Call for papers: ‘On Writing & Performance’

Volume 23, Number 2: ‘On Writing & Performance’ (March 2018)
Proposal deadline: 8 May 2017

Issue editors: Ric Allsopp and Julieanna Preston

This issue of Performance Research sets out to gather research and scholarly articles, artists’ pages and images and critical and creative work on contemporary writing and its performance, on performance and its writings, and on the various environments and contexts in which such work takes place. The issue imagines how a text can be conceptualized, written, presented and figured with equal or more contingency and responsiveness to temporal and corporeal happenings, and vice versa. ‘On Writing and Performance’ seeks to extend current and historical dialogues on the shifting relationship between textual and performance practices and asks:

• What creative, dialogic, autobiographical or alternative writing approaches may elicit a text that engages with the plurality of affects that an artwork produces?
• How may a creative work be informed, inspired, directed, scripted or critiqued with the same respect for liveness that unfolds spatially as it does textually?
• How may these parallel practices inhabit space symbiotically?
• How may a new culture of criticality develop in between acts of ‘performing through’?

The issue will consider its theme from the perspectives of live, sited, scored and voice work in the fields of performance and writing, where:

• Live work highlights the primacy of practice and serves as an ongoing discussion around the translation or transference between performance works and textual works.
• Sited work questions the nature of the relationship between performance writing and place, traversing territories that may include site-specific works, works about place or narratives around journeys between places.
• Scored considers a shifting spectrum between the singularity of the script and the plurality of the score, challenging the relationship between the written, inscribed or etched, and the performed, live or imagined.
• Voice work prompts an exploration of aurality and oral traditions, including those emerging from indigenous peoples and those associated with storytelling, singing and public speaking.

Topics for proposal may include performing/writing in relation to:

• notational, page-based and installed forms of practice
• choreographic, embodied and improvisational forms and strategies
• sonic, aural and sound-based writings and performances
• dramaturgical and theoretical approaches to translation and cross-disciplinary modes
• notions of insularity, ownership and stewardship, migrancy and transience, internment, bio-security and environmental heritage, belonging and outcast
• forms of performance space, for example, the limits of theatre space's interior contours, audience–performer relationships and the affective qualities of darkness
• distinctions between site-specific, site-situated and site-responsive modes in practices of performance and writing
• engagement with environmental, ecological and bio-political issues as context
• critical and embodied modes of writing and performing.

Schedule:

Proposals: 8 May 2017
First drafts: September 2017
Final drafts: November 2017
Publication date: March 2018

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to the journal at: info@performance-research.org

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors: Julieanna Preston <j.preston@massey.ac.nz> Ric Allsopp <ricallsopp@mac.com>

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 e-mail (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 that you send.
• If you intend to send images electronically, please contact the journal first to arrange prior agreement.
• 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.