food and audience.
Purposed Violence: Interrogating Rehearsal as a Site of Violence – This working group seeks
to investigate how power and violence work hand in hand in rehearsal, but also strive towards
practical solutions.
Butô’s Corporeal Acts: New Directions in Practice and Scholarship - This working group
seeks to convene a community of artists and scholars concerned with broadening the scope of
butô inquiry through a format that will both generate discussion around a selection of common
readings and facilitate the exchange of research.
Embodying Landscape: From Veneration to Disruption - This working group seeks to
unpack the historicity of landscape and performance, which is often hidden under the discourse
of the natural. Further, the group will focus on issues and case studies that examine how
performance reveals or marks the disruptions in, or the veneration of, landscape.
What the body knows: Reflections on Performance Practice as Research - This new
workgroup at the ASTR/CORD conference will provide a space for dance and theater
practitioners and scholars to investigate performance practice as research.
Popular Fiesta and Carnival: Movement, Politics and the Body en Masse - This working
session focuses on how the body en masse produces such motional flows in festive performance;
how does movement in typically large-scale public events generate, shape and recreate political
power?
REVISITING MEDIEVAL PERFORMANCE: EVIDENCE, THEORY, PRAXIS - This
working group will bring together various theoretical perspectives and broad definitions of
evidence, in order to explore the unique function and importance of performance in medieval
cultures.
Re-Territorializing the City: Performance, Place and Power in the Urban Environment This working session explores the means by which artists in urban areas find themselves in
constant negotiation with their surrounding environment.
The Diasporic Body and Its Discontents - Participants are invited to consider how power is
embodied in diasporic identities, cultural practices, and performances.
Exploring the Potential of a Dance Theatre MFA program - The leaders of this working
session make up the inaugural two classes of UCSD’s Dance Theatre MFA program. This
working session will be a round-table discussion.
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Dance Dramaturgy/Theatre Dramatury:A Dialogue to Explore Distinctions and
Possibilities - This roundtable seeks to bring together theatre and dance dramaturgs around
several issues of mutual concern.
Risking Encounter: When Bodies Meet in Performance - This working session seeks to foster
a conversation among dancers, theatre-makers, choreographers, and scholars that furthers the
renewed and deepened investigation of corporeality now emerging at the nexus of dance, theatre,
and performance studies.
Hybrid Lives of Professional Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre: Questions of Power in
Performance, Teaching & Community Work - This working group seeks to investigate,
develop and circulate emerging research on professional teaching artists in theatre and dance.
Nursing a Beautiful Bastard: Dance Theatre in Theory and Practice – This working session
seeks an informed conversation in which scholars and practitioners share observations and offer
prescriptive ideas about the role of Dance Theatre in today’s performing arts marketplace.
Amping It Up: Power and Affect in Inter-media Dance Theatre - This seminar is interested
in the different powers of the artist/practitioner/performer/audience as they negotiate, engage
with, expand, and control various forms of media in performance practices.
POWER MOVES: New Approaches to Plays from the Spanish Golden Age Through
Fencing, Dancing, & Connections to Shakespeare – This working session will reconstruct
physical interpretations for world-class performance texts, bridging gaps in production history
which currently inhibit teaching, staging, & critiquing plays from the Siglo de Oro.
The Dragon that Breathes Fire: Methodologies for tapping into corporeal power - The
working session includes alternation of whole group experiential sections lead by the convener
based on Butoh philosophy and techniques after which participants will break into smaller
groups.
Dancing "African": Race, Representation, and the Moving Body - This working group
considers how ideas of Africa are embodied through movement, paying special attention to
staged dance—that is, choreographed dance performed for an audience.
Indigenous Performance Research in the Americas: Bodies and Power - This session will
bring together scholars of Indigenous performance who are at various stages in their professional
development (senior researchers to graduate students) and work to contribute towards a
foundation upon which future dialogues can build.
Negotiations of Power - A History of Collective Creation - The aim of this working group is
to produce and publish a history of the international development of Collective Creation from the
early twentieth century forward.
Phenomenological Investigations of Embodied Agency - In this workshop, participants
embark on a collective, kinesthetic experience and – at the same time – a phenomenological
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investigation of embodied agency. We focus on how improvising bodies enact, experience, and
negotiate power.
The Media of Theater and Dance in History and Theory – This seminar invites scholars of
theater and dance to consider the importance of media to their work across historical and national
divides, and discuss together how emphasis on the historical specificity of media allows for a
renewed understanding of dance and theater.
Performing Modernisms - This working session explores the power of the body as a
communicative instrument in all types of modernist performance, exploring the dynamism
implicit in modernism’s various “
Dance and the Power of Aging: Embodiment at the intersection of nature and culture This working session opens up discussions on how sociality plays a far more complex and
powerful role in determining what is often understood as a strictly physiological event.
The Shakespearean Performance Research Group of the American Society for Theatre
Research (ASTR) – This working group seeks papers that address issues relating to the history,
theory, and practice of Shakespeare performance.
Ecology and/in/of Performance Working Group - The Ecology in/and/of Performance
working session is an ongoing research group that fosters trans-disciplinary research (including
performance-based research) that interrogates the intersection of performance and ecology.
Traumatic Structures - This working group is aimed at those who are interested in putting
forward a theory of trauma in performance.
2010 ASTR-CORD-TLA Joint Conference Call for Papers and Participants
Working Groups, Working Sessions, Research Groups Descriptions
Massed Bodies, Mass Power
This seminar will explore cultural dreams of creating an embodied politics through mass
performance. Revolutionary ideals since, most notably, 1789, have turned to massed bodies in
space to articulate, confirm, and advance new systems attempting to solidify their power. By
bringing thousands of bodies together in festivals, dance, and theatrical performances,
revolutionaries of all stripes have aimed to consolidate feelings of community, establish
hierarchies of power (or model the lack thereof), engineer the eruption of an uprising, and re-find
a kind of corporeal "presence" deemed missing from the most recent regime.
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Questions this seminar poses include: What kind(s) of power does the massing of thousands of
bodies together create, enable, or encourage? What theoretical notions of "presence" help us
understand the particular need for such a massive gathering of corporeal energies? When, and
what types of, fictional elements enhance the goals of the revolutionaries, and when are fictional
elements a distraction or impediment to their goals? How does the relationship between the
audience and the performer define itself when there are thousands of participants, and when does
the sheer number of orchestrated or gathered bodies mandate its own rules for that relationship?
Papers are welcome within any era and place of performance history, such as the festivals of the
French Revolution; Soviet revolutionary spectacles; mass performance under Mao; the rise of
mass choreographies in Western Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s; Germany’s Thingspiele
performances; Laban’s Festkultur ideals; Italian mass performances under Mussolini; Olympic
ceremonies; mass performances of the 1960s; and up to today’s flash mobs. Theoretical papers
should explore presence, mass, and power in the context of community formation and cultural or
political revolution.
Format
This will take the form of a small seminar. Participants will be expected to read each other's
abstracts and papers. Authors will have discussed their papers with selected other members of
the group in October. Authors will begin the seminar by outlining and investigating points of
intersection in their papers. The papers will be distributed not only among the seminar authors
but also, ideally, made available (on the web) for interested ASTR members in order to enable
the highest degree of conversation possible once the seminar convenes in Seattle.
Please send a 200-word abstract and brief bio via email attachment to [email protected] by Monday,
May 31. Kimberly Jannarone - Associate Professor, Theater Arts University of California, Santa
Cruz - [email protected]
Activist Choreographies: Pas de Deux, Mashups, and Other (In)Elegant Partnerships
In her 2003 article, “Choreographies of Protest,” Susan Leigh Foster studies political
performances as choreographed movements of impassioned bodies. We take Foster’s dancestudies metaphor as an invitation to consider not only the movement of bodies in protest, but also
the difficult activist reality of multiple “dancers” moving together--sometimes competitively—
within the same political space. Rarely do activists stage protests, demonstrations, direct actions,
or other such productions as solo pieces. They are obliged to move with as well as to or for
others, sometimes resulting in unlikely or inelegant partnerships.
In an oppositional paradigm of activism, groups seeking to transform policy or public opinion
regularly improvise new moves and adaptive gestures to sidestep the hegemonic choreographies
of exploitative state or transnational entities. In a coalitional paradigm, activist groups that
previously focused on protest models might find themselves working in (sometimes uneasy)
alliance with affiliated groups or even civic and corporate organizations. While such a
“movement of movements” can enhance the energy and impact of a single event, it also
multiplies the opportunities for careful activist choreographies to dissipate into a hodgepodge of
mismatched steps and divergent tactics. As the rise of right-wing populism (e.g., tea parties)
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demonstrates, the dance floor now features performers “stealing each other’s moves,” with
conservative activists adapting leftist tactics. Such ideological diversity leads at times to scenes
of opposed or aligned groups engaging each other in a high-stakes tango of choreographic
responses and counter-responses.
In this session we invite scholars and activists to explore these and other activist
partnerships. How do groups with divergent means/ends address these differences in order to
stage a particular intervention? How do mutually antagonistic movements working in the same
space compete for public attention? How do civic and corporate entities act as dance partners
whose moves activists must carefully negotiate? How do activist groups of various political
affiliations adopt each other’s moves and to what ends? How might participants investigate the
efficacy of activism through fields that could include social movement theory,
performance/cultural studies, and/or political science?
Format:
Participants will email 10-page papers by 9/15, after which we will organize participants into
four sub-groups. Over the following month, sub-group members will exchange mails among
themselves about each other's work. At the 2-hour conference session, each sub-group will make
a structured, 10-minute presentation consisting of 3 minutes of summary (what were their
contributors' arguments?), 5 minutes of update (what issues have our conversations raised?), and
2 minutes posing a “pressing question” to the seminar. After each presentation, we will spend
ten minutes discussing the group's arguments and question. Four presentations plus discussions
will take up 80 minutes. With ten minutes of transition time, the first phase of the seminar
should take 90 minutes. During the remaining half-hour, we will open the conversation to
auditors, who may pose questions or contributions of their own.
Please send by Monday May 31st a 200-300 word abstract and brief bio to Sonja Kuftinec at
[email protected] and John Fletcher at [email protected]. Decisions will be made by
the end of June.
The Body (Un)censored: Eastern European Performance and Physical Politics
This working session invites papers that focus on the ways in which physical expression in
performance has been shaped by or has reacted against political regimes in Eastern Europe
during the last century.
In the decade preceding the Bolshevik Revolution, many Russian theatrical practitioners
experimented with the physical grotesque (pantomime, commedia dell’ arte, puppetry) and new
styles of dance (the Ballets Russes, eurythmics, dance influenced by Isadora Duncan). After
1917, movement styles like biomechanics aimed to promote the Revolution, until such styles
were condemned by the Stalinist regime as “formalist.” During the communist era, in the entire
Eastern block, theatre, as a live performance, was the primary medium – unlike radio,
newspapers and TV– that could escape governmental censorship. Playwrights and actors learned
to speak between the lines, using metaphors, symbols, body language, or sometimes just a wink
to communicate anti-establishment sentiments to their audiences. Thus, the body became a site
of the subversion of Socialist Realism and of revolt against censorship and oppression. The fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, brought an end to
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the censorship that had been an integral part of the Eastern European theatrical experience. The
unexpected onslaught of political freedom, ironically, deprived the theatre of what for years had
been essential to it: its corporeal political subtext. In the post-Soviet era theatre and dance have
been forced to reinvent the performing body in a new age of free market censorship.
We welcome papers that deal with any aspect of how physical performance has responded to
political environments in Eastern Europe during the last century. We aim to trace the multiple
trajectories of physical expression in Eastern European theatre and dance over the past century
and their international influence. Considering the influence of Eastern European performance on
Western Theatre, our hope is to encourage active interest in this area within the broader field of
theatre research.
This is 3-hour working session.
Working session format:
 Papers (7-10 pages) will be distributed to session participants by October 1; all papers
should be read by Nov. 1 in order to facilitate online pre-conference discussions of each
other’s work.
 Participants will present 2-3 page abstracts of their papers during the session to help
familiarize audience members with each project. This will be followed by a discussion of
the themes raised in the papers, including suggestions for how to further develop those
themes.
 The goal of the working group is to provide feedback and to create a body of thematically
related articles for possible publication.
Please email a 300-word abstract and 2-page CV in a single Microsoft Word attachment to both
Magda Romanska ([email protected]) and Dassia N. Posner at
[email protected] by May 31, 2010. Participants will be notified of their acceptance in late
June.
The Power of Absent Bodies
Responding to the conference focus on corporeal power, this seminar asks how the dead and
absent body might disrupt that reading of power through the inability to securely identify past
practice or present form or, alternately, how that corporeal power still works on and through the
absent(ed) body. We welcome proposals that address either of the following questions (ideally,
we seek a balance of papers addressing each question):
1) How can scholars acknowledge the power of the body's movements in performance if those
bodies can no longer be witnessed in performance?
With scant evidence, perhaps only anecdotal tales from the past, how can we articulate
the movement of bodies, both of spectators and performers, now long dead? Can we resurrect
those movements through textual analysis or production? What are the costs and what is the
necessity of bringing that physicality into textuality? In this vein, we would invite papers that
propose strategies to recover bodies historiographically and/or engage in the ethics of that
recovery.
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2) How can scholars examine the disruptive power of the incorporeal ghost in performance?
How does the ghost character, or the character never seen or embodied on stage, but
written and present in the text and performance (for example the dead in Synge's Riders to the
Sea or Matthew Shepard in The Laramie Project), disrupt the bodily enactments of power on
stage. Does the power of the immaterial operate differently in its disembodiedness, or, are those
non-visible presences rendered powerless through the lack of corporeality? We would invite
papers that analyze how the invisible ghosts may or may not destabilize notions of identity
(individual, cultural, national, ontological) represented by and through the visible performers'
bodies on stage.
While all participants would read each other’s papers, we would pair up participants before the
seminar, providing each pair with prompts/questions to address through pre-conference e-mail
conversations. Once in the seminar, each pair would be given time to "report" on their
conversation (connections made, additional questions raised, etc.), before the seminar
participants as a whole grapple with the question how power may be de/stabilized through
absent, de-corporealized bodies.
Proposals should be e-mailed as Word documents to both Kay Martinovich at the University of
Minnesota ([email protected]) and Jeanne Willcoxon at St. Olaf College
([email protected]) by Monday, May 31, 2010. Please limit abstracts to 250 words and
include your name, title and academic affiliation with your abstract.
New Cartographies: Mapping Identity Politics in Theatre and Dance
Jocelyn L. Buckner, independent scholar, [email protected]
Aimee Zygmonski, University of California, San Diego, [email protected]
From musical theatre, vaudeville, cabaret, and revues that seemingly “require” dance, to
“straight” plays and devised theatre, the incorporation of movement and dance into theatrical
performance enhances relationships, defines characters, and establishes cultural parameters.
Dance practitioners have in turn long drawn thematic inspiration from theatre, reimaging the
narration of stories and the exploration of social issues through a kinetically based genre.
Explorations of how performing bodies exhibit and code for various identity signifiers including
race, class divisions, gender lines, dis/abilities, and sexual modifiers have never been more at the
forefront of conversations in these related fields. The past few seasons on Broadway alone have
served as an arena for boundary blending of theatre and dance in productions exploring
individual and community identities. Bill T. Jones’s Fela, the film-turned-musical Billy Elliot,
the dancing set in Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations’, and Next to Normal’s tightly
choreographed neuroses are just a few recent examples which meld dance and theatre in
performance. Likewise contemporary dance is infused with theatrical influence and reflections
from American modern dance icon Paul Taylor’s new work “Also Playing,” a tribute to
vaudeville artists which is part of his 2010 season, to American Ballet Theatre’s take on
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
This working session is devoted to exploratory creative projects, scholarship, or research based
on contemporary and historical performances that examine or use dance in theatrical
performance or the development of theatrical dance to address issues of identity politics. Ideally,
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participants will represent a variety of specialization areas in theatre or dance and offer varying
perspectives on the physical in performance, addressing theoretical, critical, or practical
treatment of identity politics in performance. Race, class, gender, and sexuality as mapped upon
the body heightens the societal perception of identity in its starkest form: a being moving
through space, offering up his/her physical self as conduit, expanding the boundaries of
traditional performance.
Questions to consider include, but are not limited to:
 How does the power of the corporeal used by playwrights, directors, choreographers,
designers, and performers communicate, contain, celebrate, or complicate popular
stereotypes?
 What cultural assumptions or personal/political identities transfer from the moving body
to the scripted word to the awaiting audience?
 How does the negotiation of the political become powerful through dance? Through
theatre? Through the deployment of the tandem workings of both?
 What are some inherent problems or limitations to the overlap in these fields?
 How does new media and technology foster or limit these tenuous theatre/dance
partnerships?
 How are the geographical boundaries crossed or cultural road maps re-drawn in the
intersections of dance and theatre performance and scholarship?
 How can artists and scholars encourage further interdisciplinary exchanges between
theatre and dance to investigate pressing social issues?
We encourage participants from all areas, including scholars, artists, presenters, and critics.
Applicants should submit a 500 word abstract and brief bio to the session leaders via email by
May 31, 2010. Selected participants will then circulate a 10-15 page paper about their topic
within the group prior to the ASTR conference. Participants will be paired by the group
conveners to provide focused, specific pre-conference feedback to 2-3 other participants via
email. Pre-conference exchanges will establish the foundation for more in-depth conversations
during the two hour working group session. During the conference participants will engage in a
roundtable discussion that may include small group break out sessions; opportunities to share
brief demonstrations of performance techniques or designs, archival materials, or other visual
examples of issues of representation that are not able to be circulated prior to the conference; as
well as debate about the intersections of theatre and dance and the future of their relationship as
separate yet related fields. General guidelines for working sessions and participants are at:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx.
Racial Impersonation?: Blackface Minstrelsy, Many Times, Many Places
Session Leader: Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern University)
When one race impersonates another and bills it as entertainment, reception is a
barometer of ethnic hegemony and sensitivity to inter-racial politics. Historians of American
performance claim that the most prominent tradition of race impersonation — blackface
minstrelsy, dating from the 1820s — has always been racist (Bean; Cockrell; Lott; Toll),
however work on Ghana shows that socially-symbolic meanings in blackface are not universal
(Cole). Saidiya Hartman’s research stresses the brutality behind representations of Topsy and
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Zip Coon, black-faced figures of fun in America, and though British stages imported these
figures Hazel Waters argues that the representations’ meanings were benign when minstrelsy
coalesced as a British genre, a process completed in the late-1850s (2007). Recent work by W.T.
Lhamon (2009) suggests that the racialized inscriptions might not be as clear cut in nineteenthcentury American minstrelsy as has been assumed.
Historians face many challenges in reconstructing and interpreting these highly complex
performances. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) and recent controversies over blackface
masquerade at the University of Toronto and Northwestern University (2009) demonstrate that in
North American contexts history is overdetermined when this particular racial impersonation is
invoked. This seminar invites papers that consider specific moments and places within the
longue durée of blackface performance, analyzed in relation to local cultures and distinct social
realities. Is there evidence of how interpretive traditions vary the racialized “content” of
blackface minstrelsy so that reinvention, trace, and ascription may be noted, contested, or
negated in evidence of reception? How does blackface operate in various performative genres –
variety, theatre, revels, carnival, and so on – and modes – dance, song, instrumentation, make-up
or masking, costume, gesture, etc. – in ways that are particular to a place and time? How does
color (“black” or otherwise) signify to audiences in combination with factors such as dialect or
accent, or practices of local knowledge?
This topic respects no disciplinary boundary between theatre and dance studies, as the
blackface minstrel tradition equally involves spoken word, dance, song, song-and-dance, and
instrumental turns. It provides an opportunity to discuss work across theatre, music, and dance
studies to consider these modalities comparatively.
Short papers will be pre-circulated 30 days before the conference. Depending on the
number and content of papers, I may cluster the submissions by period, region, or methodology
for some coordinated pre-conference e-discussion. My intention is to try to focus the in-person
discussion in Seattle on historiographic interventions, interpretive strategies, and the insights that
come from multi-national and trans-historical comparative work.
Send a 300-400 word abstract and brief bio (both in Word) by 31 May to:
Tracy C. Davis [email protected]
For guidelines about working sessions, see:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Research Group: Cognitive Science in Theatre and Performance
John Lutterbie (Stony Brook University), Amy Cook (Indiana University)
The research group in Cognitive Science in Theatre and Performance solicits proposals for
papers that focus on one or more of three terms central to defining the relation between cognitive
science, theatre and performance: mirror neurons, empathy and embodiment. Use of these terms
has varied dramatically, frequently resulting in papers based on popularizations of the science
that do not depend on a rigorous understanding of existing research. We seek abstracts that
explore how the applicants are using these terms as they apply cognitive science to their theatre
and performance research. The goal is to have a dialogue that seeks to set standards for using
these three concepts responsibly as Cognitive Science establishes itself as a field of research in
Theatre and Performance Studies. New research in the cognitive sciences offers new
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perspectives on the interrelatedness of neural connections, empathy and the body. Cognitive
psychologists and neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, V. S. Ramachandran, Paula
Niedenthal, Vittorio Gallese, along with philosophers and linguists such as Shawn Gallagher,
Evan Thompson, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, are developing models of these concepts
that can be and are being fruitfully applied by scholars to the arts and humanities.
Potential research topics include:
 How the theory of mirror neurons enhances our understanding of theatrical and
performance practices.
 How a scientific notion of embodiment opens reframes research in theatre and
performance.
 How theories of mind, memory, imagination, and empathy can affect readings of
plays and archival materials.
 How concepts of embodiment as the dynamic interaction of body, mind and
environment allows us to rethink acting and spectatorship in theatre and
performance.
Participants will be asked to send a) abstracts that clearly define their area of study, b) the
argument that will be made and c) a brief bibliography. The organizers will provide successful
applicants with a reading on each of the three terms that are the focus of the working group,
expecting they will be referenced in the final essays. Papers in completed form can be no longer
than 3000 words. They must be sent (in digital format) to the organizers of the session no later
than August 1, 2010. Completed papers will subsequently be distributed to participants; and
groups formed. All will be expected to participate in an on-line discussion of the papers with
other members of their group prior to arriving at the conference. The results of these interactions
will guide the organizers in defining the structure of the seminar.
Proposals should be sent to [email protected] and [email protected] no later
than Monday, May 31, 2010. Proposals should be no longer than 250 words and include a brief
bibliography, contact information: phone numbers (home and office), e-mail address, postal
address, fax number. All selected participants must become members of ASTR. For additional
information about presenter responsibilities go to:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Embodying Genre: Adaptation and Transformational Power
This roundtable session posits whether adaptation is its own genre by exploring the
collaborations, real and imaginary, that occur on every level of adaptation, and the cultural
“bending” that results when adaptations overshadow their originals. The process of adaptation is
full of contention, requiring risk, sacrifice, compromise, and creativity. For an adapter, success
means illuminating patterns within the original work while simultaneously reinventing it, moving
and reshaping ideas with surgical skill. Through investigating the often unexplored exchanges
that occur between the lines, or brushstrokes, or frames of adaptations, theatre practitioners and
scholars learn a great deal about both the original artwork and the transformed result; moreover,
this investigation exposes the network of meanings that runs throughout and binds them
together.
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To name just a handful, this exchange includes performances adapting visual art, classical ballet,
and twentieth century popular culture that enable pseudovoyeuristic participation on the part of
audiences, and performances that engage with familiar cultural symbols on an adaptive level.
Rarely is the adapter's task as simple as “putting the book on film” or “putting the film on stage”:
in most cases, the adapter works with as much precision and patience as a translator, and the
result is an entirely new work of art with its own unique perspective.
We seek papers that call into question the power dynamics of adapter and original author as well
as adaptation and source-text. Participants will submit 8-page papers to be distributed and
discussed amongst the group before the Conference. At ASTR, members of the group will make
brief, five-minute presentations of their papers, which will lead to an hour-long discussion of
larger issues of adaptation in performance. Please send a 200 word abstract, an 80 word bio and
your name, institutional affiliation and contact information to Hesse Phillips
([email protected]), Rachel Mansfield ([email protected]) and Helen Lewis
([email protected]).
The guidelines for ASTR working session may be found at
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Power and Performance: War on Stage
War is everywhere: in addition to the current military conflicts going on in Iraq and Afghanistan,
scholarly investigations of the intersections of performance and war have exploded in the last
few years. For example: “War and Other Bad Shit” was the topic of The Drama Review (2008);
the University of Manchester has started “In Place of War,” a network of theatre and dance
artists in war zones across the world; and the theme of the 2005 Southern Theatre Conference
was Theatre, War, and Propaganda. In an effort to join in this conversation, our working group
seeks papers that bring together a broad range of scholarship and approaches to help investigate
this pertinent area. The topic is relevant to this year’s conference theme because war is first and
foremost an expression of nations or groups of people seeking to gain power over another group;
historically a clash of armies at a specific site, war can also be conceived of in more abstract
terms such as the struggle for supremacy in the Cold War. The group seeks scholars from all
levels of expertise to enrich work on these issues.
Papers might address how plays, performances, musicals, operas, popular entertainments,
and dance:
- Explicitly stage war, its attendant struggles for power, or its aftermath.
- Have engaged in or been co-opted for propagandistic purposes to argue for or
against war. Who was the intended audience and what were the responses?
- Are sites for discussions of national, racial, or gender identity, particularly in
wartime. How are these identities inter-related?
- Have helped or been used by war survivors to come to terms with, describe, or
engage in truth-telling about their experiences.
- Have been part of a society’s rituals in preparation for war or served as living
memorials thereafter.
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-
Has wartime changed the theatre (i.e. economics)? What provisions for theatre
have been made for soldiers, P.O.W.s. or citizens in occupied territory?
The format for this working group has four distinct components. First, participants will submit a
preliminary draft by September 23, 2010. The conveners will help facilitate an initial exchange
of papers; participants will be expected to read and respond to 3-4 papers at this time. There will
also be an online site where participants can engage in an exchange of ideas. Final papers (8-12
pages) should be submitted by October 21, 2010. The conveners will divide the participants into
different small subgroups to continue an online discussion and exchange ideas prior to the
conference. During the conference session, the subgroups will respond to larger questions
suggested by the conveners, before coming together for a discussion that will include all
participants.
All papers must be submitted electronically in MS Word or a compatible format. Images, video,
music or other multimedia are encouraged, but the participant must be able share it with the
group prior to the conference.
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Please submit a 300-word abstract, along with name, affiliation, and brief bio (150 words) to
Jenna Kubly ([email protected]) and Katie Egging ([email protected]) by May 31, 2010.
Televisuality and Embodiment
Brian Herrera (University of New Mexico) and Nick Salvato (Cornell University)
[email protected]; [email protected]
In recent years, performance scholars have increasingly investigated the ways in which
televisuality has reconfigured the dimensions of "liveness" and "presence,” thereby testing
notions long presumed to be constitutive of the performance event. Yet even as these scholars
have challenged the privileging of presence and ephemerality within performance studies, much
work remains to be done as we consider the ways in which televisuality has specifically reshaped
comparable notions of "embodiment" in performance – especially those performances evincing
power relations through enactments of memory, nostalgia, knowledge transmission, erotics,
racial formations, and related identity formations. Conceiving “televisuality” broadly as a field of
transmission, mediation, and documentation, we propose in this seminar to examine the
mediatization of corporeal space, time and energy by inviting response to the following
questions:



How do ideas of televisuality, embodiment and temporality operate with and against each
other?
How is the construction of historical "time" challenged and transformed by the interplay
between embodiment and televisuality?
Is there a distinction between the use of televisuality as a mechanism deployed in service
to an extant embodied performance and those embodied performances explicitly enacted
for – or surreptitiously captured within – a televisual frame?
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

How do proliferating modes of digital televisuality (youtube, streaming video, etc.)
expand and/or limit the researcher's access to hitherto "remote" embodied performance
practices? How do such technologies complicate conventional distinctions between
producers and consumers—and thus the very notion of audience and "the gaze"—vis-avis embodied performance?
How might we interrogate the “archival” function of televisuality within contemporary
library and museum practice regarding embodied performance? How does such a
televisual archive influence contemporary and future repertoires of embodied
performance for researchers and/or for practitioners?
SESSION FORMAT AND GUIDELINES
This seminar welcomes paper proposals that document specific instances of the dynamic
interplay of televisuality and embodiment in performance as well as proposals that develop
scholarly (critical/theoretical/historical) assessments of such modes of performance. The seminar
will also use a group blog to structure preconference dialogue. Beginning in late summer, and
following a regular rotation, each member of the seminar will be asked to develop at least one
post for the group blog. Each post will provide a brief introduction to the participant’s ongoing
research, as it relates to the seminar, and prompt further discussion among seminar members.
While the blog mechanism will be essential to the seminar’s preconference dialogue, the posting
schedule will be flexible and no previous blogging experience is necessary. At the end of the
period of preconference dialogue, each member of the seminar will also produce a 12-15 page
paper to circulate among the group one month prior to the conference.
Proposal Submissions: Please send a 200-300 word proposal and a brief C.V. to Brian Herrera at
[email protected] no later than Monday, May 31. You may also address any queries regarding
the seminar—including those relating to the preconference group blog process—to Brian Herrera
or Nick Salvato ([email protected]). All selected participants must become members of ASTR
or CORD.
Bodies at Play
We are seeking scholars interested in participating in a working session that explores the
performative dimensions of “bodies at play,” which we define as physical, mediatized, and / or
imaginary “corporeal scenarios” where the mind and body engage in “play,” broadly construed.
Examples might include self-conscious movement through dance activity, competitive
movement in sports, or integrative movement in yoga or other meditation/movement practices;
embodied character movement in role playing experiences, spect/actor movement at festivals,
sporting events, and rituals; and/or projected movement onto dolls, board game components,
toys, and the like.
Within this exploration, we will pay close attention to the ways these corporeal scenarios
discipline the body through expectation, narrative, tradition, and use of space. We will also
investigate bodies at play as possible sites of intervention in which people might critically
engage with the political and historical trajectories behind these power-based scenarios.
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We are particularly interested in papers that apply theory to case studies, as opposed to papers
based primarily on the review of extant literature.
Papers might consider questions such as:
-What roles do play-based corporeal scenarios ask us to physically embody, and with what
ramifications?
-What discoveries do these playful performances set up for the participant, how are these
discoveries transmitted through movement, and what values do those discoveries impart?
-Which groups of people are missing from these played-through performances, and how would
their presence add counter or destabilizing narratives?
- How does age affect playful movement? What is specific to these performances targeted at
people at various age levels, and how are these age levels constructed/treated?
-How can the “playful” nature of these performances be a seductive force, drawing in
participants and associating them with a single perspective?
-How are playful performances and performances in play related to learning and educational
environments? How do these destinations determine, constrain or circumscribe embodiments of
play?
WORKING PROCESS AND FORMAT:
We will utilize a seminar format in which all participants circulate their papers in advance of the
November conference. Participants will engage in e-mail discussion of the papers during the
weeks leading up to the conference. The session chairs will pair participants whose work
addresses similar or dialogically engaged material, and these partners will provide the primary
responses to each others' papers. (All participants will, however, read all selected papers.)
During the 2-hour time allocated, each pair will have ten minutes to respond to each other's
papers (5 minutes per paper). After this, there will be time for a general discussion around the
topic as a whole based on questions that the conveners generate in response to the holistic themes
arising from the submitted studies.
If interested, please submit a 250 word abstract for the paper you will present and a brief
biography by May 31, 2010; authors will be notified of acceptance by July 1st.
We strongly suggest looking at the ASTR link that outlines best practices for working sessions:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Please submit proposals to BOTH Matt Omasta at [email protected] AND Drew
Chappell at [email protected]. You may also address questions to these contacts.
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Pointing at the Experiential: Constellating the Multiple Realities of Performance as
Research
Professor Kris Salata, Florida State University, [email protected]
Professor Daniel Mroz, University of Ottawa, [email protected]
The Performance Research Working Group aims to create a venue for theoretically informed
engagement with emerging scholarship grounded in praxis. The Working Group invites artists,
scholars and artist-scholars to participate in an interdisciplinary dialogue focused on the
epistemological and methodological questions raised by work that explores what anthropologist
Dwight Conquergood calls performance as a way of knowing. We are interested in scholarship
that takes praxis as its object, yet which acknowledges the essential differences between
empirical knowledge and its scholarly articulation.
Our goal is a cross-disciplinary analysis of the centrality of embodied experience in both the
creation and reception of performance, as well as the challenges (methodological, theoretical,
rhetorical) attendant on the process of its articulation. We focus on the experiential not only as a
dimension that bridges the concerns of theorists and practitioners, but also as a productive locus
for investigating the limits and conventions of scholarly discourse. By foregrounding the central
role of the experiential in Performance as Research, we hope to encourage rigorous
methodological reflection and rhetorical experimentation responding to the challenges of
articulating embodied perception and somatic experience within the frame of a scholarly text.
Our emphasis on embodied experience arises both from themes that have been developing in the
Working Group over the last four years and from the focus chosen for this upcoming meeting of
ASTR in collaboration with the Congress on Research in Dance.
By grounding each participant’s offering in the lived experience of performance (which
encompasses both production and reception), we propose to further refine our working
knowledge of this new territory of methodological and epistemological analysis. Key issues
include:
 The multiple concepts and contested definitions of Performance as Research,
 The positioning of the scholar, artist and the artist-scholar along the continuum of
participation/observation.
 The various and seemingly heterodox epistemological perspectives encompassed by the
concept of Performance as Research,
 The academic evaluation of Performance as Research,
 The articulation of experiential and embodied knowledge.
Format
The Performance as Research Working Groups assembled at ASTR over the last four years have
provided a locus of engagement for scholars and artists with diverse investments vis-à-vis
performance practice and its discursive formulation. Participants in the 2010 working group must
commit to and continue substantive dialogue and exchange prior to the actual conference,
responding to one another’s contributions and taking full advantage of the opportunities for
collegial input on members’ diverse projects.
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Proposals should not exceed 300 words and be accompanied by a short bio. Please send
proposals by Monday, May 31, 2010 to the conveners: Daniel Mroz, University of Ottawa,
[email protected] and Kris Salata, Florida State University, [email protected]
Selected participants will be notified by June 15th, 2010. We will initiate email discussion on the
basis of abstracts on August 1, 2010, with an initial draft of a paper no longer than 10 pages to be
circulated no later than September 15th, 2010. We expect that participants will engage in
sustained dialogue on evolving work during the months prior to the conference. Rather than
regurgitating synopses of individual essays, discussion at the November meeting will jump
directly into addressing the key issues that emerge during pre-conference interaction.
Open Texts
The Open Texts working group seeks to exchange and analyze existing (published) written
material that is potentially ripe for dance-theatre performance collaborations in a working group
environment. Those interested in applying to our working group will propose a specific text (a
play, radio play/s, poem/s, or other written material) and outline its merits as a strong candidate
for dance-theatre performance practices. Questions we ask our working group participants to
consider as they select works to share with the group include but are not limited to:
- What dramaturgically constitutes various works as “open texts”? What is an open text? What
makes it ripe for dance/theatre collaborations?
-Is this a writer whose work ventures into more “open” territories, thus inviting dance artists to
interpret and represent his/her written ideas with a physical dance vocabulary?
-Whether prose or poetry, how are the formal and dramatic elements (rhythm, structure, meter,
imagery, rhyme, character, and story etc.) interrogated and prioritized in the development of a
dance-theatre work?
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Those interested in applying to our working group should
propose a specific text (a play, radio play/s, poem/s, or other written material) and outline its
merits as a strong candidate for cross-disciplinary performance practices.
Please submit a) a 250 word abstract, including your choice of open texts, and a brief rational for
your inclusion in this working group; and b) a short bio. Later, we’ll ask those invited to share no
more than ten pages of the written material with the working group. Please submit all materials
to Christina Tsoules Soriano ([email protected]) and Cindy Gendrich ([email protected]) by
May 31, 2010.
EXPECTATIONS: If your proposal is selected for the “Open Texts” working group, you will be
expected to read and consider the selected “open text” materials put forth by each member. You
will also need to prepare to contribute to the discussion with your own proposed text, being
ready to include significant historical, cultural and/or contextual information about the author
and his/her text. You might also consider specific methods to introduce in a rehearsal process of
this piece.
18
In keeping with the conference themes of power and embodiment, please reflect on these works
becoming differently embodied in performance when they are enlivened or provoked from
various methodological approaches, such as that of a choreographer and theatre director,
collaboratively. Other themes from the conference, such as identifying the “transformational or
liberatory power of performance” in these texts could also be discussed, as well as identifying
how a dance-theatre collaboration of such texts might elicit embodied responses from its
audience.
Contaminating Bodies: The Threat of Women on Performative Display
Cultural perceptions of female bodies have often been grounded in ancient notions of biology—
women as leaky, loose, uncontrolled—and influenced by fears about that physiology’s power
over others. For example, beliefs about menstrual blood as a mortally treacherous contagion still
exist. Moreover, notions of the dangerously excessive female body endure in contemporary popculture images that seek to contain female appetites for food, sex, and power.
This working session invites scholars who are interested in finding cross-disciplinary/crosstheoretical ways of examining how these recurring ideas/images impacted practices involving the
public display of female bodies, control over such display, and, consequently, women’s
participation in public performances. Significantly, in many periods and contexts where women
did not appear in dramatic events publicly, they did participate in public dancing. We are seeking
work across dance and theatre that considers not only the ways in which these genres empower
the female body (often as a defiant presence), but also how our perceptions of empowerment
through dance and theatre differ.
We are especially interested in exploring the idea of contagion and how cultures interpret
performative displays as imbuing female bodies with the power to “pollute” spectators. Although
we might relegate such ideas to the past, theories of disgust explored by Mary Douglas and
William Ian Miller suggest that these fears persist. Theories of contamination may help us better
understand not only historical responses to female bodies, but also negative responses to
contemporary stagings of women whose bodies resist hegemonic “ideals.” Negative responses to
the film Precious and to magazine layouts featuring “plus-size” models offer two recent
examples.
We invite work from a range of historical periods, geographies, and theoretical frameworks. We
will organize participants into smaller working groups that encourage dialogue across
disciplinary, theoretical, and historical boundaries. Members of these groups will exchange short
papers before the conference. Each participant will prepare brief written feedback for the other
members’ papers, which they will exchange and discuss at the conference session. We will
follow this small group work with a larger group discussion about conclusions and connections
that emerged from this work, and possibilities for further study.
Please submit a 200-word abstract and brief bio to both Jen-Scott Mobley ([email protected]) and Jill Stevenson ([email protected]) by Monday, May 31st. Feel
free to email Jen-Scott or Jill with questions.
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ASTR 2010 Reading Group: Institutional Economies in the Performing Arts: David
Savran’s Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class
Lara D. Nielsen ([email protected]), Assistant Professor, Macalester College
Patricia Ybarra ([email protected]), Assistant Professor, Brown University
This 2010 ASTR reading group asks participants to read David Savran’s Highbrow/Lowdown:
Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. In recent years, many scholars have
begun to examine the institutional economies that come to bear on producing theatrical and other
performance events, deploying Marxian and neo Marxian frames of thinking to pursue both
historical and theoretical analysis. Reading Savran supplies an opportunity to concentrate our
collective attentions on an earlier period in U.S. history, motivating a community of scholars to
reflect on the cultural politics of American pasts (including the production of memory), which
contribute to the imagination of artistic production processes in the present juncture. Savran
writes: “In this book, I am attempting to write a political economy of culture during a key
moment in U.S. history: an analysis of the relationship between particular theatrical and musical
practices and the changing shape of social and economic resources.” We are especially excited to
work with Highbrow/Lowdown in the context of this year’s conference because of its
multidisciplinary focus on “embodying power:” we see an opportunity, here, to consider theatre
and performance research on labor and class relations regarding the production of popular U.S.
performing arts -- and not at the expense of considering affective economies. Two additional
texts therefore supply a critical counterpoint for the comparative reading project: Tavia
Nyong’o’s Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) and Mark
Franko’s The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity (2002). Given the ongoing
importance of African American cultural forms, the labor practices of popular performers such as
Jazz Musicians in this period, and institutionalizing cultural memory practices, this reading
group contributes to theatre and performance research examining institutions of cultural
production. Before the conference, participants are expected to write and pre-circulate a fivepage position paper engaging with a major theme, theoretical paradigm, or methodology
pertaining to Savran’s book. We will use these short essays, in addition to the texts by Nyong’o
and Franko, to frame discussion at the meeting in Seattle in November 2010.
Please send 300-word proposal to both of the email addresses listed above, and a brief bio. We
ask applicants to the reading group to articulate their objectives for joining the conversation
about Savran’s book, and to relate in particular a pressing theoretical challenge they are facing in
the context of their own work. As always, please refer to the guidelines that outline best
practices for participating in working sessions:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Moveable Feasts: Methods and Theories for Analyzing Food Performance
Identities are produced and sustained through food’s consumption. And control over food is the
definition of “corporeal power.”1 Holodomor and the recent crisis in Darfur are only two of
innumerable performances of such power as exercised over the body (politic). Alternately, Irish,
Turkish and countless other hunger strikers invert state authority by writing oppression on their
1
Call for Papers, “Embodying Power: Work Over Time” Joint Conference of The American Society for Theatre
Research, The Theatre Library Association and The Congress on Research in Dance 2010.
20
bodies. Performance and endurance artists from Marina Abramovic to David Blaine make art at
the outer limits of the human body’s capacity. On stage, food symbolizes the power dynamics of
gender, race, class, and nation, as well as their boundaries and fissures: the papacy persuades
Brecht’s Galileo to sacrifice his principles in the interest of his belly; Beckett’s Hamm controls
the pantry and so controls Clov. This working group, convened in both 2008 and 2009, invites
proposals that engage with the ways in which food on stage and in performance “has worked
on/through/with bodies throughout history (over time).”2
While the politics of food play out in the somatic responses of characters, food on the
stage also evokes audience members’ consciousness of their embodiment. Indeed, playwright
Sarah Woods cautions fellow dramatists about incorporating food and cooking into drama: “On
stage, activities like making food [and] eating […] make us think about ourselves. As a writer
you’ve got to allow for people’s reactions.”3 Scholars in this working group may explore the
politics operating at the intersection of performer, food and audience. In what ways does food in
the theatre or in the street hold sway over an audience? What does it mean to exercise this power
in the name of art or entertainment? How do cultural performances and performative acts of the
politics of food impact theatrical production?
Format
This research group will include 10-12 participants. Each participant will contribute a short
paper (6-8 pages) describing a research project in progress. Papers will be circulated prior to the
conference session, and participants will suggest priorities for the session based on connections
between projects. The session chairs set the session agenda derived from common critical
concerns, challenges and paradigms.
Proposal Submissions
Please send a 250 word paper abstract and a brief bio via email to Dorothy Chansky
([email protected]) and Ann Folino White ([email protected])
The deadline for proposals is Monday, May 31, 2010.
Guidelines that outline best practices for working sessions and participants:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Purposed Violence: Interrogating Rehearsal as a Site of Violence
Zack Whitman Gill, University of California, San Diego
Raimondo Genna, University of Caflifornia, San Diego
Hannah Arendt, in her Reflections on Violence, argued that violence “always stands in
need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues.” Whether it is waterboarding,
preemptive war, shock and awe, or the death penalty, in the political arena the performance of
violence on the public body always carries the fragile promise of future knowledge, security, or
peace as its justification. Artists and scholars have long explored and interrogated the political
deployment of violence, mindful of its relation to performance. Often these critical investigations
engage in and deconstruct representations of power and violence, utilizing the performer’s body
2
3
Ibid.
Qtd. in Sarah Hemming, “A Sure Recipe for Staging Successful Drama,” Financial Times 6 January 2004, Arts: 15.
21
as a means to confront violence’s traumatic effect. At the same time, these discursive and
performative inquiries grapple with the ethics of propagating violence even as they seek to
understand its origins and continuing appeal, both aesthetically and politically.
Yet theatre and dance have often turned a blind eye to their own perpetuation of violence
in pursuit of an end. While theatre is most often viewed as a positive force, scholars and artists
tend to gloss over the inherent violence of rehearsal. Rehearsal inflicts violence on the body with
a similarly fragile promise of future security—once called to perform, the body should do so
without hesitation. Ranging from the performer’s rigorous training to hone his or her craft to the
repeated shock to the system of full contact athletic practice, an imagined and idealized outcome
is inscribed on the body over time. While these performers might be willing participants in their
own violent experience, does their voluntary participation erase the violent act on the body or
make it any less severe? Does the violence enacted in rehearsal in pursuit of a perfected
performance demand its own intervention? Using the critical lens of performance, this seminar
seeks to interrogate the overlap of violence and power in the context of rehearsal, broadly
conceived. We welcome diverse interpretations of “rehearsal,” with possible considerations
ranging from acting, dance, and music to offstage arenas such as sports practice or military
training. We seek papers that not only investigate how power and violence work hand in hand in
rehearsal, but also strive towards practical solutions.
Format:
The working group will be a question and answer and discussion session structured
around exploring the papers and potential avenues forward. Selected participants will circulate
papers of no longer than fifteen pages on 1 October 2010. Prior to the conference, each
participant will respond (via email to the entire group) to a different paper selected by the coconveners; email discussion will also focus on the body of work as a whole. At the conference,
each participant will offer a five-minute presentation that brings the violence discussed in their
own paper to the fore in order to allow the audience to take on an active participatory role.
Keeping with the conference’s theme, we encourage these presentations to perform. The last
hour of the session will be an open and evolving discussion generated by the presentations and
email discussions.
Applicants should submit a 500-word abstract with contact information in word or pdf
format to Raimondo Genna ([email protected]) and Zack Whitman Gill ([email protected]).
Butô’s Corporeal Acts: New Directions in Practice and Scholarship
OVERVIEW: Fifty years after its first performance by co-founder Hijikata Tatsumi, the
Japanese avant-garde movement form known as butô enjoys ever-increasing global popularity as
a performance genre, training method, and developing area of scholarly research. This working
group seeks to convene a community of artists and scholars concerned with broadening the scope
of butô inquiry through a format that will both generate discussion around a selection of common
readings and facilitate the exchange of research.
Drawing on Eastern and Western philosophical perspectives, choreographic and physical
practices, and the fields of dance, performance, religious, and global studies, this working group
takes butô’s inception and current intercultural manifestations as dual starting points to ask
questions about its historical and transnational movements. The discussion addresses how
corporeal power is construed (and constructed) within dominant discourses of mind/body duality
22
and problematizes the interaction between “East” and “West” by examining ways that a Japanese
practice is taught, embodied, performed, and written in Japan and around the world.
Accordingly, while we are concerned with the foundational question of what gives butô its
power as a performance art form, we also raise questions about the ways geopolitical power
plays out through this dance form as it is alternately employed to bolster Japan’s position at the
forefront of popular and high culture while also being embroiled in intercultural negotiations that
can challenge or reify existing geopolitical imbalances. The working group will engage new
threads, including but not limited to: butô in globalization and diaspora, movement in butô as a
philosophical inquiry, applications of butô methodologies and butô’s relationship to culture,
selfhood, and Japanese intellectual history.
WORKING FORMAT: Our working group format is designed to develop a common dialog
among butô scholars and practitioners while enhancing individual members’ research
perspectives. It comprises responding to three key readings on a blog, exchanging individual
research papers, and culminating in a roundtable discussion during the conference, facilitated by
senior butô scholar Bruce Baird. Suggested readings may include: Baird (socio-political
perspective on butô’s origins), Yuasa (Eastern, phenomenological perspective on the body), and
Deleuze (non-binary Western philosophy). We will read one article/text per month beginning in
August and respond on the blog in the months leading up the conference. Upon completing the
third reading response, we will exchange research papers (at the beginning of November) and
comment on them prior to the conference. The actual working session at the conference will
address three key themes that arise during the process, as identified by the workgroup conveners.
Participants must commit to all activities of the workgroup, including three blog posts (by
August 15, Sept 15, Oct 15), submission of a research paper for review (November 1), and
participation in the roundtable discussion during the CORD/ASTR conference.
The group will include 12-14 participants, selected from the submissions received by May 31,
2010. We will notify all applicants by the end of June 2010.
SPECS FOR PROPOSALS: Please send a 200-word abstract, brief bio, and contact information
to Tanya Calamoneri: [email protected]
Please refer to
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx for further
information on work session participation guidelines and conduct.
Convening Committee:
Chair: Bruce Baird, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst,
[email protected]; Tanya Calamoneri, Adjunct Faculty and PhD Student, Department of
Dance, Temple University, [email protected]; Rosemary Candelario, PhD Candidate,
UCLA, [email protected]; Megan Nicely, Adjunct Faculty, Tisch Open Arts, New York
University, PhD Candidate, Department of Performance Studies, New York University,
[email protected]; Michael Sakamoto, Faculty, Goddard College, PhD Student, UCLA
[email protected]
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Embodying Landscape: From Veneration to Disruption
Heather Ramey, University of California San Diego, [email protected]
Rachel Gostenhofer, University of Toronto, [email protected]
Performance is often thought to arise out of a dialectic between human action and its physical
environmental context. Today, this context is reified in both scientific and political discourses as
“the environment.” However, as illustrated by historians of religious thought, this dialectical
construction is a characteristic of specific non-universal modernities. From the earliest recorded
religious rituals to current performances of myriad origins the ecological environment is always
already being processed, evidenced, and transformed through performance. These performances
have regularly invoked and provoked the power of the landscape and its inhabitants, illuminating
the body’s relationship with that power. Absent the category of “nature,” landscapes and their
contents have been understood as part of the cultural life-worlds of their occupants and have
therefore contained signs that narratized cultural and historical events. Such narratized events
have typically been enacted through performance. The working group seeks to unpack the
historicity of landscape and performance, which is often hidden under the discourse of the
natural. Further, the group will focus on issues and case studies that examine how performance
reveals or marks the disruptions in, or the veneration of, landscape. Discussion topics may
consider:
 The embodiment of landscape in theater and dance performances
 The embodiment of landscape in political and religious ritual
 New ways of theorizing landscape and performance
 Historicizing issues surrounding performance in non- and quasi-anthropogenic
landscapes, with a view to examine, what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls, “provincializing” in
the dialectical human-landscape relations that are currently hegemonic in North America
 Border crossings and the landscape
 Processes of training performers in the embodiment of landscape
 Site-specific or ecosystem-specific forms of performance
 Anthropomorphization in performance of landscape
This multidisciplinary working group seeks to bring together a variety of approaches. These
include but are not limited to: theatre, dance, performance studies, history, anthropology,
cognitive science, visual arts, environmental studies, ritual and religious studies, and theories
such as phenomenology, semiotics, and developing theories.
Session Process:
Each participant is required to submit a 15-20 page paper and participate in pre-conference
discussions (via blog or wiki pg). Through email discussion the group will generate guiding
questions to facilitate dialogue and debate during the conference. This session will provide a
platform for the formation of an ongoing multidisciplinary research group that is a strong
specified offshoot related to the discussion between performance and ecology, as well as, an
effort to foster relations between sole academics and scholar practitioners.
Submission: Please send a 200 word abstract, your contact information, and a brief bio to
Heather Ramey at [email protected].
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What the body knows: Reflections on Performance Practice as Research
Facilitator: Teoma Naccarato
This new workgroup at the ASTR/CORD conference will provide a space for dance and
theater practitioners and scholars to investigate performance practice as research. Central
questions to be considered through movement and discussion include: How is it that we perceive,
construct and express meaning via our bodies in dance, theater and life? What is the relationship
of embodied episteme with other ways of knowing, such as language? Does kinesthetic
perception and expression necessarily require decoding by the brain into language to attain
meaning? What is lost in translation? We will also look at what forces—external and
internalized—shape our continual performances of identity and readings of one another. Does
training in codified movement techniques enhance or hinder a performers’ capacity for authentic
expression? What educational practices in dance and theater foster corporeal intelligence and
agency? Our research will involve a personal treasure hunt, unearthing memories and
experiences that have been inscribed in our bodies over time by training, the media, and diverse
personal, familial and cultural realties. Together, we will honor the unique nature of what our
bodies know, foregrounding the value of embodied scholarship in dance and theater.
Prior to the conference, each work session member must post a sample of their research
on the group’s blog; this may be in the form of a paper (maximum 10 pages), video footage
(maximum 10 minutes), photos (max 10 images), or a combination of media. These online
introductions will initiate dialogue, allowing for common themes and concerns to emerge and
inform our group meeting. At the ASTR/CORD Conference in Seattle, our two-hour session will
take the form of a workshop, integrating movement and discussion to investigate the relationship
of embodied practices with theory. Our time will begin with sensory-based warm-up games in
order to facilitate personal, collective and spatial awareness, as well as an environment of play
and risk. Moving on, we will explore ways in which to access memory from the body, drawing
on Augusto Boal’s Image Theater, as well as activities from Authentic Movement and Contact
Improvisation. Peer observation and dialogue will be interspersed with physical research,
allowing us to question how, when, why and where our physicality has been shaped by external
and internalized forces. Finally, I will facilitate movement exercises that examine the corporeal
articulation and negotiation of power in performance. In this workshop, the interplay of artistic
practice with theoretical inquiry will deepen conceptions of embodied knowledge and power.
Dance and theater practitioners and scholars are welcome in this session. To participate,
please submit a brief bio, as well as a 200-word abstract that articulates your interest and
involvement with performance as research. Please also provide a website or blog address at
which I can view a sample of your work. Proposals are due no later than Monday May 31st,
2010, and should be emailed to: [email protected]. Please feel free to contact me with any
questions or concerns.
Popular Fiesta and Carnival: Movement, Politics and the Body en Masse
Milla Cozart Riggio ([email protected]), Angela Marino Segura
([email protected]), Rachel Bowditch ([email protected])
In his book Critical Moves (1998), Randy Martin invites us to consider politics as 'the collision
and mutual displacement of forces—their motional flows.' This working session focuses on how
the body en masse produces such motional flows in festive performance; how does movement in
25
typically large-scale public events generate, shape and recreate political power? In parades, and
motorcades, processions, religious events, carnival, rallies and concerts, movement and bodily
expression transmit crucial information about the exchange and circulation of power. Whether
invoking destruction or the demonic, nationalisms, pledges and vows, healing or amorous
devotions and ritual, these events literally create motional flows that symbolically and sometimes
ritually recall, attest to, or subvert the forces of social organization and interaction, sometimes
through spectacular displays of animal as well as human behavior. This working group will focus
on ways that popular fiesta and carnival—typically mass events—generate language, evoke
history, and produce collective action through movement, inertia, syncopation and other physical
forces. What kinds of political and social relationships are embodied in or signified by gestures
and movements, dance, and other corporal expression among participants and regulators of these
festive events?
While the study of the body will be the focus for our group this year, arguably this could not be
accomplished without the recognition that spaces determine the body en masse in festive
performance as much as the body, in turn, creates and situates performance within its space.
Therefore, we also welcome papers that address this relationship between popular fiesta, carnival
and the spaces in which they appear: streets, plazas, stadiums, porticos, prisons, natural and
virtual environments or play spaces.
We invite papers that consider the 'body en masse' in:
*Street Performance*
*Festivals, fiesta and religious manifestations*
*Parades, processions, political and military marches*
*Circulation, diaspora and migrations of festive traditions and practices*
*Building communitas within local, national and global networks*
*Ritual drama, religiosity or public devotional practices*
*Methods and modes of inquiry in popular fiesta and carnival research
*Intersections of staged and scripted theatre in festival, fiesta and carnival
Session Format and Guidelines
Participants must commit to submitting preliminary drafts by September 15, 2010 and final
conference papers by October 30, 2010. All participants will be expected to actively contribute to
an online pre-conference discussion.
Proposal submissions: This working session is a continuation of the Popular Fiesta and
Carnival session at ASTR in 2009. New members are welcome, including scholars and
practitioners. All must apply. Proposals and papers are accepted in Spanish or English We
invite papers from all geographic and disciplinary areas. To apply, please send a 250 word
abstract, including your name, title of paper and brief bio sketch to [email protected],
[email protected], and [email protected] by the abstract submission deadline of
May 31st.
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REVISITING MEDIEVAL PERFORMANCE: EVIDENCE, THEORY, PRAXIS
Lofton Durham, Western Michigan University, and Jenna Soleo-Shanks, Briar Cliff University
The thousand years between the Roman theatre and Shakespeare’s stage was an extraordinarily
fertile time in the history of Western performance, yet this era suffers from comparison with the
adjoining periods. Still dogged generally by the problematic inheritance of 19th century
philology and, more specifically, by the evolutionary paradigms established by medieval theatre
scholars in the early 20th century, the study of medieval performance is ripe for new scholarship.
As Carol Symes has argued, “the medieval theatre was more multifaceted, more immediate, and
more representative (in every sense) than that circumscribed by the playhouses of the
Renaissance. This is the medieval theatre we need to be studying.” Although scholars from
various disciplines have made valuable and important contributions to the study of medieval
performance, the future of medieval performance studies depends on the unique perspectives and
specific theoretical tools of theatre scholars. Such scholarship contributes to our appreciation of
performance as a dynamic cultural form by considering, among other ideas, how performance
related or reacted to existing power structures and how the bodies of performers existed in and
interacted with spaces that were not exclusively meant for performance. Theatre scholars also
offer new perspectives on the limits and definitions of performance evidence.
This working group will bring together various theoretical perspectives and broad definitions of
evidence, in order to explore the unique function and importance of performance in medieval
cultures. We are particularly interested in three aspects of this topic: new primary source
evidence or alternate applications of evidence; new or revised methodologies for approaching
medieval performance practices; and theoretical applications that draw connections among
disparate cultural phenomena, illuminate new bodies of evidence, and/or alter conventional
understandings of medieval performance, theatre, and drama.
Session Format and Guidelines:
Session chairs will group papers in clusters. Each member of the cluster will be responsible for
reading all papers in the cluster. At the conference, each cluster will receive a set of questions
from the session chairs, which the cluster will consider as a group during a break-out session.
After these break-out sessions, the clusters will give a summary report of their discussion to all
session participants. The session chairs will facilitate the reporting session in order to create a
summary report of the questions raised, lessons learned, and possible future actions or avenues of
scholarship and dissemination.
To apply, send a 200-word abstract and a brief bio by MONDAY, MAY 31st to BOTH
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] and
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]. All participants will be required to join ASTR
or CORD and register for the conference. Please
visit <http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx>http:/
/www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx for more
information on participants' responsibilities.
27
Re-Territorializing the City: Performance, Place and Power in the Urban Environment
Shannon Blake Skelton (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Ryan Tvedt (University of
Wisconsin-Madison), Bill Whitney (Independent Scholar, Pennsylvania):
[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected].
Deadline: Tuesday, May 25, 2010
This working session explores the means by which artists in urban areas find themselves in
constant negotiation with their surrounding environment. The private, public, and liminal spaces
of urban areas contain multitudinous intersections between urbanity and theatricality, between
the needs of the locality or state and the needs of its denizens. Cities contain created structures
and megastructures which define physical, psychological and metaphorical spaces, consistently
and persistently impacting the practical and pragmatic concerns of artists and their work.
Whether (or if) the city in question is part of the imperial, postcolonial, or neocolonial realm,
artists who work and live in it are forced to contest and defy, or comply and capitulate, with
local, national, and global power structures. The embodied arts of theatre and dance are
particularly rich fields within which to explore the negotiations of performance, place, and power
in the urban landscape. Such negotiations and contestations serve as vital areas of discourse
concerning issues of representation, tourism, and community, as well as ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, normativity, and socio-economic status. One particularly rich area for discussion
would be implications of the body in urban areas – in embodied practices, bodies of work, iconic
bodies and their images, movements of bodies, and/or representations of historical bodies and
means of their preservation.
Additional Topics for Discussion and Dialogue may include:
Corporeality and Space in the City
Location as Memorial Performance
Public Art and Space
Memory and Ruins
Community and Utopia
Grammar of Aesthetics in the Urban Locale
Urban Community and Space
Queer Space/Queer Time
Hyperreality, Simulacrum and Erasing History
Architecture and Performance
Street Performance
Mapping Theatrical Districts
Walking in the City
SESSION FORMAT AND GUIDELINES
This working session will exist in three phases. Once the participants have been selected, a
bibliography of 4-6 published articles or excerpts centered upon power and performance in the
urban environment will be disseminated, serving as theoretical foundations to enhance our
discussion. The second phase involves each participant developing their paper or project upon
the topic, and distributing them electronically. The working session will be divided into
subgroups in order to read and respond fully to each author. Lastly, the group will meet at the
2010 ASTR conference to publicly discuss concerns and questions posed by the readings and
28
papers. Papers should be written and distributed to the group no later than September 30, 2010
to allow for the most effective discussion.
Proposal Submissions: If interested, please submit a 200-300 word abstract for the paper you
will present, and a brief biography, by May 25, 2010. Please submit proposals and bios as
attached Word documents to all three conveners at [email protected], [email protected], and
[email protected]. You may also address questions to any of these three contacts.
Selections will be made in June. All selected participants must become members of ASTR or
CORD.
29
The Diasporic Body and Its Discontents
Participants are invited to consider how power is embodied in diasporic identities, cultural
practices, and performances. Our session emphasizes the spatial and temporal aspects of the
“corporeal power” at the conceptual heart of CORD/ASTR 2010. By paying attention to
diaspora’s “discontents,” we will also focus on the material and political effects of diasporic
performance and the exercises of corporeal power. Our theme encourages participants to
examine the ways in which diasporic traditions can be at once bodily coercive and liberating,
limiting and expressive, acting on and through performing bodies. This session encourages
participants to consider the distinctive resources performance can provide for a multitude of
subjects and actions involved in power’s applications, negotiations, and various forms of
resistance.
Participants may consider the following questions:
 How might diasporic performances work over time?
 How might they reconcile the past and the present through the acting body?
 What processes work on or construct the “diasporic body”?
 How is the diasporic body created and sustained?
 What kinds of bodies fight back, desert, or deviate, and how do they perform?
 How might the body sustain diasporic identities and cultural connections? How might
diasporic bodies in particular show intersections of movement and force?
As a working group, we plan to nurture and support the production of publishable scholarship
related to our ongoing conversations on diaspora, performance, and ASTR and CORD’s 2010
themes of embodiment and power. We plan to submit and circulate article-length essays before
the conference, allowing rigorous and creative feedback. We will utilize online technologies to
encourage creative and open interactions among its participants. For further information, see
ASTR’s “Working Sessions Guidelines,” URL at
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Working Process:
Our working group focuses on helping participants develop article-length projects for
publication.
BEFORE ASTR/CORD:
 Participants are subdivided into smaller editorial teams.
 Teams post article-length drafts of their work to our website by September 1.
 Each member of the smaller editorial teams comments on the work, posting feedback
electronically.
 Team members re-draft and re-post essays, or post a précis of the revisions they plan
to make.
AT ASTR/CORD:
 For the first half of our session, teams meet in smaller subgroups to discuss status of
projects and to offer feedback.
30

For the second half, the group convenes to discuss the articles as a collection, what
they suggest about the state of the field, and possible future projects.
AFTER ASTR/CORD:
 Members may re-submit their articles to the group for additional feedback, or send
them to appropriate journals. The group establishes deadlines for review as needed
throughout the spring.
Submitting a proposal:
Please submit a 500-word abstract proposing an article that you would like to develop in
connection to the group’s theme, including a paragraph detailing where you are in your research
process. Please submit proposals via email no later than May 31, 2010 to all of the conveners:
Heather S. Nathans ([email protected]); Adrienne Macki Braconi
([email protected]); and Peter Reed ([email protected])
Exploring the Potential of a Dance Theatre MFA program
Alicia Peterson Baskel, MFA in Dance Theatre (2011), UCSD - [email protected]
Janet Hayatshahi, MFA in Dance Theatre (2012), UCSD - [email protected]
Rebecca Salzer, MFA in Dance Theatre (2011), UCSD - [email protected]
Kyle Sorensen, MFA in Dance Theatre (2012), UCSD – [email protected]
Rationale:
In 2008, the University of California San Diego’s Department of Theatre and Dance established
the first graduate program in Dance Theatre in the United States. The leaders of this working
session make up the inaugural two classes of UCSD’s Dance Theatre MFA program (two
students were accepted in each of the first two years). We entered the program with diverse
backgrounds and goals, and have necessarily interacted with the curriculum in different ways.
We would like to use an examination of our specific experiences as a springboard from which to
discuss general strategies for the interdisciplinary study of performance. We invite scholars and
practitioners from varied dance and theatre backgrounds to join us.
Our working session will be a round-table discussion structured as follows:
 Brief introduction of the session participants and their backgrounds.
 Brief presentation and discussion of UCSD’s current curriculum.
 Presentation and discussion of excerpts from performances and films that have been
created by UCSD’s current graduate students
 Examination of the meaning of the term dance theatre and discussion of what
distinguishes a program in Dance Theatre from a Dance MFA or a Theatre MFA (both
theoretically, and in UCSD’s current program).
 Invitation to working session participants to sketch out and discuss alternative curricula
for a graduate program in Dance Theatre
Specifications for Participants:
Please send your ideas regarding what is interesting or important to include in a dance theatre
curriculum (200 words or less) and your bio to the working session leaders before May 31st,
2010.
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Additional Information:
Guidelines outlining best practices for working sessions:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
University of California, San Diego Dance Theatre Website:
http://theatre.ucsd.edu/academics/graduatePrograms/dancetheatre/index.html
Dance Dramaturgy/Theatre Dramatury:
A Dialogue to Explore Distinctions and Possibilities
Ray Miller, Appalachian State University, [email protected]
Rationale: Within the academic setting, Theatre dramaturgy has enjoyed an increasing presence
as a part of many theatre programs. It is not unusual today to have a faculty member designated
as the department dramaturg. Often, but not always, this person serves as a theatre historian.
Many departments engage the dramaturg not only as a member of particular productions of a
play or musical but also as a sitting member of a season selection committee advising and
guiding the department in its overall choice for a production theme for its plays for an academic
year.
The same has not necessarily been the case in dance programs. While a number of professional
ballet and modern dance companies employ a dance dramaturg and some graduate level dance
programs offer at least one course in dance dramaturgy, there are few undergraduate dance
programs that do the same. As programs move towards a Dance Studies model, I would
anticipate that opportunities would emerge for a Dance Dramaturg to serve the department in
ways that are similar to those of the Theatre Dramaturg.
This roundtable seeks to bring together theatre and dance dramaturgs around several issues of
mutual concern. Those would like to contribute to this roundtable would be asked:
1. To distinguish the role and function of the dance dramaturg from that of the theatre
dramaturg.
2. To identify and explore common professional and theoretical areas of concern.
3. To discuss how the role of dramaturgy can best serve the mission of the departments in
which they reside.
4. To identify how the dramaturg can expand the academic program and production
schedule to other departments within the college or university setting.
5. To interrogate methods by which the theatre and dance dramaturgs might collaborate.
6. To develop a bibliography of sources that might serve both the dance and the theatre
dramaturg.
Format: Participants would be asked to submit a 500-word abstract in which they provide two
items. The first would be a brief description of their work in the field of dramaturgy. Second,
they would be encouraged to define those issues that are of particular interest to them not only as
dramaturgs but also in their roles as “cultural workers,” what Paulo Freire underscores as “those
who dare to teach.” Finally, they are asked to contribute to a bibliography of materials on the
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topic, which will be compiled by the convener and distributed to all the parties engaged in this
roundtable.
As a baseline for discussion, participants would be asked to read two articles from Theatre
Topics. The first is “Teaching African American Dance/History to a ‘Post-Racial’ Class: Yale’s
Project O” by Joseph Cermatori, Emily Coates, Kathryn Krier, Bronwen MacArthur, Angelica
Randle, and Joseph Roach, which concerns a team taught seminar-studio course that culminated
in the production of a musical based on the collision between the Orpheus myth and the civil
rights era televised dance parties. The second is Clare Croft’s “A Mutually Satisfying Pas de
Deux: Feminist Dramaturgy and Dance in the Undergraduate Dance Curriculum.” Using these
as a common reference point, each participant is asked to be prepared to contribute to the
discussion based on one or more of the six purposes for the roundtable described in the rationale.
Please send questions and materials to Dr. Ray Miller at [email protected] by May 31, 2010.
For further information, see ASTR’s “Working Sessions Guidelines,” URL at
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Risking Encounter: When Bodies Meet in Performance
Gwendolyn Alker, Associate Teacher of Theatre Studies, Department of Drama, New York U.
Emily Coates, Artistic Director, World Performance Project; Lecturer, Theater Studies, Yale
Daniel Larlham, Lecturer, Theater Studies, Yale University; Doctoral Candidate, Columbia
Keri Walsh, Assistant Professor, Literature Department, Claremont McKenna College
All modes of corporeal performance, social or artistic, require entry into zones of risk in which
subjects opens themselves to otherness. In the rehearsal room, in the theatre space, in the street,
and in countless other sites of encounter, human beings – both performers and spectators – come
together in hopes of learning, stealing, sampling, or passing on expertise and experience to and
from the bodies that surround them. In today’s interconnected world, creating artistic dialogues
across cultural, national, geographic, and economic boundaries as well as training, rehearsal, and
transmission within even the most stable performance traditions require repeated engagements
with bodily difference. Such engagements destabilize the subject’s bodily routines, practices,
and certainties, as well as the frameworks of understanding that go along with them. Encounter
carries risks as well as rewards, opens up certain possibilities even as it closes others down, and
always generates unintended meanings in excess of intended ones; but these realities ought to be
acknowledged as prompts to critical attention rather than deterrents to collaborative openness.
In inviting submissions on the theme of embodied encounter within performance practice,
the conveners of this working session seek to foster a conversation among dancers, theatremakers, choreographers, and scholars that furthers the renewed and deepened investigation of
corporeality now emerging at the nexus of dance, theatre, and performance studies. Encouraging
the momentary surrender of our disciplinary orthodoxies, we welcome traditionally written
papers as well as presentations that employ differing modes of delivery, perhaps including the
sharing of live performance fragments or the screening of documentary footage.
Urgent questions present themselves when bodies teach, adopt, challenge, inherit, touch,
merge, or surrender to each other in performance. We invite presentations that address one or
more of the following questions:
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






How do we theorize the embodied dynamics governing collaboration, reception, and the
transmission of performance knowledge?
What role do phenomena like kinesthetic empathy, embodied memory, imitation, and
surrogation play in pedagogical and collaborative endeavors?
How can an investigation of corporeality deepen our understanding of the situational,
conventional, textual, semiotic, and culturally coded dimensions of performance?
What new body-to-body phenomena are emerging within performance modes in our
globalizing twenty-first century? What corporeal phenomena are becoming extinct in our
digital age?
Can we codify an ethics and an ideal format for performative encounters across perceived
boundaries of difference? What vocabularies and theoretical frameworks do we use to
articulate such encounters to ourselves and to others?
What do body-to-body processes of exchange within performance practice share with
those of “everyday” life? How are they different?
What frameworks from other disciplines – such as phenomenology, consciousness
studies, and cognitive science – might be usefully applied to an investigation of corporeal
encounter in performance?
Submission deadline:
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted along with a brief bio to:
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and
[email protected]. Presenters planning to incorporate performance elements or
audio-visual materials should express this intention in their abstracts.
The deadline for abstract submissions is Monday, 31 May 2010.
Session format:
Working session participants will submit a paper of 10-12 pages by Friday, 1 October 2010. In
advance of the conference, mini-groups of 3-4 members will read and comment upon each
other’s papers. At the conference, each mini-group will present its conclusions reached and
questions generated, referencing live or recorded performance fragments as necessary.
Questions regarding the working session format should be posed to the conveners at the email
addresses listed above. General information about participation in ASTR working sessions can
be found at: http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Hybrid Lives of Professional Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre:
Questions of Power in Performance, Teaching & Community Work
Mary Elizabeth Anderson, Wayne State University
Doug Risner, Wayne State University
Historically, dance and theatre have shared important social bonds with their communities, both
by definition and out of necessity. Many professional dance companies and theatres today
depend heavily upon community support and volunteerism. Similarly, theatre and dance
education have been intimately linked to community and culture since the early 1900s in the US.
During the first half of the 20th Century, performing arts instruction in US public education
found its justifications on the basis of humanism and public service. It was during this period that
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schools and universities witnessed the emergence of “artists-in-residence,” professional arts
practitioners hired to facilitate arts training and assist in mounting public productions. While the
ties between theatre and dance in education and the communities that they serve have long since
been forged by professional artist-educators living hybrid lives, their particular function within
educational institutions has been substantially controversial from the outset.
Despite the proliferation of educational arts programs during the 1960s and 1970s, perceptions
about the work of the “artist-teacher” became increasingly problematic. Artist-teachers were
characterized as “schizophrenic,” their work representing a “dilemma” and their identities in
“peril,” in the context of schools and colleges that now prized the tenets of professionalism and
vocational education over the pre-WWII values of humanism and public service. The artistteacher, operating within the liminal spaces between professional production and academia,
embodied an unresolved conflict in the values underlying public education.
During the last decade, the “professional teaching artist” has emerged, with an attendant
professional association (Association for Teaching Artists), a major national research project
(NORC Teaching Artists Research Project), and the development of a certification program
(University of the Arts, Philadelphia). The work of today’s professional teaching artist can
perhaps be understood as a creative and intentional reconciliation of the historical dichotomies
that have produced the social, cultural and economic marginalization of these workers.
This working group seeks to investigate, develop and circulate emerging research on
professional teaching artists in theatre and dance. In response to the conference theme of power
“working” through embodied practices, the group takes as its central questions:




How does(n’t) power circulate within and from performance pedagogies employed by
professional teaching artists?
As teaching artists traverse multiple spaces between professional and academic worlds,
what do we mean when we talk about the “transformational, liberatory power of theatre
and dance pedagogy?” How do we know if and when transformation occurs?
How is power negotiated in the embodied practices of teaching artists and the
communities they engage?
In what ways, if any, can the cultural work of professional teaching artists in theatre and
dance illustrate the “indispensable utility”4 of these disciplines within the academy and
its burgeoning bodies of knowledge?
Interested participants are invited to submit a 500-word (excluding references) abstract, and brief
bio to [email protected]. Selected participants will engage in pre-conference wiki-based
dialogues and write and circulate a 12-page paper in advance of the conference. Co-authored and
multi-authored proposals are especially encouraged.
4
Berkeley, A. 2004. Changing views of knowledge and the struggle for undergraduate theatre curriculum, 19001980. In Teaching theatre today: pedagogical views of theatre in higher education, eds. A. Fliotsos and G. Medford,
7-30. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004.
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Nursing a Beautiful Bastard: Dance Theatre in Theory and Practice
Name(s), institutional affiliation (if any), and email address of Session Leader(s):
Jeffrey Fracé
Carrie Ahern
Assistant Professor
Dancer, Choreographer
School of Drama
Artistic Director
University of Washington
Carrie Ahern Dance
[email protected]
[email protected]
Dance Theatre is a category of Dance. Physical Theatre is a category of Theatre. Is there a
meeting place right in the middle, between Theatre and Dance? How and where do these two
cultures meet? What demands does this hybrid culture make on its creators, performers and
audiences?
We are interested in an informed conversation in which scholars and practitioners share
observations and offer prescriptive ideas about the role of Dance Theatre in today’s performing
arts marketplace. We’ll approach this conversation from three angles:
(1) The creator’s process (or, on the stage): A principal step in Dance’s direction toward Theatre
occurs when the dancer speaks text; the converse in Theatre occurs when the actor moves
expressively. Do these supplemental discursive acts necessarily multiply meaning? What can go
wrong, or right, when the dancer speaks and the actor moves?
(2) The audience’s process (or, in the marketplace): Can audiences of Dance and Theatre
effectively meld? Is there a possibility for a greater “live culture” that does not identify with
single, separate disciplines but with hybrid forms that cross boundaries and break new ground?
Considering how events listings are broken down in virtually every media outlet in the country
into separate categories, we wonder how long it will take until the information catches up with
the art. In a world full of marketing genius, how is it that the marketing of the performing arts is
a regressive discourse?
(3) The performers’ process (or, in the studio): Performers of Dance and Theatre often run in
very different circles socially and professionally. Typical rehearsal processes are very different
for each – dancers often meet less frequently but for longer stretch of time, while actors might
cram the same number of hours into a few short weeks – so what might a compatible process be?
Can a theatre director know enough to elicit a strong performance from a dancer, and can a
choreographer effectively direct an actor?
We will begin this conversation by addressing each of the three angles in turn, in advance of
November’s conference. Over the summer, participants will begin to offer observations and
analyses on a blog-style website. Letters addressing the first angle will be due by July 30; the
second angle by September 10; and the third by October 20. Responses to these letters will be
welcome anytime.
At the conference, we will turn to the Prescriptive. In the spirit of bombasts and avant-gardists,
we propose to complete a manifesto of Dance Theatre Do’s and Don’ts by the end of our two-
36
hour working session. We want to undertake this work as though we were taking responsibility
for the intelligent evolution of this form. If we scholars and artists are to nourish a “live culture”
that will grow and support meaningful new work, it is important that we articulate clearly and
forcefully a set of goals and challenges. We hope that this roundtable will create new networks
and inspire new collaborations; and we hope the participants will return to their own work with
new tools for analysis and production.
Please send a 200-word response indicating your interest in and preliminary observations on one
or more of these angles, as well as a brief biography to [email protected], by May 31,
2010. More information on working sessions can be found at
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Amping It Up: Power and Affect in Inter-media Dance Theatre
Dr. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies Roehampton University
[email protected]
Katherine Mezur School of Drama and Japan Studies University of Washington, Seattle
[email protected]
In both theatre and dance, vocabularies of corporeality have expanded to include new media
technologies. Merce Cunningham’s exploration with motion capture technologies, the Wooster
Group’s televisually driven movement patterns, William Forsythe's visual choreography in the
on-line Synchronous Objects, Dumb Type's examinations of technological culture, or Blast
Theory’s use of mobile phone and gaming technologies to engage audiences—all negotiate how
bodies are impacted by the current technological moment.
In the development of genres of multimedia performance, theatre and dance often collide, merge,
and work side by side to incorporate forms of media in performance. These body-based forms
have interrogated the possibilities of media, creating spaces in which the idea of bodies might be
expanded while emerging technologies are explored through theories of affect, technoscience,
hybridity etc. This seminar is interested in the different powers of the
artist/practitioner/performer/audience as they negotiate, engage with, expand, and control various
forms of media in performance practices. What are the potentials of co-presence between living
bodies and technologies—projections, robotics, interactive gaming devices, surveillance
technologies, medical or bio-tech technologies—on stage and in the audience? How does
media’s power affect bodies and kinaesthetics? How can bodies drive new media
experimentation?
We hope to engage with scholars and practitioners to investigate feedback loops of power,
exchange, and affect between bodies and technologies in theatre and dance practices exploring
such questions as:
 What is the role of the “spectator” in interactive environments?
 How has new media/gaming technology appropriated vocabularies of theatre and dance?
 How does the living body of the actor/dancer/audience member impact upon technologies
of image, sound, live feedback, recorded sound and image?
 Is there power for the “unmediated” discipline when it seemingly intertwines, fades, or
disappears into the mediated?
37
This session will be structured as a 2 hour working group/seminar in which participants will
discuss and analyze work previously exchanged. Preconference activities will include division
of accepted proposals into pairs or small groups to facilitate an in-depth
reading/observation/discussion of similarly-themed or diversely contrasting work. This will be
followed by on-line exchanges that seek to identify themes and questions across the groups. We
hope to facilitate on-line laboratory spaces for viewing work and discussion, using wiki, blog, or
skype formats. We will facilitate a scenario in which new knowledges concerning theatre,
dance, and new media/technologies are generated, explored, and interrogated. During the faceto-face discussion we will focus on questions emerging from the preconference exchanges rather
than paper presentation.
We welcome and encourage research, performance, and analyses that negotiate across/with
media and live bodies. We welcome work in diverse formats and practical work able to be
previewed in advance of the conference. Please send 200 word proposals outlining your project
to both conveners no later than Monday, May 31st.
[email protected] AND [email protected]
For more information regarding the responsibilities of participants, please take a moment to read
the Working Group guidelines here:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
POWER MOVES:
New Approaches to Plays from the Spanish Golden Age
Through Fencing, Dancing, & Connections to Shakespeare
NOW CASTING:
TEAMS of scholars & practitioners to reconstruct physical interpretations for world-class
performance texts, bridging gaps in production history which currently inhibit teaching, staging,
& critiquing plays from the Siglo de Oro.
COME COLLABORATE on PRODUCING:
 a revolutionary re-view of how dance, combat, & ideas intersect in one- & three-act
scripts from early modern Spain;
 a history-making journey into lost production history, re-connecting choreography with
literature to recover stagecraft;
 a map-changing movement across boundaries between study & performance, original &
translation, Shakespearean tragedy & Spanish Comedia.
SKILLS SOUGHT:
INTEREST in meeting, firsthand, vibrant examples of Total Theater – powerful fusions of
movement, music, spectacle, & profound thought.
38
ENTHUSIASM about preparing recovered classics for rediscovery – in class, onstage, & for
further research.
EXPERIENCE with dance, stage combat, Spanish, translation, dramaturgy, performance, or
Shakespeare.
PRODUCTION REQUIREMENTS:
Step One:
Go through the Audition Drill (details below).
Step Two:
Read (then repeatedly re-read) your Team’s target play
(during the summer).
Plays currently targeted include:
 Lope de Vega’s three-act La dama boba / Lady Nitwit (c. 1613; translated 1962, 1976,
1998, & 2000)
 Cervantes’ one-act Entremés de Trampagos, el rufián viudo / The Thug Who Lost His
Sugarmama (published 1615; translated 1948, 1964, & 1996)
 Quevedo’s one-act Entremés de la destreza / Swash-&-Buckle Play (c. 1608)
 Cervantes’ one-act El retablo de las maravillas / The Wonderful Showoff Show
(published 1615; translated 1948, 1964, 1996, & 2008), &
 Lope de Vega’s three-act Castelvines y Monteses / Capulets vs. Montagues (c. 1603;
translated 1998, 2005, & 2010).
Team Members will post notes about the intersection of dance, combat, & ideas in target
plays on the session’s wiki as they read.
Step Three: With inspiration from your Team Leader, pose specific, pedagogy-productionresearch questions for the session’s senior scholars – the fight choreographers, dance
historians, & movement-reconstruction practitioners who’ll enrich our exploration
(September).
Step Four:
In collaboration with other members of your Team, develop concrete strategies
for teaching, staging, & critiquing your target play, to share as your Team report (October).
Step Five:
Attend the session’s meeting in Seattle – two hours (or more) in which you’ll get
to share findings with other Teams, participate in hands-on demonstrations with senior
scholars, & network with ASTR’s Shakespeare Performance Research Group (November).
AUDITION DRILL:
Send a 250-word proposal & a brief personal sketch to [email protected]
by Monday, May 31.
In your proposal, tell us which of the target plays catches your interest most urgently, & why.
More information about the plays is posted at
http://spanish-golden-age-plays.wikispaces.com.
In your personal sketch, tell us about skills you can bring to your team.
39
PLEASE NOTE:
We warmly welcome participation from people with no prior exposure to the Spanish
Golden Age. In step with the guidelines posted at
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionGuidelines/ tabid/128/Default.aspx,
we’ll explore ideas interactively, with no formal conference-paper presentations.
QUESTIONS:
We’ll be happy to clarify, expatiate, & respond. You can reach the session’s co-conveners – Ben
Gunter at Florida State University, Susan Paun de García at Denison University, & Amy
Williamsen at the University of Arizona – via
[email protected].
The Dragon that Breathes Fire: Methodologies for tapping into corporeal power
Joan Laage, PhD, CMA
kogut butoh [email protected]
As performers, we create worlds, and to do this successfully, we need to exercise our power.
Power gives us the ability to engage and control the attention of the audience, to lead them
through a transformative experience. The most important thing education can offer dance and
theatre students is training methods and body/mind research that can unleash the individual’s
potential power as a performer and uncover a unique artistic voice.
The post-WWII phenomenon Butoh is both dance and theatre. At its core is the body, but what
do we mean by “the body?” One can assume the body is central to dance, but what of theatre?
For theatre, perhaps the body is the carrier or deliverer of the text while in dance the body is the
text. Both dance and theatre artists have ventured to cross the definitive lines, dance taking on
spoken text and using non-dancers, and theatre dispensing with words. Butoh training offers
much to both dance and theatre students including how to access corporeal power.
In response to the question “what is the body?”, theatre theorist Peggy Phelan writes that the
body is at once a spiritual and corporeal body, an internal and external, invisible and visible,
living and dead body. Butoh artist Akaji Maro insists “you have to kill your body to construct a
body as a larger fiction.” Butoh co-founder Ohno Kazuo professes that “butoh revolves around
the idea of the ‘dead body,’ into which the dancer places an emotion that can freely express
itself.” Rather than using mimicry or specific instructions, Butoh training uses poetic imagery to
shape and move the body.
Applicants are invited to submit a 200-word proposal including a statement of interest and
reasons for how their research and/or practice supports, enhances, or questions the session’s
topics of inquiry along with a brief bio.
Topics of Inquiry (in relation to training to access corporeal power)
 Harnessing the connection between breath and energy
 Imagining the body as composed of elements: stone, water, air, etc
40
 Cultivating awareness of body physics: space/time, mass, and gravity
 The body as a container: matter and metamorphosis
The working session format includes alternation of whole group experiential sections lead by the
convener based on Butoh philosophy and techniques after which participants will break into
smaller groups. This will be a time for participants to share their research and/or practice
focusing on a specific topic through discussion or further movement experience. After the
alternating experiential and discussion sections, the whole group will convene so each of the
smaller groups will have a chance to share their experiences and findings. The session will
culminate in reflections and in suggestions for furthering discourse on the session’s topics.
Participants will be expected to conduct email conversations within their chosen smaller groups
(3-5 people) at least one month before the conference. These conversations will be focused on
topics given by the convener, and are designed to help participants prepare their contributions to
the working session. A pre-determined leader for each group will be responsible for emailing
weekly summaries to the convener. Each group will also submit (via email) three sources (title,
etc. with a summary or abstract) relating to the topics of inquiry to the convener by October 1,
2010, who will compile the list and resend to all participants for research and discussion
purposes. As a post-conference conclusion, the convener will email each participant early in
2011 with the intent of determining the impact of the working session experience on the
individual’s research/practice in their field.
More information on working sessions can be found at:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Dancing "African": Race, Representation, and the Moving Body
Christina Knight (Harvard University) and Jasmine Johnson (UC Berkeley)
This working group considers how ideas of Africa are embodied through movement, paying
special attention to staged dance—that is, choreographed dance performed for an audience. We
are interested in contemporary manifestations of African dance in order to explore how
practitioners evoke and adapt African cultural forms throughout the black diaspora. Moreover,
our working group will consider the ways in which 'African-ness' is staged through an
engagement with:
The "traditional/contemporary" and "retention/adaptation" binaries that often frame
interpretations of the cultures of Africa and its diaspora.
The tensions between African dance as a site of hybridity, technical prowess, and improvisation
of the one hand, and also as a repository of history, tradition, and spirit on the other.
How multiple parties—directors, dancers, and audiences—discursively define Africa and
putatively African cultural practices.
And, how the manner in which dance is performed and witnessed influences the dynamics of its
practice.
More broadly, our working group will work to address the following questions: "How is power
negotiated in terms of culture and identity?" and "How do bodies in motion negotiate and enact
power?" Ultimately we are interested in the ways in which "African-ness" is defined, who gets to
41
do the defining, and the stakes of certain definitions. Our working group encourages discussions
on culture that thoughtfully encompass race, the moving body, and popular culture.
Working Group Process and Format:
All participant papers will be circulated prior to the conference. Though every participant will
have access to all of the papers, each participant will be assigned one other paper to read closely.
We recommend that everyone share their thoughts about their assigned paper with their partner
prior to the conference. We encourage participants to submit works-in-progress rather than
finished articles or book chapters.
During the working session itself, the group will be divided into several breakout groups based
on shared themes gleaned from the papers. In order to facilitate dialogue, the larger group will
come together in the final 30 minutes of the session in order to share issues raised in the breakout
groups. We are hoping that this will facilitate discussion about themes that are relevant across
fields such as drama, dance history, African diaspora studies, and performance studies.
We welcome both graduate students and professors to join this discussion. For more details on
participant guidelines and expectations, please see the following link:
<http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx>http://ww
w.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Please send a 200 word abstract and brief bio to:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] and
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] by Monday, May 31st.
Indigenous Performance Research in the Americas: Bodies and Power
Ann Haugo ([email protected])
Tiffany Noell ([email protected]).
While 2009 and 2010 are watershed years in Indigenous performance research – with the
publication of one monograph and three collections of articles – the field is still emergent,5 with
little professional support for dialogues among researchers about methodology, focus, or ethical
considerations. As co-conveners representing different generations of scholarship, we hope this
session accomplishes two goals: First, the short-term goal of bringing together scholars of
Indigenous performance who are at various stages in their professional development (senior
researchers to graduate students); and second, a long-term goal of contributing to a foundation
upon which future dialogues can build.
In keeping with the conference theme of “Embodying Power: Work Over Time,” we propose a
set of possible questions that begin with the concepts of embodiment and power, including
Christy Stanlake’s Native American Drama: (Cambridge, 2009); S.E. Wilmer’s Native
American Performance and Representation (University of Arizona Press, 2009), and two
unreleased volumes from SUNY Press and UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center Press.
5
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questions that focus on the role of the scholar in the research process, a highly debated topic in
Indigenous Nations Studies discourses. However, because Indigenous Americas performance
research is still relatively new, we will also consider proposals from participants whose current
research may not intersect precisely with these concepts. Thus, participants might consider any
of the following topics, or suggest their own:
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In what ways do scholars transcribe embodied memory?
How do scholars mark indigenous bodies, or reveal the ways in which Indigenous bodies
have been “marked” historically?
How is power transferred/transformed from the stage to the page in Indigenous
performance?
How does Indigenous performance challenge colonial power relations in the Americas?
How does Indigenous performance negotiate power as it relates to culture and identity?
How is the actor-spectator interaction imagined in Indigenous performance?
Working Session Format:
In advance of the conference, participants will share 5-7 page “position” statements, articulating
their methodological approach, their subject or focus, and the significance of their research to
Indigenous performance. Via e-mail (or another internet-based discussion forum) participants
and the co-conveners will identify common concepts, arguments, key terms, or topics through
which to structure an interactive two-hour session at the conference.
We anticipate that some participants in this session may have also participated in the seminar
session convened by Ann Haugo at the 2006 ASTR Conference (Indigenous Americas:
Performance Research in Local and Transnational Contexts), and we hope that this working
group will provide an opportunity to sustain a dialogue about Indigenous performance research
within ASTR.
Applicants should send proposals of 500 words or less (in Word attachments, with affiliation and
full contact information) by May 31st, 2010 to Ann Haugo ([email protected]) AND Tiffany
Noell ([email protected]).
Negotiations of Power - A History of Collective Creation
We invite authors to submit proposals for essays on aspects of the international
development of the Collective Creation movement, from the early twentieth century
forward.
Aims: The aim of this working group is to produce and publish a history of the international
development of Collective Creation from the early twentieth century forward. The goal of this
proposed volume is to provide a more historically systematic overview than has hitherto been
attempted, and to contribute a significant piece to a broader consideration of the relationship
between institutional and aesthetic practices
We are interested in studies of particular companies, overviews of the historical development of
Collective Creation in particular regions of the world, and considerations of Collective
43
Creation’s varied manifestations (ideological, institutional, aesthetic, etc) at different historical
moments and in distinct cultural contexts.
For additional information on content, please see “Themes” and “Working Definition” below.
Rationale: Despite its significant, ongoing, global impact, Collective Creation remains
underdeveloped as an object of scholarship. We are aware of only a very small selection indepth studies in English, including The Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation (Vox Teatri,
2008), and Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising (Playwrights Canada Press, 2009).
While these constitute a significant step in the field, neither claims to offer an international,
historical overview.
Working Method:
 E-mail exchange (June–November), to test ideas and share resources;
 Contributions to working bibliography exchanged early July;
 Drafts exchanged early October;
 Revisions submitted subsequent to ASTR session; date TBD.
 ASTR session will be structured as discussion, with break-out working-groups to:
1. Refine the working definition of Collective Creation, taking into account intersections
with related forms, including studio, laboratory, devised and post-dramatic theatre, as
well as cultural divergences and convergences;
2. Re-define the scope of the proposed volume based upon contributions; identify
critical gaps; create a plan to address gaps;
3. Discuss ways of bringing drafts into fuller harmony with aims of the proposed
volume;
4. Produce draft book proposal;
5. Lay out schedule for completion.
Contact: Please send an abstract of 250 words or more, and brief bio emphasizing your interest
in Collective Creation to: Dr. Kathryn Syssoyeva, [email protected]
Deadline: May 15, 2010
For further guidelines and information, please go to:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Themes:
Our overarching aim is to map Collective Creation’s crisscrossing temporal, spatial and cultural
trajectories. Within this framework, themes we wish to see addressed include, but are not limited
to:
 Diverse structures of artistic authority/cooperation proposed by collective theatre groups over
the century;
 The role of particular institutional structures in facilitating/foreclosing upon particular
aesthetic possibilities – and vice versa;
 Intersections with related forms of theatrical experimentation;
 Collective creation as social protest;
44




The politics of political disengagement;
Imploding utopias and failed collectives;
Extra-theatrical impetuses (political, ideological, philosophical, etc) to collective creation;
The roots the theatrical collective in pre-twentieth century practice.
Working Definition: Collective Creation is a theatrical movement characterized above all by the
nature of the creative process – in its essence, a group of persons collaboratively developing a
theatrical work from conception to performance. Typically, that collaborative method eliminates
or decentralizes the role of the director, accentuates the creative contribution of the performer,
emphasizes democratic or consensual decision-making, and redistributes traditional designations
of responsibility. Collective Creation is here understood to be an artistic movement with broader
socio-political implications: a considered intervention into normative power dynamics of
hierarchically structured institutions, by practicing and modeling institutional alternatives. The
movement’s impulses are thus understood to be at once aesthetic and political. The nature of
that politics, however, is open-ended. Historically, the particular “politics” of particular
performance collectives run the gamut from the engaged political activism that typified the U.S.
collectives of the 1960’s, to utopian theatre communities such as Jacques Copeau’s “Copiaus”
(established in 1924), to the politics of political refusal, such as we find in the work of
Stanislavsky and his collaborators in his final Studio in the 1930's, which may arguably be
understood as constituting a radical (for its time and place) retreat from political oppression
through committed engagement in collective imagination.
While a flowering of Collective Creation occurred in the 60’s and 70’s, its roots can be traced to
collaborative theatre practices developed earlier in the century. Meyerhold, for instance,
introduced the term “collective creation” in Russia in 1906; Copeau and Saint-Denis deployed
collective creation methods in France in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Similarly, as Jane
Baldwin, Jean-Marc Larrue and Christiane Page argue in The Lives and Deaths of Collective
Creation, the movement’s impact continues to be felt globally. Indeed, the programs of many
theatre schools, the subject matter of many conference talks, the intensifying scholarly interest in
such related categories of practice as “devising,” “laboratory,” and “post-dramatic” theatre - all
suggest a resurgence of interest in collective practices, in the form of broad diffusion; arguably,
collective creation is experiencing a migration from margin to center.
Phenomenological Investigations of Embodied Agency

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Agency
Kinesthesia
Phenomenology
Improvisation
Consciousness
Movement Scores
Space for Action
Potential for (political) Movement
Sensory experience
Verbal analysis
Embodied Discourse
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FOCUS
In this workshop, participants embark on a collective, kinesthetic experience and – at the
same time – a phenomenological investigation of embodied agency. We focus on how
improvising bodies enact, experience, and negotiate power. [We operate under the assumption
that any movement can be looked at socio-politically, as to what it is performing, what it is
producing.] In a collaborative setting we introduce frameworks, or movement scores, for
improvising. Developed in relation to the theories of Michel Foucault and Maurice MerleauPonty, these scores implicitly alter power relationships as they restrict and condition the basic
freedom of the participants: they control, encourage, rein in, permit, contain, or make space for
subjectivity. As a result, the scores enable the group to have an embodied discourse on agency.
We make space for actions and trace what it is like to be engaged in a certain action. We
move from privileging the sensory experience to privileging analysis to see how they inform
each other. How do these moves enable an account of agency that centers on the body, its
experience and potential for movement?
FORMAT
Our format lays the foundation for a democratic dialogue. We begin with a series of
scores for movement improvisations that create a range of experiences and that shift our focus on
kinesthetic, social, and phenomenological issues. Next, participants will engage in a writing and
discussion process that allows them to articulate their experience during the improvisations and
make connections to their particular research interest.
Thereafter the group will co-construct a graphic word map that centers on one
collectively determined issue of embodiment. The textual drawing accounts for the various
perspectives and points of view in the room, and serves as a basic score for the next round of
improvisations. To conclude, we analyze and contextualize our experiences, and connect them
to the larger theoretical frameworks. The back and forth between improvising and
discussion/writing lends itself to understanding more about the intersections of theories and
practices, in which we excavate questions that lend themselves to further thinking and moving.
WHO?
We are looking for dance and theatre artists, dance scholars, theatre scholars and
individuals interested in the aforementioned lines of inquiry. Basic knowledge of Foucault,
Merleau-Ponty, and theories of embodiment is helpful.
WHAT IS EXPECTED?
 Post 1-2 articles or book excerpts on phenomenology/embodiment/consciousness/agency
on google group (TBD). Due July 30, 2010
 Read all postings. Write and post responses by October 15, 2010
 Commit to reading everybody’s responses before the conference
PLEASE SUBMIT the following to Arianne Hoffmann ([email protected]) and
Kristen Smiarowski ([email protected]) by May 31st 2010:
Statement of interest
Description of research & practice (this could include scholarship, creative
practice, writing, moving, speaking)
1-2 suggested readings for the group (see “What is Expected?”)
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Abbreviated CV or resume
Contact information
More information on Working Sessions:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
The Media of Theater and Dance in History and Theory
Session Leaders:
Sarah Bay-Cheng, Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre, SUNY
Buffalo, <[email protected]>
Martin Harries, Professor of English, NYU <[email protected]>
Expected Number of Participants: 10-12
Call For Participants:
The contemporary proliferation of new media has made scholars unusually alert the mediated
nature of all expression and communication: it is as though McLuhan’s exaggerations have all
come true. In theater and dance studies, however, as in other fields, the glamour of an explosion
of media in our historical moment has to some extent blinded scholars to the history of media.
There are so many video screens on stage now that we treat the “mediatization” of dance and
theater as new, overlooking theater’s reliance on or dialectical interaction with media in earlier
periods. If the overall aim of this 2010 conference is to consider the ways that power is
embodied in performance, the narrower aim of this working session will be to investigate the role
that media play in the exercise and embodiment of -- and in the resistance to -- power of various
kinds. Our goal is not collectively to develop a general theory of the mediatization of theater and
dance, but to consider the variegated and historically contingent roles that different media have
played in different spaces and times. We invite scholars of theater and dance to consider the
importance of media to their work across historical and national divides, and discuss together
how emphasis on the historical specificity of media allows for a renewed understanding of dance
and theater.
This working session will take the form of a seminar at the 2010 conference in Seattle. In
advance of the conference, participants will read a focused selection of crucial theoretical
readings, take part in an online forum in advance, and exchange short response papers of five
pages or so on how the readings and forum have, and have not, illuminated the particular issues
that they encounter in their own work.
We will open an electronic forum for discussion by midsummer, and begin our discussion online.
We will then ask each participant to write a short response paper of five pages or so to be
distributed to all participants. These response papers will discuss how this set of readings, and
our online discussion to that point, have and have not addressed issues of particular importance
to their work. We will pair participants and ask each member to write a response to the other
paper they have read. Questions for these response papers and for discussion in the seminar may
include, among others:
47
 Is performance a medium?
 What definition of “media” is useful? Does McLuhan’s “extensions of man” extend
the terrain too far?
 In what ways have theater and dance defined themselves by negating or offering an
alternative to the dominant organization of media?
Interested participants should send an abstract of their research interests (250 words) and brief
biography to Sarah Bay-Cheng ([email protected]) and Martin Harries
([email protected]) via email attachment by May 31, 2010.
General information about participation in ASTR working sessions can be found at:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx
Schedule:
Proposals for Working Session:
31 May 2010
Selection of Participants:
15 June 2010
Distribution of Readings/
Opening of Online Forum:
30 June 2010
Response Papers Due:
15 October 2010
Paired Responses Due:
7 November 2010
Performing Modernisms
Rationale:
This working session explores the power of the body as a communicative instrument in all types
of modernist performance, exploring the dynamism implicit in modernism’s various
“movements” and expanding our understanding of these “-isms” by attending not only to their
defining principles but to the aesthetic practices they performed. Recent studies (for example, by
Olga Taxidou and Günter Berghaus) have opened up the field of the “New Modernist Studies” to
a performance-studies-oriented approach. This seminar invites further contributions to
modernist performance studies, including (but not limited to) work on specific modernist figures
and/or movements (especially understudied or overlooked artists and groups), performance and
alternative modernisms (especially from the global “periphery”), indigenous and transnational
modernist performance, modernist performance in popular culture, performing bodies as/and
machines, manifestoes and political action, historical approaches to the study of modernist
performance, problems in historicizing performance, the repertoire versus the archive in
modernist performance, and theories of modernist performance.
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Format:
Abiding by a seminar format, this session requires each participant to submit a 10-15 page paper
by early October, such that they may be circulated among all participants. Divided into 4
clusters based upon specific topics that emerge, participants will then read and comment on the
papers submitted by their fellow cluster members via an online discussion before convening in
November to join in a larger group discussion. At the conference, the sponsors will briefly
introduce the seminar participants, provide an overview of the 4 topics that define the clusters,
and facilitate discussion among participants and attendees. Besides providing a forum in which
to explore the emerging field of New Modernist Performance Studies, this session seeks to build
upon the 2009 session by continuing to compile a bibliography of recent scholarship that could
be posted on the ASTR website as a resource for all interested members.
Submission guidelines:
Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to all four session conveners by Monday, May
31st.
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Julia A. Walker, Washington University in St. Louis, [email protected]
Rhonda Garelick, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, [email protected]
Penny Farfan, University of Calgary, [email protected]
Kate E. Kelly, Texas A & M University, [email protected]
Dance and the Power of Aging: Embodiment at the intersection of nature and culture
With the exception of a number of high profile performers such as the late Margot Fonteyn,
Sylvie Guillem and Mikhail Baryshnikov, dancing for the working professional is understood to
be largely a young person’s occupation. As research indicates, the average age of retirement
from professional dancing is between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-four (Wainwright and
Williams 2005, Laws 2005). Contradicting this phenomenon of early retirement, recent exercise
science research has pointed towards a far longer physiological longevity for professional
dancers, suggesting a dancer’s physiology can cope with contemporary performance demands
well in excess of actual retirement ages (Koutedakis and Jamurtas 2004; Wyon, Head et al. 2004;
Wyon 2005; Wyon 2009). Looking at these current findings in exercise science, this working
session opens up discussions on how sociality plays a far more complex and powerful role in
determining what is often understood as a strictly physiological event. While there are pockets of
research into the effects of aging and dance in the medical humanities (Wainwright and Turner
2003, 2006), performance studies disciplines have largely ignored the issue of aging and
performance (Woodward 2006). In dance studies this is particularly surprising given that dance
has a dramatically age influenced aesthetic. This working session looks to advance new avenues
of intellectual examination, inviting a more complex negotiation of the power of aging.
Format of Working Session
The working session hopes to encourage cross disciplinary investigations into the scientific and
cultural grounds of our understanding of aging in the performing arts. The breadth of possible
perspectives and standpoints that this topic invites, including not only differing disciplinary
points of view but also the impact of such forces as gender, race and class, opens up an exciting
range of research possibilities. To this end, paper proposals are sought for presentation at the
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session, including contributions from graduate students. Although resulting papers should
present clear research parameters around method and topic area, they are intended more as a
stimulus for opening debate and making collaborative interdisciplinary connections. To aid a
sustained and evolving exchange of ideas, chosen participants will be expected to circulate their
presentation in essay form (with attached bibliographic references) to a secure member’s only
online blog interface in the run up to the conference. Following the presentation of papers, the
panel presenters will further explore intellectual convergences and departures. Discussion will
then be invited from auditors of the session.
Proposals should be sent to Victoria Thoms at [email protected] and include:
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An abstract of no more than 200 words outlining the subject and methodological approach of
your proposed presentation
Indicative bibliography
Contact details and biography of the presenter/presenters
Technical requirements
The Shakespearean Performance Research Group of the American Society for Theatre
Research (ASTR)
The Shakespearean Performance Research Group provides an ongoing home for the study of
Shakespearean performance within ASTR.
For the 2010 conference, “Embodying Power: Work Over Time,” we seek papers that address
issues relating to the history, theory, and practice of Shakespeare performance. While working
group papers need not be tied to the conference theme, our inquiries do engage with several areas
germane to the themes of the Seattle conference. For example, we would like to invite papers
that, broadly speaking, interrogate the "work" of Shakespeare performance. We have in mind the
tension, reciprocity, overlap between several different senses of "work": the relationship between
the literary "work," the "work" on stage, and the "work" of the professional theatre; how working
on and with Shakespearean writing and performance has been constituted historically and
theoretically; the "work" that Shakespeare performance might be said to accomplish; or the ways
in which the reputation of Shakespearean "work" has been used to validate or legitimize
performance as a profession and field of inquiry. As corporate entities gain nearly unlimited
powers of "speech," are there ways in which the Shakespearean literary/theatrical corpus claims
for itself powers to speak culturally in ways that may overwhelm other voices? We seek to
interrogate such speech, work and power, and their embodiment in Shakespearean performance.
At this year’s conference, we are planning to collaborate for at least a portion of our session with
members of the “New Approaches to Plays from the Spanish Golden Age” working group, and
so also welcome papers that look at the relationship between Shakespearean theatre and that of
the Spanish Golden Age.
Those wishing to propose a paper should submit a 200-word abstract and 50-word academic
biographical statement, including current affiliation(s), if any, by Monday, May 31st, 2010, to
[email protected] (proposals also can be mailed to Don Weingust, Center for Shakespeare
Studies, Southern Oregon University, 1250 Siskiyou Boulevard, Ashland, OR 97520).
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Selected papers will be assigned to subgroups by the group’s conveners, Catherine Burriss,
Franklin J. Hildy, Robert Ormsby, Don Weingust and W. B. Worthen, and the conveners will
organize on-line communication of subgroup members before the conference. At the three-hour
conference session, papers will be discussed first within the subgroups, after which the groups
will come together to exchange ideas.
Ecology and/in/of Performance Working Group
Theresa May [email protected] / 541 346-1789
Conveners: Theresa May (Asst. Prof. U Oregon), Downing Cless (Assoc. Prof. Tufts), Wendy
Arons (Assoc. Prof. Carnegie Mellon), Arden Thomas (PhD Candidate, Stanford).
The Ecology and/in/of Performance Working Group has formed as a response to growing
ecological sensibility in our collective professional imagination. (For example, in March 2009
the Public Art Research Cluster at Carnegie Mellon U hosted a symposium entitled “Greening
the Future of Live Performance.” In May 2009 Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) convened a
Symposium on Theatre & Ecology at the University of Oregon.) The array of current research –
which includes dance and the embodiment of landscape, architectural responses to place, critical
animal studies, theatre historiography that treats the land as archive, ecopolitics, and ecopoetics,
have begun to articulate a significant nexus of inquiry in our field. We are witnessing not only a
growing concern and mounting artistic will, but also faith in the imagination as a critical aspect
of our individual and collective ecological identities. The Ecology in/and/of Performance
working session is an ongoing research group that fosters trans-disciplinary research (including
performance-based research) that interrogates the intersection of performance and ecology. We
are particularly interested in research models that employ the science of ecology as a critical
framework; or employ environmental history to contextualize performance. (As opposed to, for
example, the metaphoric use of "ecology" in reference merely to "whole systems thinking.”) Our
aim is to challenge ourselves and the community of theatre and dance scholars to engage with the
material non-human environment, bringing a more scientifically-based understanding of ecology
to bear on how we imagine, theatricalize, or perform it. We are interested in fostering critical
engagement of key theoretical and practical concerns such as:
 intersections of landscape or ecology and the body;
 the ecological ‘footprint’ of production;
 performances that participate in/reflect ecological debates through representation;
 cultural (de)construction of "nature";
 performative intersections of social justice and ecological issues;
 partnership projects in the arts and sciences;
 dialogic relationships between onstage/offstage ecological discourses;
 subjectivity/inter-subjectivity and ecological identity;
 animal representation on/off stage;
 eco-activism/community-based performance.
The format will encourage investigation (including practice) that opens up new collaborative
scholarly and/or practice-based projects; dialogue and sharing of research will occur via email
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and/or blog. The working group members will form small interest groups prior to the conference.
As introductions, these small groups will exchange written or practice-based samples of their
research. Members of the small groups will respond/reflect on the work samples, and together
formulate 2 foundational questions that link their projects and open up fissures or complications.
At the conference the entire working group will meet prior to its session. There, the small focus
groups will pose their questions to a second group, which will develop a response to the
questions. At the session, each focus group will have a short time to discuss their own questions;
followed by a “listening” period when they hear responses to their questions from the second
small group. (Two rounds.) Following these discussions, each pair of small groups will share the
the results of their exchange with the whole working group.
By Monday May 31st, please send a 200 word abstract or proposal to Theresa May
[email protected].
Traumatic Structures
Trauma figures significantly in theatre, dance, and performance art. Plays, from Euripides’
Trojan Women to Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, take up both domestic and societal traumas. From its
inception, the confessing and healing of trauma has been a core practices in performance art.
Some examples include Mitchell’s Death by Linda Montano, Sally’s Rape by Robbie McCauley,
and Sarajevo by Reza Abdoh. Isadora Duncan created Mother following the loss of her children,
Butoh emerged in response to the horrors of the atomic bomb blasts, and Bill T. Jones created
Still Here by interviewing people who face life threatening illnesses.
Trauma is always about power, whether it is about the loss of power of the individual or the
practices of a repressive regime. Often the work of performance (over time) is to come to terms
with that trauma by modifying the power relations through practice. Many claims are made about
the power of the arts to heal, to hold accountable, or to promote change. There are so many
examples of performative works that engage such a broad range of violences (domestic violence,
genocide, racial discrimination) with such a wide range of strategies (testimony, dramatization,
realism, imagism, expressionism, reenactment) and desiring diverse outcomes (accountability,
healing, condemnation, reconciliation) that it seems plausible to suggest that performing arts
share a “special relationship” with trauma.
This is a paradoxical effort given that trauma is defined as that which is “world shattering”,
“overwhelming”, or “unrepresentable”. In her geneology of trauma, Ruth Leys describes the
traumatic experience as one “so profound” that is precludes “cognitive knowledge.” In
Mourning Sex, Peggy Phelan reminds us that
trauma’s potency comes in part from how well it is contained. When I say trauma is
untouchable, I mean that it cannot be represented. The symbolic cannot carry it: trauma
makes a tear in the symbolic network itself.”
How then do we propose to make representations of that which is not representable? And how
can we do so without reiterating/reinscribing the very violences we seek to redress?
This working group is aimed at those who are interested in putting forward a theory of trauma in
performance. We hope to bring together scholars with practitioners whose work explores the
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performative dimensions of trauma. We will attempt to share not only our scholarly efforts but
also our source materials. This means we will “go the extra mile” to find ways to exchange
documentation, to view live performances, or to read scripts. Proposals should address the
theoretical perspectives of the applicant but also include suggestions for how the work could be
best shared with group members. In addition to writing and reading one another’s papers,
working group participants should be prepared to view documentation ahead of the conference
and/or to meet for extended hours (beyond the allocated session) if group members propose
performances or events.
Please send an abstract of 250-500 words that clearly explains your proposed contribution to this
working session. Include in your narrative an explicit statement of your thesis or objective and a
clear description of your object(s) of study. Make sure to indicate the format of your
presentation and any special needs for your content to be fully shared with the group. In addition
to your proposal, please also submit a brief bio, CV, or cover letter that clarifies your
professional credentials and your relevant qualifications for this working group.
The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2010.
Send electronic proposals (pdf preferred) to Laurie Beth Clark, Professor, Art Department,
University of Wisconsin: [email protected].
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