CFP: Seminar: Affect / Canada / Theatre - CATR Fredericton

[Erin Hurley, Prof.]

Call for Participants

Seminar: Affect / Canada / Theatre
Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) conference,
Fredericton, NB, May 28-31, 2011.  

Of late, scholars have renewed theatre and performance studies’
historical attention to questions of sentiment, feeling, and mood.  Work
on racialized affect in/as performance (Muñoz), utopian performatives
(Dolan), and theatre’s affective labour (Ridout) reflect this engagement
with creative expression of the “affective turn.” Little, however, has
been published on the relation of affect to theatre and performance in
or about Canada. The goal of this seminar is to examine if and how the
affective turn is changing theatre studies in Canada. We might ask, How
has theatrical affect participated in building or destabilizing
collectives, communities, and nations in Canada?  What strategies can we
use for mapping or marking affects and their resonances in and through
performance?  A more conceptual goal is to explore how thinking feeling
opens up new areas of inquiry, modes of analysis, and kinds of attention
in theatre studies in Canada.  

Participants may wish to consider the following:
--How does Canadian theatre and performance produce, manage, and
transmit feeling, emotion, and affect? 
--Can we map a Canadian theatrical geography via an emotional geography
of performance in Canada? Would it allow for an alternative narrative of
Canadian theatre history or regionalism? 
--Can regional differences in theatrical style be reconsidered through
the lens of affect as varying affective registers or emphases?  
--Can we consider Canada’s geopolitical borders or identity frontiers as
affectively invested domains?   
--How might a production’s affective draw inform what becomes a Canadian
“classic”? 
--What are the connections between so-called “national” or
“representative” plays/performances and the specifics of the affects
they deploy or provoke?  
--What character types, theatrical forms, or performance venues carry
the burden of affective labour? 

Selected participants must submit papers (10 pages) by 2 April for
feedback by other participants. The seminar will involve structured
discussion of broader questions regarding the emergent discourse of
theatre and affect and its challenges and opportunities for theatre and
performance studies in and about Canada.

Please e-mail 500-word proposals and a short bio by 15 January 2011 to
Erin Hurley, McGill University, erin.hurley at mcgill.ca