Reminder: Foot Call For Papers

[Luella Massey]

The Festival Of Original Theatre (FOOT), a yearly graduate conference  
held at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for Study of  
Drama, seeks 20 minute paper presentations for its 2009 Conference:  
“Exquisite Corpses, Bloody Bodies: Murder, Myth, and Representations  
of Violence on Stage and Screen,” to be held in Toronto, Ontario  
January 28th-31st, 2009.

A history of theatre and film from Aeschylus to Martin McDonough might  
very well be written as the story of violence and its representation.   
The world’s theatres have been the sites of countless acts of physical  
aggression, murder, even cannibalism: violence occurring onstage and  
off; violence represented with extreme realism and extreme  
stylization; violence played for laughs or played in chilling  
silence.  Littered with bodies, corpses, blood and bones that are the  
products of violent murder, ‘noble’ self-sacrifice, spectacular  
accidents, calculated sadism, and occasionally even ‘natural’  
circumstances, the theatre is a venue in which the dead literally  
arise, take a bow at the end of the evening and do the whole thing  
over again tomorrow night.

If we start from the premise that the dramatic arts function as key  
sites for the production and transfer of myth and social  
understanding, what do the conventions by which violence is  
represented at a given historical moment tell us about a particular  
culture?  About the relationship of an act of theatre to the society  
that produced it?  About that society’s views, however diverse and  
contested they may be, of the place of violence in culture, the  
relationship of the individual body to the body politic, the threat of  
violence, and even what it means to exist as an individual?

Contributions that historicize the topic, even when dealing with  
contemporary theatre, would be particularly welcome.  A variety of  
approaches are encouraged: presenters might focus very closely on the  
depiction of violated bodies in one particular staging occurring at a  
specific historical moment, or the changing representational  
strategies applied to one play or mythic story in different cultures.

A few possible panel topics might include:

*Ob-scenity and verbal violence: representing the off-stage murder.

*Blood at the “origin”: changing depictions of blood and violence in  
mythic Greek theatre and its revivals.

*Slapstick and knockabout: violence played for laughs.

*Murder, my sweet: female bodies and the sexualization of violence.

*Realism and its discontents: film, the theatrical body, and the  
possibility of “authentic” representations of violence and death.

*Breath as little as possible: living actors as dead bodies.

Potential participants are asked to submit a 250 word abstract for a  
20 minute presentation, along with a one line bio, to foot.graddrama at utoronto.ca 
 no later than October 15th, 2008. Applicants will be notified by  
email by November 1st.