CFP: War Making Bodies | Graduate Symposium at Indiana University

[Sara Beth Taylor]

GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY  |  WAR MAKING BODIES  |  DECEMBER 9-10, 2011
Submission Deadline:  September 15, 2011

The First Annual Indiana University Department of Theatre & Drama Graduate Symposium on Theatre and Performance Studies:

WAR MAKING BODIES

While acts of war and theatrical acts differ in many respects, they both, nevertheless, have a direct and often lasting effect on the bodies involved. What and how that happens—what is made and unmade—has the potential to change everything after the “making” and the perception of everything that has come before it.

In conjunction with the university’s Fall 2011 Themester initiative, “Making War, Making Peace,” the Indiana University Department of Theatre & Drama presents a Graduate Symposium titled War Making Bodies. The program is open to submissions from Indiana University graduate students from all disciplines, as well as graduate and post-graduate students from other institutions and independent scholars.

The two day-long event features an evening performance of Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in addition to a day of presentations of student research and a keynote address by Rhonda Blair, President of the American Society for Theatre Research and Professor of Theatre at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

The conference will be Friday, December 9th and Saturday, December 10th, 2011 in Bloomington, Indiana and features a $200 prize for the best essay to be awarded at the conference.

We are seeking papers that address the implications of war, bodies, and performance. We hope to host a diverse, interdisciplinary community of scholars and welcome proposals from disciplines outside theatre and performance studies that rigorously address the conference theme.

Papers might deal with, but are not limited to:

• The political body and the body politic

• Theatre and its relationship to war and politics

• Reading dramatic literature in a political frame

• Trauma as it is bodied, embodied, and disembodied

• Terror management and its integration into performance theory

• How bodies reveal pain

• Performance of memory

• Spectatorship and power
• The performance of war

• The ramifications of media and its effect on performed/performing bodies
• The role of performance in framing historical narratives of war

We also welcome alternative, practice-as-research or performance proposals that address the theme, War Making Bodies. Facilities may be available to stage performances or demonstrations, but these proposals are encouraged to be submitted as early as possible.

Please submit a 300 word proposal and one paragraph bio to warmakebody at gmail.com by September 15th. Presenters will be notified of their acceptance in late September.