CFPs vol on performance & ecology

[Denis Salter]

ESSAYS IN PERFORMANCE & ECOLOGY

Edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May 

Estimated publication: 2011

Call for Papers
In March 2009 the Public Art Research Cluster at Carnegie Mellon University hosted a symposium entitled "Greening the Future of Live Performance," organized and moderated by Wendy Arons, director of the Performance and Ecology Public Art Initiative and Associate Professor of Dramatic Literature and Dramaturgy.  In May 2009 Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) convened a Symposium on Theatre & Ecology at the University of Oregon, organized by EMOS founder and artistic director, Theresa May, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts.  These are two recent examples of a significant and growing ecological sensibility in our collective professional imagination.  Notes from the EMOS schedule provide a window into this emerging discourse: 

 

The array of papers and presentations at the EMOS Symposium indicated not only a growing concern, mounting artistic will, but also faith in the imagination as an aspect of our ecological selves.  Practice-based sessions reminded us that theatre is a way of knowing; dance and architecture reminded us that our work is necessarily embodied; critical animal studies insisted we are not alone here; theatre historiography treated the land as archive; ecopolitics embraced ecopoetics; and in almost every session we witnessed a re-calibration toward community collaboration and local means (May 09). 

 

The editors of this proposed anthology of essays, interviews, and artist statements invite papers that further identify, illuminate, or complicate ecocritical concerns as they relate to theatre and performance (broadly construed).  We are especially interested in explorations that employ the science (rather than merely the metaphor) of ecology as a critical framework; or employ environmental history to contextualize performance.  We welcome papers on topics including but not limited to: the ecological situatedness of language; the dialogic relationship between onstage/offstage ecological discourses; intersections and complications of landscape/body; performances that participate in/reflect ecological debates; ecology, technology and representation; the cultural (de)construction of "nature"; performative intersections of social justice and ecological issues; partnership projects in the arts and sciences; ecological dramaturgy; community/place and ecology; the body as a site of ecological intersections; the ecologies of theatrical space; semiotics of "nature"; subjectivity/inter-subjectivity and the ecological self; animal representation on/off stage; eco-activism/community-based performance.  

We encourage submissions by artists working in the area of eco-performance and who reflect critically on their work and/or process. We encourage proposals that go beyond a recitation of ideas or positions, but instead critically engage a driving question about how performance (broadly constructed) has or might function as part of ecological communities.

 

Please send a working draft (conference length is fine), or a finished draft, or (if you must) an abstract of 500 words to both editors:  Theresa J. May tmay33 at uoregon.edu, and Wendy Arons warons at andrew.emu.edu by October 1, 2009. Documents should be sent as attachments. 

Thank you!  We look forward to reading your submission.

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"They were neither one thing nor the other; neither Victorians nor themselves. They were suspended, without being, in limbo." Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts.  
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"Essentially, we strip Mother Nature to a skeletal form. We still worship and appreciate that, but we don't realize that it's a skeletal form. Not understanding that it's skeletal, we also have no idea how close to perishing it is."--Richard Hebda.
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Denis Salter
McGill
853 Sherbrooke St. West
Montreal, QC
H3A 2T6



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