SEMINAR CFP: CATR Victoria 2013 Upsurges of the Real part 2

[Jenn Stephenson]

SEMINAR CFP: CATR Victoria 2013 "Upsurges of the Real part 2" Seminar leader: Jenn Stephenson

As David Shields notes in his manifesto Reality Hunger, "every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art" (3). In the last decade or so, artists in varying disciplines have responded to this perennial challenge of presenting reality by including larger and larger chunks of actual "real" stuff into their works. Theatre, however, constitutes a special case, because any staging of "real" elements is complicated by the core operation of the theatrical frame, which is to take a real thing (an actor) and turn it into a fictional thing (Hamlet). This essential fictionalizing property of theatre presents significant challenges to the representation and perception of real objects as "real."

This seminar aims to parse out the complex and sometimes ambiguous relationships of "reality" and fiction in what we might term reality-based or "documentary" theatre. From the analysis of the ontological status of these elements, it will be possible to connect various strategies for representing the "real" to the invariably overt politically or socially-activist intentions of these documentary works. The main objective of this seminar is to draw connections among the strategies employed by diverse genres (site-specific, verbatim, documentary, autobiography) with the idea of beginning to collectively develop a poetics of reality-based performance.

The seminar welcomes proposals both from returning participants of last year's seminar on the same topic and also from new potential members. Selected members of the seminar will be asked to submit a short paper (15-20 pages) by 10 May. Once the papers are collected, each member will be asked to respond to two other seminar papers. Responses will be due 20 May. At the conference, the seminar will meet for 3 hours. The overall goal of the meeting is to assist each other in moving scholarship forward with the specific goal of encouraging the publication of the work produced. Abstracts (250 words) should be submitted to Jenn Stephenson jenn.stephenson at queensu.ca<mailto:jenn.stephenson at queensu.ca> by 14 January 2013.


Jenn Stephenson
Associate Professor, Drama
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6

Phone. (613)533-6000 x78597
Email. jenn.stephenson at queensu.ca<mailto:jenn.stephenson at queensu.ca>
Web. www.queensu.ca/drama/jstephenson<http://www.queensu.ca/drama/jstephenson>
Twitter: @queensjenn
Blog: www.realtheatre.wordpress.com

"There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography" --Paul Valéry
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