[Candrama] TRI - Special Issue: Love in a Time of Extremes: Forms, Resistance, Solidarity

[Yana Meerzon]

Call for papers – Theatre Research International

Special Issue: Love in a Time of Extremes: Forms, Resistance, Solidarity



Detailing her co-writing process with Dritan Kastrati in How Not to Drown, the story of Kastrati’s journey through the UK’s asylum and foster care systems, playwright Nicola McCartney remarks that it was ‘a labour of love’ (2019). The play, which ran first at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019, emerged out of a co-writing process that took several years, and involved different processes ranging from writing from interviews, revisiting lived experience through the lens of story, workshops and collaborative efforts from the actors, of which Kastrati was one, the director and the producers. McCartney’s remark on the love involved in the labour of staging this story connects to James Thompson’s work, highlighting how aesthetics and care are not separate issues in relations nor in theatre making. Rather, they are ‘about the shape and feel of how we look after each other and how we look out for each other: it is about the art and craft of acting in solidarity’ (2022, 139). In ‘To Applied Theatre with Love’, Thompson relates this combination more directly to the question of love, asking: ‘How might one sustain love, particularly of an artistic practice, in a loveless world; and how, in turn, might this help to maintain a commitment to a sense of justice and social change?’ (2021) Suggesting that love for and through practice is something that might inform a commitment to socio-political change is the critical starting point of this Special Issue. We invite contributors to think about how theatre sustains and challenges love in a time of extremes, with the rise of authoritarian leaders globally, migration urgencies, climate collapse and continued failure on the part of global democracies to ensure piece. Under such circumstances it is increasingly urgent to query which forms – of art, of solidarity, of politics – love takes; to consider which of love’s performances might resist abstract categorisations of media jargon and political rhetoric, hindering its audiences and practitioners from becoming numb to one another’s lifeworlds.



This starting point is not without its demands. Scholars of love have long noted the necessity of paying critical attention to love, while love inevitably slips beyond theoretical scrutiny into the experienced. Love as an object of study, and love as an art to be lived and done, cannot be separated, Erich Fromm suggested in The Art of Loving (1956). Even if love for literature – to which we might add theatre – is not in itself a viable critical position to take, as Rita Feltski and others remark in Love Etc., it has to be acknowledged that ‘Ways of knowing cannot be completely cut off from ways of feeling’ (Feltski 2024, 8-9). Not knowing, however, what exactly is meant when we talk of love, or insisting on its indecipherability as art, emotion and politics, bell hooks suggests in All About Love (1999), risks reinforcing love as a site for power struggles heteronormativity and violence, risks supporting the very structures that regulate life’s intimacies and its vulnerabilities unequally (Ahmed 2014; Butler and Athanasiou 2014; Lorde 1980).



Nonetheless, Mireia Aragay, Cristina Delgado-García and Martin Middeke argue that what carries through the broad strokes of performative genres seems ‘to be a widespread agreement that feeling is an essential part of what matters in the theatre’ (2021, 1), making theatre ‘a public feeling project’ (Hurley 2014, 3). While theatre might then portray what society as a whole places value on, Caroline Svich encourages audiences, practitioners and scholars alike to examine theatre as ‘an industry that is constantly negotiating its relationship to and with capital’ (2021). ‘What kind of love can flourish’ she questions ‘beyond the extractive modes of making that are ingrained in the very systems many artists seek to break?” (2021)



Taking the question of value beyond its relation to capital into an embodied and relational space, Dalia Gebrial explores the possibility for decolonizing desire. Highlighting the historical, artistic and subscriptive ‘codes of social value assigned to certain bodies; of who is worthy of love’s work’ (2017), she asks:



What does it mean to be lovable? Who is and is not deserving of particular kinds of love? How is love coded and reproduced? What, and who, is absent when love is represented?’ (2017)



Jericho Brown explores similar questions in his reflections on how he can compose a love-poem as a Black, queer writer, and, specifically, which artistic forms are available for him to do so. Reflecting on the sonnet as a key literary technology in addressing a beloved, he instead makes a duplex, a poem of two-line stanzas, thereby commenting on existing modes of expression while creating new ones. The duplex further reflects the difficulty of inhabiting all one’s identities for those ‘who live within a single structure’ (2019). Instead, Brown uses his form to ask: ‘What happens when that wall is up and what happens when we tear it down? How will we live together? Will we kill each other? Can we be more careful?’ (2019)



On a narrative note, Lauren Berlant suggests love – and stories of love – exists on the lines between order and destabalisation, it produces ‘individuated social identity, as in coupling, family, reproduction’ (2012, 13), but it also puts people ‘into plots beyond their control as it joins diverse lives and makes situations’ (2012, 13). Seen as a producer of personhood, love, constituting ‘a radical event on a micro-level' (Badiou in Felski 2021, p.),  might shape both the individual and their surroundings, while forcing us ‘to confront the ontological difference of another person’ (Felski 2021, 41). Treating forms of love and artistic forms as connected issues simultaneously combines Gebrail’s question of who is present and who is absent when love is represented with hooks demand on love’s decipherability as a political project. Yet, where prominent romantic love-stories, like Romeo & Juliet, Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, Heloise and Abelard, readily display how people die for one another as an ultimate sometimes unavoidable, testament to unconditional love, we are inspired by different scripts such as Bashar Murkus’s The Year of Snow (2015), Nana Grinstein’s Coming Out (2016), Natalya Vorozhbit Bad Roads (2017), and Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs (2011). Instead of rehashing well-made arguments on love and death, the editors are looking for essays taking Gebrail’s question of who is absent when love is represented into their objects of inquiry.



Contributors are then encouraged to challenge, develop and explore our critical starting point that theatre – with its attention simultaneous attention to process, product and production; and theatre as an art, as Fromm suggested, an industry and a tool for highlighting socio-political values – is in a unique critical, aesthetic and relational position to view forms of love and resistance. Taking Sara Ahmed’s suggestion to heart that living a feminist life means being and becoming part of one another’s survival in such a way that challenges the structures that keeps inequality in place (2017, 1), we are interested in essays that reflect on questions like: how we might live for one another in solidarity, care and community? And, connectively, what, where and how might we find love as a viable public emotion, as political and affective resistance?



We invite 6-8000 words essays probing into the following questions:

  *   Mobility and love
  *   Forms of love and solidarity
  *   Love as a political feeling
  *   Love in extreme circumstances
  *   Love in an age of the Anthropocene



Please submit your essays to Manuscript Central: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/t-r-i specifying that your submission is for issue 51:3, which will be published in the autumn of 2026. The submission deadline is 1st September 2025. For information about submission, visit: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/theatre-research-international/information/author-instructions



Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:

Milija Gluhovic (m.gluhovic at warwick.ac.uk<mailto:m.gluhovic at warwick.ac.uk> ), Helene Grøn (helene.groen at hum.ku.dk<mailto:helene.groen at hum.ku.dk>) and  Anika Marschall: (a.marschall at uu.nl)



References:

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Aragay, M., Delgado-García, C., & Middeke, M. (Eds.). (2021). Affects in 21st-century British theatre: Exploring feeling on page and stage. Palgrave Macmillan.
Badiou, A. (in Felski, R.). (2021). Love as a radical event. In R. Felski (Ed.), Love, Etc.: Essays on Contemporary Literature and Culture (pp. 41-57). University of Virginia Press.
Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Brooklyn, NY: Dead Letter Office, Punctum Books, 2012.
Brown, J. (2019). ‘The duplex’, American of American Poems. Online
Butler, J., & Athanasiou, A. (2014). Dispossession: The performative in politics. Polity Press.
Feltski, R. (2024). Love, Etc.: Essays on Contemporary Literature and Culture. University of Virginia Press.
Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. Harper & Row.
Gebrial, D. (2017). ‘Decolonizing Desire: The Politics of Love’. Verso Books Online.
hooks, b. (1999). All about love: New visions. Harper Collins.
Hurley, Erin (2010). Theatre and feeling: How emotion shapes our experience of theatre. Routledge.
Lord, A. (1980). Sister outsider. Crossing Press.
Middeke, M., Aragay, M., & Delgado-García, C. (2021). The emotions of performance. Palgrave Macmillan.
McCartney, N. (2019, July 12). Playwright Nicola McCartney on Heritage and How Not to Drown. The Herald Online
Svich, C. (2021). Theatre as industry and art: Negotiating the relationship with capital.
Thompson, J. (2021). To applied theatre with love. TDR 65(1), 139-149.
Thompson, J. (2023). Care aesthetics for artful care and careful art. Routledge.


Professor Milija Gluhovic

Head of Theatre and Performance Studies

School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures

Faculty of Arts Building

University of Warwick

Coventry CV4 7AL

Phone: +44 (0)24 7652 3021

Fax: +44 (0)24 7652 3297

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