ASTR Feminist Historiography Working Group CFP

[Penny Farfan]

American Society for Theatre Research

Feminist Historiography Working Group
Toronto, Saturday, 12 November 2005, 7:00-9:00 PM

Call for Papers
_
What Did/ She/ Say?
Recovering Evidence of Women's Theatre Discourse___

Major accounts of theatre history (including histories of theatre theory
and criticism) typically include little commentary by women artists,
theorists, critics, and historians of theatre, yet women across the
centuries have documented in various modes and genres their ideas about
theatre.  Women's commentary is often embedded (and thus camouflaged) in
various modes of non-dramatic writing, including reviews, letters, and
novels, which may help to explain their absence from collections of
dramatic criticism and theory.

A standard anthology of theatrical writing, Bernard Dukore's /Dramatic
Theory and Criticism/, includes no such commentary by women, but it does
include both extended essays and brief excerpts from letters, prefaces,
speeches, and popular journalism by male writers about the nature and
significance of theatre.  We can look to similar sources--letters,
diaries, novels, prologues, plays, poems, literary criticism, reviews,
fashion columns, training programs, club minutes, etc.--for evidence of
how women thought and wrote about theatre.

In 2005, the ASTR Feminist Historiography Working Group will focus on
documenting and analyzing commentary by women about theatre across
historical periods.  Such commentary might consider the nature, history,
effects, and significance of theatre and the processes by which it has
been made.  We invite proposals for brief papers (maximum 5 pages total)
consisting of a primary document (letter, review, diary entry, excerpt
from novel, poem, play, memoir, etc.) and an accompanying analysis of
that document as a contribution to an insufficiently understood history
of women's thinking about theatre.

Specific questions that might be considered in relation to particular
documents include, but are not limited to, the following:

    What does the primary document reveal about what its author believed
    theatre had been, was, or could be?  How does the document view the
    relation of the theatrical present to the past or future?  How does
    the thinking evident in the document clarify the author's own
    theatrical or dramaturgical practice, both in its own right and in
    relation to that of her precursors and/or contemporaries?  How does
    the document intervene in conventional theatrical/dramaturgical
    practices or accounts of theatre history, and why?  Does the
    document memorialize a past event or person, and if so, why is that
    event or person significant to the author of the document, given her
    present moment?  How does the document conceptualize the relation
    between art and life, between theatrical/dramaturgical practice and
    lived experience?

The following are some of the larger questions that we hope the Working
Group will collectively consider through its collection and analysis of
a range of such documents:

    If we begin to recover a body of overlooked and/or undervalued
    evidence of women's thoughtful presence at, involvement in, and
    reflection upon theatre, how does that body of evidence change
    historical narratives of theatre at various historical periods?
    Does a history different from that represented in current popular
    and academic narratives of the theatre emerge when these accounts
    are taken seriously?

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words to both conveners, Penny
Farfan (farfan at ucalgary.ca <mailto:farfan at ucalgary.ca>) and Kate Kelly
(kate-kelly at tamu.edu <mailto:kate-kelly at tamu.edu>) by June 1, 2005.
Complete papers, including original documents, of no more than 5 pages
will be due by September 1 to initiate a pre-conference discussion via
email.  N.B. Our conference time has been scheduled for Saturday Nov.
12, from 7-9 p.m.  **
--

Penny Farfan
Associate Professor of Drama and English

University of Calgary
Department of Drama
Craigie Hall D209
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary
Alberta
Canada  T2N 1N4

Phone: (403) 220-6680
Fax: (403) 284-0713
E-mail: farfan at ucalgary.ca

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