CALL FOR PAPERS
Critical
Stages/Scènes critiques
The IATC journal/Revue de l'AICT
Guest Editors: Duška Radosavljević and Flora
Pitrolo
December 2021
(#24)
Recent decades have seen an increased interest of
theatre-makers in speech and sound as a starting point for making theatre and
performance. This trend could be traced back to verbatim theatre of the early
2000s, evolving out of the political theatre experiments of Anna Deavere Smith
in the United States, Tricycle in London, Teatr.doc in Moscow and eventually
capturing the imagination of dance companies such as DV8. Canadian Robert
Lepage’s thematic interest in voice was also explicitly explored in his nine-hour
ensemble piece Lipsynch (2008). In 2015, Simon McBurney of
Complicite made two productions in which the central medium of storytelling was
(amplified) sound: Beware of Pity and The Encounter.
Forms of theatre often qualified as immersive, such as the work of Lundahl
& Seitl, Silvia Mercuriali and, selectively, Rimini Protokoll is often work
that uses sound as an integral part of its dramaturgy.
In the UK a form of theatre known as ‘gig theatre’ has
evolved over the years mostly on the festival circuit such as Latitude and
Edinburgh Fringe, eventually entering mainstream theatre (Kate Tempest at the
Royal Court) and the West End (Arinze Kene’s Misty 2018). That
the use of rock iconography on the theatre stage is not a UK-specific
phenomenon can also be detected in the works of Aris Biniaris, Oliver Frljic,
Lola Arias and Yury Butusov in their respective cultural contexts, while in the
United States the work of Lin Manuel Miranda used hip hop to challenge and
change the form of the Broadway musical. For this special issue, we perceive
these parallel trends as a paradigm shift.
In addition to the various moves towards the sonic
mentioned above, Covid-19 has brought about an increased focus on born-digital
theatre and performance, much of which utilises the aural dimension. In amongst
numerous, yet uncatalogued others, Stacy Makishi’s The Promise at
the Yard Online and Yannick Trapman-O’Brien’s Telelibrary used
telephone technology to create performances during the lockdown and
Toronto-based Dopolavoro Teatrale’s Daniele Bartolini set up an entire festival
of telephone performances Theatre-on-Call in April 2020.
This investigation takes place at an interdisciplinary
intersection between theatre and performance, dramaturgy, media studies, and
theoretical and practical studies of sound and voice, and is also informed by
insights from musicology, museology, anthropology and digital humanities.
As editors of this special issue, we believe that the
increased focus on sound as an integral dramaturgical element in (digital and
non-digital) theatre and performance-making methodologies also requires a
reconsideration of relevant research methodologies deployed in studying these
works. As part of our own research shared on www.auralia.space we have
pioneered a number of new methods, including academic dialogic improvisation,
the format of ‘oral introductions’ to academic books and the Zoom-generated
‘making-of documentary’. Additionally as part of this special issue we would
like to continue exploring the process of methodological and presentational
innovation in academic publishing.
We therefore invite proposals of ‘academic artefacts’
combining or substituting the medium of the written word with the affordances
of the digital domain – audio-visual recordings, coded submissions, and/or
other formal experiments in response to the following topics:
§ Dramaturgies of speech and sound
§
Orature, cyberture and their decolonising potential
§ Musicality of performance
§ Digital performance ethnography
§
The aesthetics and politics of amplification
§
Storytelling in the live and in the digital sphere
§
Gigs, theatre, gig theatre and spaces in between
§ Beyond verbatim theatre
§ Dramaturgical and compositional thinking
§ Aural and oral creative processes
§ Aural and oral research methodologies
§
Listenership, spectatorship and digital tele-spectatorship
Length of submission: 4500 words
max, 45 minutes of footage max, or equivalent (combined).
All submissions will be peer reviewed.
Please send 300-word abstracts
to auraliaspace@gmail.com, indicating the format that your submission will take
and why this is the best way to tackle the chosen topic, and include 50-word biogs
of all authors collaborating on the submission.
Please note the narrow timeframe:
Abstracts: 30 November 2020
First drafts due: 28 February 2021
Final submissions due: 30 October 2021
Publication: December 2021
BIOS
Duška Radosavljević is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and
Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her scholarly work
focuses on dramaturgy, writing for performance, and theatre-making. Duška is
the author of the award-winning Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text
and Performance in the 21st Century and editor
of The Contemporary Ensemble (2013) and Theatre
Criticism: Changing Landscapes (2016).
Flora Pitrolo is a researcher, music journalist, DJ,
broadcaster and writer. Her work looks at archives of experimental European
performance and music scenes from the 1980s to the present. Her most recent
large project is the artist book Syxty Sorriso & Altre Storie (2017).
She is currently co-editing a volume of non-Anglophone disco scenes
entitled Disco Heterotopias.
