Call for papers – Scenography Working Group
Scenography & Stratification
The Scenography Working Group (SWG) is seeking proposals that will respond to the conference theme, Theatre and Stratification from a perspective that specifically addresses design for performance (in all of its theatrical forms, not only for theatre but also including dance, puppet and object theatre, installation and performance art, multi-media, digital practices, etc. and for events which might be staged well beyond conventional theatre buildings.)
This meeting of the Scenography Working Group is an opportunity to reassess the stratifications that underpin our discipline: to take core samples and to examine the breach between theatre design and scenography (Irwin in Hannah & Harsløf, 2008:42) and to look once again into the abyss (Aronson, 2005).
The conference call suggests that: ‘To speak of stratification, however, is not merely to speak of layers and layering’
How is scenography stratified?
As a discipline it has been a shifting landscape of tectonic plates: “For several years scenic art has been on a path of evolution. [New forms] have violently shifted the earlier boundaries” (Appia, 1904)
What are our discipline’s subduction zones and surface ruptures?
What are the past tectonic processes and current seismic shifts?
How might we think of stratification in relation to composition?
What are the scenographic processes and forces at play?
How does the layering of stage space and the performers’ bodies make meaning?
Contributions might include (but are not be restricted to) aspects such as
Layering of costume
Masking and unmasking
Layering of audience experience and spectatorship
Levels of immersion
Layering of place and space – in site-specific performance practice for example
Materiality of performance
Layering of technologies – both ancient and contemporary
Layers of meaning making
Creative processes
Hierarchies of production and their impact on scenography
How do the histories of performance design underpin contemporary practices?
How might we excavate these layers and look once again into the abyss?
What are the new scenographic landscapes?
Papers presented as part of the working group’s proceedings will have the opportunity of inclusion in a new peer-reviewed publication focused exclusively on scenography.
References
Adolphe Appia [c.1902] (1904) ‘Ideas on a Reform of our Mise en Scene’ La Revue des revues 1 (9), June, 342-349
Hannah, D & Harsløf, O (eds) (2008) Performance Design Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen
Aronson, Arnold (2005) Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press)
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
Abstracts (up to 300 words) will be accepted in English and French although the working group’s primary language is English.
Abstracts are to be submitted via the abstract submission page: http://iftr2014warwick.org/call-for-papers/working-groups/ and accepted abstracts will be published in the Congress’s Abstracts Book
Please also send your abstract to the co-convenors of the group; Professor David Vivian (dvivian@brocku.ca) and Scott Palmer (s.d.palmer@leeds.ac.uk)
The working groups are scheduled to meet throughout the conference period, from Monday 28th July until Friday 1st August, 2014.
The Scenography Working Group welcomes participants with an interest in scenography and all aspects of design for performance. The group offers an opportunity to present and engage with participants who are both practitioners and theorists. Presenters and observers are welcome to participate in all of the group’s activities. It is expected that observers will be registered for the conference and will be presenting in the general programme. If you wish to participate as an observer please send a brief request to Professor David Vivian (dvivian@brocku.ca) so that you may be added to the SWG mailing list and provided access to SWG meeting documentation. The SWG will also convene a business meeting for all members and guests during the conference period.
We invite a range of styles and formats for your presentation, from the more traditional academic writing to theorised, media-rich formats. Each presenter will be allocated 20 minutes to present their paper, including any audio-visual or practical demonstration, plus an additional 10 min for Q&A with the audience. As international dialogue is an important aspect of our gatherings please restrict the duration of your paper presentations to 20 mins to allow for this interaction to take place.
Those selected to present at the meetings of the SWG will be asked to make their presentation or paper available to all group members before the conference. The conveners will provide a secure online environment for the distribution of the presentation material. Group members are expected to read all papers in advance of the SWG meetings. Further details and deadlines for this aspect will be provided upon acceptance of your abstract.
We will also be proposing a panel from the SWG to the main conference program. The panel will be based on the same Working Group call. If you wish to be considered for the panel rather than for presentation in the working group meetings please indicate this clearly in your abstract submission.
GENERAL ASPECTS TO CONSIDER
Abstracts may be submitted until 15th January, 2014.
The maximum length for the abstract submission is 300 words.
Please indicate the equipment requirements for your presentation.
Amplification of the 2014 IFTR World Congress Theme Theatre and Stratification can be found here http://iftr2014warwick.org/
The theme of the conference is Theatre and Stratification. To speak of stratification, however, is not merely to speak of layers and layering.
In the earth sciences, stratification refers to the formation of identifiable layers of rock, each of which marks – and hence is embedded within – distinct periods of history. In archaeology and excavation, the fragments of culture are understood according to stratigraphic principles as well. Here too it is the actual layering of history that provides context and significance to cultural artefacts, not only with regard to the specific stratum in which the artefacts are lodged but also in the relation that strata have to each other. In the social sciences, stratification takes on an identifiably political but no less historical verve. It refers to the ordering of individuals, groups and institutions within socio-political hierarchies and global economies. Social stratification operates with historically constructed categories like nationality, citizenship, class, caste, race, ethnicity, religion, education, language, age, gender, and sexuality. Such categories regulate authority and power, access and mobility, privilege and entitlement, as well as labour, production and performance broadly defined. The arts are by no means exempt from these processes of historical, social, political and cultural stratification. Indeed, at the most basic level, one of the more provocative lines of inquiry that theatre historians might pursue can be distilled into the simple question: how is theatre stratified?
Simple though this question might appear to be, it invites inquiry not only into the multiple ways that theatre is layered outwardly but also into the multiple layers of theatre itself. It asks how theatre marks and is embedded within history, and how the theatre of one historical moment is positioned in relation to other moments or events of history. It asks how theatrical events are positioned in relation to each other, and how any given theatrical event is layered not only in terms of its aesthetic and ideological structures but also in terms of its spatial and temporal dynamics. It queries notions of high, low and middlebrow theatre. Moreover, to ask how theatre is stratified is to ask how theatre as an institution as well as theatre as a practice is positioned within functioning hierarchies of social, political, cultural and economic power. It is, in short, to ask about the kinds of layering not only in which theatre participates but which it produces as well. Stratification affects performance, and to ask how theatre is stratified is to query how stratification affects theatre’s performance. Asking how theatre is stratified is an invitation to consider how theatre might serve as a catalyst for rethinking the very hierarchies that regulate the present and foreseeable future of the institutions of theatre and scholarship:
IFTR Warwick 2014,
School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies,
Millburn House,
The University of Warwick,
Coventry, UK
CV4 7HS.
info@iftr2014warwick.org
