bo_ba's Journal

Театральные исследователи
Читая материалы к ~~XXV-му съезду КПСС~~ конференции американского общества театральных исследований в Бостоне в ноябре.

Cognitive Studies in Theatre and Performance

Conveners: John Lutterbie, Stony Brook University; Rhonda Blair, Southern Methodist University

The research group in Cognitive Studies in Theatre and Performance solicits proposals for papers that focus on how the cognitive sciences can be applied to the practice of theatre and performance. New developments in cognitive studies are providing new paradigms for understanding the art of the theatre in its myriad forms. Cognitive and neuroscientists such as Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, Antonio Damasio, V. S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee, and Gerald Edelman, along with philosophers and linguists such as Evan Thompson, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, are developing speculative models of the cognitive process that can be and are being fruitfully applied by scholars to the arts and humanities.

Potential research topics include:
• How the cognitive and neurosciences allow us to rethink the practice of theatre and performance.
• How scientific research and neural-cognitive studies open new areas of and approaches to theatre and performance research.
• How theories of mind, memory, feeling, imagination, empathy, and behavior illuminate our understanding of theatre and performance.
• How resonances between different theories and scientific studies increase our understanding of theatrical and performance practices.

Performance Research Working Group

Conveners: Kris Salata, Florida State University; Lisa Wolford Wylam, York University

The Performance Research Working Group aims to create a venue for theoretically informed engagement with emerging scholarship grounded in praxis. While discourse surrounding performance based research in its various parsed acronyms and mutations generated within a European context has tended to foreground issues relating to the validation of practical research as equivalent to publication, our concern is rather with epistemological and methodological questions raised by work that explores what anthropologist Dwight Conquergood termed performance as a way of knowing. We are interested in scholarship that on the one hand takes praxis as its object, yet which acknowledges the essential differences between empirical knowledge and its scholarly articulation.

Possible topics include:
• Research grounded in participant-observation involving cultural and/or artistic performance
• Analysis of the outcomes and implications of laboratory based theatre work and/or interrogation of the ways in which performance itself can constitute a research praxis
• Theorization (not reportage) of the actor’s embodied practice, including attention to interdisciplinary research paradigms

Proposals should not exceed 300 words and be accompanied by a short bio. Send proposals by June 6, 2008, to the conveners: Kris Salata, ksalata@stanford.edu, and Lisa Wolford Wylam, lwwylam@yorku.ca.

Recovering Scenographic Memory: Mapping the Artifacts of Design

Conveners: Christin Essin Yannacci, Arizona State University; Stephen Di Benedetto, University of Miami

Michel de Certeau has argued that history “begins with the gesture of setting aside” and “transforming certain classified objects into ‘documents.’” Archivists’ selection/organization of artifacts and scholars’ translation of artifacts into evidence divorces objects from everyday practice to give them new meaning. For scholars of design and scenography, the archive is a place to imagine, reconstruct, and analyze the artistry of past stages, translating a succession of ground plans into the precise choreography of scenic platforms or costume renderings with fabric swatches into the graceful sweep of a period gown. Scenography, as Arnold Aronson has observed, is both a space art and time art that is always changing during performance—scenery shifts, lights fade, and costumes adjust from one scene to the next. As an artistic product, scenography is not fixed; no single artifact (like a painting or sculpture) can fully communicate the scenographer’s artistry. Scholars of scenography, therefore, necessarily examine a range of artifacts and employ multiple, interdisciplinary research methodologies.

This session, organized in collaboration with Fredric Wilson, curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, brings focus to the scenographic archive and the processes by which scholars recover the scenographic past. By examining models, renderings, blueprints, photographs, diary entries, and personal correspondence, participants will interrogate the ways in which different analytical frames treat the objects housed in the Harvard collection. By comparing methodologies for constructing evidence, participants will study how their approaches to scenographic artifacts yield various insights, how scenographic artifacts themselves guide and limit our ways of looking, and, indeed, how the scenographic archive shapes our understandings of the past.

We encourage submissions from those interested in establishing and sustaining a dialogue around scenography and its relevance to the broader histories and theories of theatre and performance. Proposals might stem from a range of research projects, including (but not limited to):
• Case studies of past or contemporary performances.
• Examinations of past or contemporary scenographic artists.
• Scenographic theorizations of past or contemporary landscapes.

Selected participants will produce a five-page position statement and methodological analysis of an artifact used in their research, and participate in a pre-conference list-serve discussion. Once in Boston, we will meet initially at the Harvard Collection to examine a range of material objects. During our conference session, we will respond to questions emerging from our position papers and archival discoveries.

Applicants should send proposals of 500 words or less and a brief bio to Christin Essin Yannacci (yannacci@lsu.edu) AND Stephen Di Benedetto (scenographyusa@gmail.com) by midnight EST, Friday, June 6th, 2008.