[Candrama] CFP - Living Circles: Jewish Philosophy & Performance (CATR Roundtable)

[Laine Newman]

*Living Circles: Jewish Philosophy & Performance*

Call for Roundtable Participants

Canadian Association for Theatre Research

Vancouver, BC June 3-6, 2019

Jewish spiritualties are inextricably defined and shaped by circles. We
dance in them. We write in them. We keep time through them. Our daily
lives, our scholarly work, and our performances exist through a framework
that refuses linearity. Spatially and temporally, we are oriented through a
complex refusal to isolate past from present, where we are from where we
have been and where we are going. What might this spiritual and religious
lens offer us pedagogically and theatrically in performance and education?
Alongside other established scholarly frameworks, what does it mean to
apply Jewish philosophy as a form and structure to our performance practice
and theoretical investigations?

The Jewish Talmud is written in a kind of circle, with the text centralized
and the commentaries encircling it physically on the page. It is also
studied in circles: spatially, as it is typically studied in groups rather
than lecture halls, and methodologically, as it is measured by units of
seven-year cycles. The story is held up by the structures that discuss,
analyze, reflect, and apply theory to practice. It performs a kind of
network, an evolving dialogue of perspectives and commentaries.

This roundtable offers an opportunity for artists and scholars to explore
Jewish theoretical and philosophical approaches to performance on stage and
in everyday life. Roundtable participants will be asked to submit short
8-10 page papers prior to the conference, which will be posted on a shared
online blog. Papers can take multiple forms, including formal papers and
experimental or performance-based papers. Conference Participants will be
asked to comment on each other’s work prior to meeting for our discussion
at the conference.

We encourage participants to consider Jewish practices and approaches to
circles and encircling through an intersectional approach that considers
Jewish thought alongside other theories and positionalities. Topics for
papers may include (but are not limited to):
- Inter-religious dialogues and sacred circles
- Talmudic structures of commentary encircling narrative
- Spatial and/or temporal conceptions of circles in Jewish performance
- Life cycles and round foods (seder plates, challahs, eggs, bagels...  )
- Queer and Jewish Temporalities
- Ritual circle dancing as performative orientation devices
- Feminism and Jewish thought on stage
- Intersecting circles of trauma and oppression
- Disrupting binaries of separate gendered circles in Jewish dance and
everyday life
- The creation of insiders and outsiders: Performing Ashkenazi privilege in
the west



*Participants are asked to submit an abstract or proposal of no more than
250 words.*

Submission Deadline: 31 January 2019

Abstracts should be sent to: livingcirclescatr at gmail.com

Roundtable Organizers: Laine Zisman Newman and Shira Schwartz Greenberg

For more information visit:

https://catr2019.com/activities/roundtables/living-circles-jewish-philosophy-and-performance/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20181206/fc96ea39/attachment.html>