Call for Contributors: Performance Research Journal 17.1 CFP: ON FAILURE / Deadline: 15 April 2011
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PERFORMANCELOGÍA: Todo sobre Arte de Performance y Performancistas
Mar 14, 2011, 9:13:18 AM3/14/11
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Performance Research Journal
Vol. 17, No. 1
On Failure – Call for Contributors
Issue Editors: Róisín O’Gorman and Margaret Werry
To speak of failure is to invite stigma. Yet failure is a fact of our lives
as performers and artists, teachers and learners, activists and institution
builders. What is the value of facing failure square on, studying it,
theorizing it – even cultivating it? How can we, in Beckett’s famous words,
“fail again, fail better?” If failure is the sine qua non of
performance--improvisation, rehearsal, experiment assume an accretion of
failures as integral to the process of discovery and creativity--this
special issue asks if performance might provide us with a metaphor and
methodology for failure.
“On Failure” will focus in particular on pedagogy.. Hope and success are the
cultural dominants in a neo-liberal age, the mantra of the corporatizing
university, but also the resort of progressive efforts by artists, teachers
and public intellectuals in the humanities, who yoke movements for change to
teleological narratives of aspiration and self-assertion.
In Theatre and Performance Studies, most work on public art, activism, and
pedagogy--from recent literature on relational aesthetics, to established
Boalian work on theatre for social change--carries an ameliorative and
developmental charge. Yet clearly, most such projects fail most of the time;
fail to democratize, raise visibility, transform consciousness or even gain
the understanding of those they claim to aid. Dwelling on and in failure
offers not only a tool of critique or diagnostic of neo-liberal enterprise,
but also a way to remodel the theoretical premises of activist work in our
discipline, querying the trajectories and temporalities of change enacted in
performance.
How does failure focus progressive hopes not on future transcendence, but in
the interstices of present struggle—the immanence and “becoming” of the
everyday? What is the affective landscape of failure, and what social and
political work does the affect of failure do? What is the analytic power of
failure to reveal the limits of the (currently) possible, thinkable,
acceptable, and the contours of structures of possibility? What is the
relationship between failure and change--what role has failure played in
significant transformations (of political or artistic movements, scientific
discoveries, for example)? What is the quality of failure as an aesthetic
experience? How does failure help performance theory rethink some of its
central terms, such as repetition, difference, death, or presence? What is
failure, anyway? How or where does failure register, institutionally,
viscerally, bodily, affectively? What is its social choreography and how is
that choreography culturally or historically variant or contested? What are
the risks of valorizing failure in the way these questions imply? What does
such a project stand to learn from those who are set up to fail, doomed to
fail, or dismissed as failures? Finally, against the background of current
catastrophic world-historical failures (economies, governments etc.), or the
intractable, durational failure of major institutions (public higher
education, for example), what is the value of attending to the
micro-failures of performance and pedagogy?
Topics
* Failures in translation and/or trans-cultural transactions.
* Accounts of those who are set up to fail, particularly of those on
the margins of institutions (such as adjunct teachers), or the art
establishment, for whom the stakes of failure seem particularly high.
* Failure in cultural context – consequences of different or
changing cultural processes and attitudes towards failure.
* Migrations of failure: accounts of how failure moves globally or
cross-culturally.
* Rehearsal or company ethnographies, focusing on particularly
daring or innovative uses of failure in performance method.
* Legacies of failure –failed political, artistic, and intellectual
projects, failed ideologies. How do we live in the ruins?
* Failure in other contexts of learning: science or engineering,
medicine, or craft, for example.
* Stillborn, invisible failures: art that never got made;
performances that never reached the stage; lessons that never got taught.
* Experiments in failure; deliberate failures – by artists,
teachers, activists.
We seek contributions in a wide range of formats: project ethnographies,
descriptions of pedagogical experiments in and outside the academy,
reflections and theorizations, interviews and dialogues, tales from the
pedagogical or public art trenches, creative and visual responses.
Deadlines are as follows:
Proposals: 15 April 2011
Completed articles: August 2011
Publication date: February 2012
ALL proposals and general enquiries should be sent direct to:
Alison Matthews: ae...@aber.ac.uk
(who is assisting Sandra Laureri with this particular issue)
‘On Failure’ editorial enquires should be directed to Róisín O’Gorman
r.og...@ucc.ie or Margaret Werry werr...@umn.edu
All other matters in relation to the Journal PR, please contact Sandra
Laureri: Performance Research sbls...@aber.ac.uk
Proposals will be accepted by e-mail (MS-Word or RTF). Proposals should not
exceed one A4 side. Please DO NOT send images electronically without prior
agreement.
Please note that submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it
presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication
elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript, the author(s) agree that the
exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article have been given to
Performance Research.
Source: Alison Matthews via Live Art, Performance and New Performance Mail List
Researcher/Doctoral Student
Centre for Performance Research / TFTS
Parry Williams Building
Aberystwyth University
Aberystwyth, Ceredigion,
Wales, UK
SY23 3GH
PERFORMANCELOGÍA
Todo sobre Arte de Performance y Performancistas
All about Performance Art and Performance Artists
Archivo y Difusión del Arte de Performance
Archive and Dissemination on Performance Art
Archivo Virtual / Virtual Archive: http://www.performancelogia.org
Boletín / Newsletter: http://groups.google.com/group/performancelogia
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/perfoartnews
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/performancelogia
Email: performa...@gmail.com
Colaboraciones / Collaborations: Apartado Postal: 5048.
Caracas 1010A - Venezuela
Vol. 17, No. 1
On Failure – Call for Contributors
Issue Editors: Róisín O’Gorman and Margaret Werry
To speak of failure is to invite stigma. Yet failure is a fact of our lives
as performers and artists, teachers and learners, activists and institution
builders. What is the value of facing failure square on, studying it,
theorizing it – even cultivating it? How can we, in Beckett’s famous words,
“fail again, fail better?” If failure is the sine qua non of
performance--improvisation, rehearsal, experiment assume an accretion of
failures as integral to the process of discovery and creativity--this
special issue asks if performance might provide us with a metaphor and
methodology for failure.
“On Failure” will focus in particular on pedagogy.. Hope and success are the
cultural dominants in a neo-liberal age, the mantra of the corporatizing
university, but also the resort of progressive efforts by artists, teachers
and public intellectuals in the humanities, who yoke movements for change to
teleological narratives of aspiration and self-assertion.
In Theatre and Performance Studies, most work on public art, activism, and
pedagogy--from recent literature on relational aesthetics, to established
Boalian work on theatre for social change--carries an ameliorative and
developmental charge. Yet clearly, most such projects fail most of the time;
fail to democratize, raise visibility, transform consciousness or even gain
the understanding of those they claim to aid. Dwelling on and in failure
offers not only a tool of critique or diagnostic of neo-liberal enterprise,
but also a way to remodel the theoretical premises of activist work in our
discipline, querying the trajectories and temporalities of change enacted in
performance.
How does failure focus progressive hopes not on future transcendence, but in
the interstices of present struggle—the immanence and “becoming” of the
everyday? What is the affective landscape of failure, and what social and
political work does the affect of failure do? What is the analytic power of
failure to reveal the limits of the (currently) possible, thinkable,
acceptable, and the contours of structures of possibility? What is the
relationship between failure and change--what role has failure played in
significant transformations (of political or artistic movements, scientific
discoveries, for example)? What is the quality of failure as an aesthetic
experience? How does failure help performance theory rethink some of its
central terms, such as repetition, difference, death, or presence? What is
failure, anyway? How or where does failure register, institutionally,
viscerally, bodily, affectively? What is its social choreography and how is
that choreography culturally or historically variant or contested? What are
the risks of valorizing failure in the way these questions imply? What does
such a project stand to learn from those who are set up to fail, doomed to
fail, or dismissed as failures? Finally, against the background of current
catastrophic world-historical failures (economies, governments etc.), or the
intractable, durational failure of major institutions (public higher
education, for example), what is the value of attending to the
micro-failures of performance and pedagogy?
Topics
* Failures in translation and/or trans-cultural transactions.
* Accounts of those who are set up to fail, particularly of those on
the margins of institutions (such as adjunct teachers), or the art
establishment, for whom the stakes of failure seem particularly high.
* Failure in cultural context – consequences of different or
changing cultural processes and attitudes towards failure.
* Migrations of failure: accounts of how failure moves globally or
cross-culturally.
* Rehearsal or company ethnographies, focusing on particularly
daring or innovative uses of failure in performance method.
* Legacies of failure –failed political, artistic, and intellectual
projects, failed ideologies. How do we live in the ruins?
* Failure in other contexts of learning: science or engineering,
medicine, or craft, for example.
* Stillborn, invisible failures: art that never got made;
performances that never reached the stage; lessons that never got taught.
* Experiments in failure; deliberate failures – by artists,
teachers, activists.
We seek contributions in a wide range of formats: project ethnographies,
descriptions of pedagogical experiments in and outside the academy,
reflections and theorizations, interviews and dialogues, tales from the
pedagogical or public art trenches, creative and visual responses.
Deadlines are as follows:
Proposals: 15 April 2011
Completed articles: August 2011
Publication date: February 2012
ALL proposals and general enquiries should be sent direct to:
Alison Matthews: ae...@aber.ac.uk
(who is assisting Sandra Laureri with this particular issue)
‘On Failure’ editorial enquires should be directed to Róisín O’Gorman
r.og...@ucc.ie or Margaret Werry werr...@umn.edu
All other matters in relation to the Journal PR, please contact Sandra
Laureri: Performance Research sbls...@aber.ac.uk
Proposals will be accepted by e-mail (MS-Word or RTF). Proposals should not
exceed one A4 side. Please DO NOT send images electronically without prior
agreement.
Please note that submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it
presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication
elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript, the author(s) agree that the
exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article have been given to
Performance Research.
Source: Alison Matthews via Live Art, Performance and New Performance Mail List
Researcher/Doctoral Student
Centre for Performance Research / TFTS
Parry Williams Building
Aberystwyth University
Aberystwyth, Ceredigion,
Wales, UK
SY23 3GH
PERFORMANCELOGÍA
Todo sobre Arte de Performance y Performancistas
All about Performance Art and Performance Artists
Archivo y Difusión del Arte de Performance
Archive and Dissemination on Performance Art
Archivo Virtual / Virtual Archive: http://www.performancelogia.org
Boletín / Newsletter: http://groups.google.com/group/performancelogia
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/perfoartnews
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/performancelogia
Email: performa...@gmail.com
Colaboraciones / Collaborations: Apartado Postal: 5048.
Caracas 1010A - Venezuela
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