ASTR Working Session Call: Theorizing Temporality in Performance

[Benjamin Gillespie]

Dear All,

*[My apologies in advance for cross-posting.]*

I'd like to draw your attention to a working session I'll be running at
this year's American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference. I
encourage you to apply if your work intersects with issues of temporality
and performance in any way. The full working session description can be
found below. I'd really like to see some fellow Canadian participants on
the panel, if possible. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have
any questions. Submissions are due by June 1st.

All best,
Benjamin
--
Benjamin A. Gillespie
Assistant Editor, *PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art*
PhD. Candidate in Theatre, The Graduate Center
Writing Fellow, Lehman College
Adjunct Lecturer, Baruch College
City University of New York
benjamin.a.gillespie at gmail.com


*Theorizing Transtemporality and Performance*
*American Society for Theatre Research Conference*
*Minneapolis, Minnesota*
*November 3-6, 2016*

*Session Conveners:*

*Benjamin Gillespie, The Graduate Center, CUNYStephanie Vella, The Graduate
Center, CUNY*

In recent years, the turn toward temporality studies in the humanities has
seen rigorous development as the result of applying transdisciplinary
methodologies that take issue with historical assumptions surrounding the
organization of time and the prioritization of space. Since performance is
a durational concept necessarily engaged in alterations of time—be they
diachronic, synchronic, episodic, dissonant, repetitive, distorted,
situational, queer, lapsed, or otherwise—it is an ideal paradigm through
which to explore and measure the collision of multiple temporal
arrangements in bodies and worlds, both human and nonhuman. Speaking
directly to the conference theme, this working session will consider how
“trans” might widen discourses of temporality in theatre and performance
studies and potentially disrupt histories and critiques that position
bodies inside or outside of time along vectors of race, class, gender,
ability, and age.

*We offer the following prompts for thinking theatre and performance anew
through the transtemporal:*







*What are the potentials for measuring the body in, through, over, and
across time in theatre and performance, as well as measuring time’s effect
on performing bodies?How might transtemporality reconfigure aesthetic and
cultural periodizations such as modern, primitive, classical, post-modern,
post-colonial, avant-garde, contemporary, early, and late?How does
transtemporality intersect with queer, disability, gender, trans,
indigenous, age, and critical race studies?How does transtemporality move
across or through fast, slow, extended, suspended, and condensed time
frames?Can the transtemporal disrupt the flows of labor and capital?How do
the scholarly uses of archives, images, memories, and gestures potentially
transcend singular temporalities?Can transtemporality point to the limits
of historiography, periodization, genre, and the methodological concerns of
performance studies itself?*

Accepted participants will share 8-10 page papers with the entire group by
October 1st. We will then divide the papers into subgroups of 3-4
participants according to the topics that emerge. The members of each
subgroup will read their group’s papers closely and engage in an online
discussion before the conference, drawing parallels among the papers and
organizing their presentation for the in-person working session. During the
session, each subgroup will give a 10 minute presentation including a short
summary of each paper, an overall summary of the online discussion, and a
focused discussion question for the larger group developed out of common
themes. A discussion period of 15 minutes with the entire group will follow
each presentation. The final 20 minutes of the session will open up the
conversation to auditors.

*Interested participants should submit the following details: *your name,
institutional affiliation, and both a paper title and 500-word abstract
suited to the interests of the working group. For any specific questions,
please contact the working group conveners at bgillespie at gradcenter.cuny.edu
 andsvella at gradcenter.cuny.edu. Please note that all submissions must be
received formally through the ASTR website, at
http://www.astr.org/page/16_WGSubmissions. The form will allow you to
indicate second and third-choice working groups if you wish; if you do so,
note that there is a space for you to indicate how your work will fit into
those groups. The deadline for receipt of working group proposals is 1 June
2016 and we anticipate that participants will be notified of their
acceptance no later than 30 June. As this is the first year of this new
process, please contact the conference organizers at astr2016 at astr.org if
you have any questions about the process.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20160506/ff503e0c/attachment.html>