Why Movement Matters

Movement Symposium on Saturday 18th April 2020 at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London

RADA invites you to submit proposals for contributions to a One Day Symposium on: 

Why Movement Matters

We are holding a one day Symposium with Industry Professionals and Movement Practitioners, directors, teachers and educators, to offer opinions, experiences and ideas about “Why Movement Matters”.

The aim of the event is to raise awareness about the vital contribution movement practice and movement direction make to the industry. We intend to explore movement’s past and its future as a creative maker of meaning in the theatre and hope to create the opportunity for open discussion and professional networking. On a practical level the event will generate opportunities for emerging and established artists to share their work with the possible option to write about and to interrogate questions around practice through journals and other publication outlets.

The idea for this event came from a panel discussion at the Dorfman Studio at The National Theatre in November 2018 to discuss the legacy of Jacques Lecoq and to launch The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq. What emerged from this event was how wide ranging the influence of movement is but how little is known about any of the details of its development and about the variety of practices now available. This event provides an opportunity to share, to interrogate and to celebrate this powerful aspect of how theatre is made and how it continues to shape developments in production and in training.

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Call for Proposals: Performance Research Journal – Special Issue ‘On Hybridity’

Call for Proposals
Vol. 25, No. 6 Performance Research Journal: ‘On Hybridity’ (September/October 2020)
Issue Editors: Frank Camilleri (University of Malta) and Maria Kapsali (University of Leeds)

Proposal Deadline: 8 November

This issue of Performance Research considers hybridity in relation to performance, in particular the making, reception and study of performance as practices that emerge from heterogeneous sources, as well as the performative operation of hybridity in historical, cultural and political contexts.

The term emerged from roots in agriculture and horticulture (for example, grafting) and is related to animal husbandry (cross-breeding) and to applications in metallurgy (alloys). It took on pseudo-scientific biological overtones when it overlapped with the history of imperialism and slavery, in the process generating a racialized discourse. In the second half of the twentieth century, hybridity became more broadly associated with questions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’, eventually leading to notions of ‘cultural hybridity’. Homi Bhabha’s reading of the term in the context of colonialism marks the interstitial and the liminal, for example in processes like those of mimicry, which reproduce the dominant culture in an ‘alien’ indigenous/colonized setting. Such perspectives resonate with others that emerge when two (or more) cultural worlds collide, including creolization in language, as well as Mikhail Bhaktin’s heteroglossia (the ‘hybrid utterance’) and the carnivalesque (satire/critique through imitation). In the twenty-first century, hybridity has taken a more pronounced tinge in light of technology, where to be human entails an ever-increasing reliance on and entanglement with non-human materiality. In addition to discourses about post-colonialism, multiculturalism, and identity, therefore, hybridity is now invoked in the contexts of globalization, technologization and the Anthropocene.

In discussions on contemporary performance, hybridity is often used loosely to capture the synthesis and co-mingling of different sources, practices and methodologies that
arguably underpin it. More specifically, the term has been employed in discussions of cultural and racial performance, as well as in relation to the emergence of new theatrical practices in colonial contexts. Responding to the complex connection between hybridity and performance, this special issue is grounded in the following points: 1) a reconsideration of the concept is timely; and 2) performance, in reflecting and influencing human activity and life, is strategically placed to conduct such a reappraisal specifically via its practices of preparation and presentation. Accordingly, this issue of Performance Research investigates the intersections between hybridity and performance as the coming together of performer and environment, materials and practitioners, performance and reception, event and analysis. Hybridity is, therefore, understood as at once a formative, trans-formative and per-formative encounter that shapes performance and culture on many levels:

• as pedagogical process
• as compositional and production strategy
• as ensemble and assembly (human and non-human)
• as inter- and intradisciplinary endeavour
• as a professional strategy
• as inter- and intracultural phenomenon.

Topics may include but are in no way limited to:
• issues and themes of hybridity in terms of technology, spaces/sites and fluid identities (for example, cyborgs, cultures, migrations) in performance
• the hybridization of physical and digital elements in performance (intermediality, multimedia, mixed media)
• intercultural/multicultural performance
• interdisciplinarity and intradisciplinarity in performance
• the multisource development and multichannel transmission of training exercises (including massive open online courses (MOOCs), mobile apps)
• compositional strategies like devising, choreography and ensemble work
• improvisation and relational performance processes
• applied performance as hybrid adaptive practice
• comedy, satire and the carnivalesque in performance
• issues related to genre, including performance art, ‘total theatre’, opera and other forms like music theatre, mime and dance that can be conceived in hybrid terms
• analysis of historical performances from the lens of hybridity
• practice as research case studies as hybrid methodologies and practices
• the post-human, the post-modern and the post-dramatic as hybrid paradigms
• conceptual frameworks related to hybridity that have a performative element (for example, grafting, fusion, merger, assemblage, otherness)
• historiography and ethnography as hybrid and evolving practices that involve diverse methodologies and technologies from various sources
• human and non-human relationalities and issues of agency in performance (objects, clothes, technology, design, architecture, plants, animals).

Schedule:
Proposals: 8 November 2019
First drafts: February 2020
Final drafts: May 2020
Publication: October 2020

Issue contacts:
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to Performance Research at: [email protected]

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:
Frank Camilleri: [email protected]
Maria Kapsali: [email protected]

General Guidelines for Submissions:
• Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website (www.performance-research.org ) and familiarize yourself with the journal.
• Proposals will be accepted by email (Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF)). Proposals should not exceed one A4 side.
• Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.
• Please include the issue title and issue number in the subject line of your email.
• Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that all attachments do not exceed 5 MB, and there is a maximum of five images.
• Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
• If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On the final acceptance of a completed article you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.

The Chekhov Collective UK: What we do

Praxis Symposium (2016) Michael Chekhov in the 21st Century: New Pathways
Image: Katerina Kotti

The Chekhov Collective UK is delighted to announce the launch of its new website www.chekhovcollectiveuk.co.uk, along with its programme of 2019-2020 events and workshops.

Whether you have been working with Michael Chekhov’s technique for years, or have only touched upon his work and are curious to experience more, we warmly invite you to explore our website, and join us for some of our events. Here is a little introduction to our work:

Chekhov and Voice Workshop with guest Daron Oram (2019)

Who we are:

Dr Cass Fleming established The Chekhov Collective UK in 2013 as part of the New Pathways project to foster collaborative exchange and practice research.  The Collective is co-directed by Dr Cass Fleming, Dr Roanna Mitchell and Gretchen Egolf and is made up of a group of UK-based artists and researchers from various disciplines — you can read more about us all here. We are, of course, also part of a whole constellation of Chekhov practitioners, in the UK and around the world. We have just begun to create an interactive map of this constellation, which you can see here.

Chekhov and Clown workshop led by guest Marjolein Baars from the Netherlands (2019)

What we do:

The Collective runs research projects and affordable workshops that explore both traditional and innovative applications of Chekhov technique in various contexts. 

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CfP: Performance Knowledges: Transmission, Composition, Praxis (University of Malta)

Annual Conference hosted by the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta
In cooperation with the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, UK

11, 12, 13 March 2020

Confirmed keynotes:
Professor Bruce McConachie (University of Pittsburg)
Professor Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University)
Professor Lynette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London)

The seventh Annual Conference of the School of Performing Arts (University of Malta) considers knowledge in relation to performing arts practices. More specifically, the conference aims to explore, question, and discuss the different types of ‘knowledges’ that emerge from or are involved in performing arts practices including creation, production, performance, and spectatorship.

The conference’s focus on performing arts practices—dance, theatre, and music—acknowledges an affinity with Performance Studies, which originated in American universities as a new ‘knowledge formation’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999) with the aim to integrate performance into interdisciplinary scholarship and offer a counterbalance to the emphasis on texts and literature within cultural studies. The conference focus on practices is also strongly connected to developments originating around the same time for artistic research in the context of European higher education. The debates about artistic research have posited basic questions about the constitution of knowledge and its valorisation (Borgdorff 2012). The conditions and opportunities for artistic research in higher education continue to evolve, but many questions about its status and relevance, in connection to knowledge production in particular, remain.

The aim of Performance Knowledges is to offer an opportunity to refresh some of these discussions and debates through a focus on performing arts from the perspectives of transmission, composition, and praxis. This is a chance to include research cultures working at the borderline with the social and cognitive sciences, where the vantage point of the performing arts should provoke a robust discussion of embodied and relational forms of knowledge. It also encourages participants to rethink how in composition and transmission processes knowledge is diversified into different types, including tacit knowledge—with emphasis on process and experience (Polanyi 1958). This should include addressing the question of skill—which is so often overlooked in academic debates about the subject.

We are looking for presentations that engage with questions of varieties, generation, transmission, and implications of performance knowledges. We are looking for inter- and multidisciplinary approaches that might contribute to the analysis of ways of knowing in the performing arts, and to the scholarly study of collaborative encounters between directors, choreographers, composers, performers, designers, and spectators. We are particularly interested in alternative and diverse conceptualisations of practice-generating knowledges, as well as knowledge-generating practices,

Presentation topics might include, but are not limited to, issues and themes of performance knowledges in relation to practices, methodologies, and technologies. We welcome submissions across a number of areas that address the multifaceted understandings of knowledge as emergent in theatre, dance, and music, including but not limited to:

– the artist’s perspective on languaging and documenting practices
– embodied cognition and moving beyond dualism in the practice of the performing arts
– problematising hegemonic knowledges, implications for performing arts
– training processes and compositional strategies as intangible heritage
– practice turn in contemporary theory, communities and ecologies of practice
– habits, skills and contexts for tacit knowledge acquisition and transmission
– perspectives on and from diverse atypical modes and mixed abilities
– historical, analytical, and theoretical understandings of embodiment in the performing arts
– case studies of creators, performers, spectators, and other agents of performance
– technologisation and the impact of digitisation on performance practices
– translation, transformation and/ or appropriation of performance forms

Abstracts of a maximum of 300 words should be submitted in Word Doc by 16 December 2019 to the conference convenors on these addresses: Lucía Piquero (lucia.piquero -at- um.edu.mt) and Scott deLahunta (aa9576 -at- coventry.ac.uk). Acceptance will be confirmed in January 2020. If an official invitation is required earlier for research funding purposes, please contact the convenors and ensure that you submit your abstract as early as possible. Abstracts should include a brief biography (additional 125 words maximum), presentation format whether conventional 15/20-minute presentations or lecture-demonstrations (participatory elements are welcome), and any technical equipment you might require.

Important dates:
Deadline for submissions: 16 December 2019
Notification of acceptance by 20 January 2020
Dates of the conference: 11-13 March 2020
Conference website: https://www.um.edu.mt/events/performanceknowledges2020