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Stage and Beyond. Space and Place in Contemporary Theatre

Stage and Beyond. Space and Place in Contemporary Theatre

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Clément Lévy)

Call For Papers

Anglistica aion, an interdisciplinary journal
 

Title: "Stage and Beyond. Space and Place in Contemporary Theatre"

Editors: Carmen Gallo and Clément Lévy

Description:

Since the ’60s contemporary theatre has known several seasons of experimentations involving in particular the relationship between body and space. The subversion of the traditional idea of body and its role has deeply modified the conception of stage itself as a space for performance. It was once conceived as an arena whose borders could not be overcome, while now it is perceived and represented as a place and a space (that is to say “a practised place”, according to De Certeau [1984]) whose borders are indefinite, osmotic, fluid, negotiable, in a mutual exchange between art and the surrounding environment. This is what we find in the so called site-specific performances, which choose to adapt their play to unique (usually re-adapted) locations or buildings originally devoted to completely different aims; in the environmental theatre, in which the location is meant to imitate, or is itself, the setting of the story; or in the immersive theatre productions where the theatre-goers play a role as witnesses or characters, interacting through their own body with the fictional world of the play and thus living a real experience of its physical or virtual setting.

The avant-garde theatres of the 20th century admittedly helped shape new relationships between stage and setting and between reference and real spaces, but the particular types of dislocation and deterritorialisation which are at work on the stage and beyond still need to be more widely investigated.

For this forthcoming issue of Anglistica aion, we welcome papers that investigate the theatre’s potential to mediate the relationship between human beings and space through analyses of thought-provoking performances which move beyond the limits of the conventional stage in order to elicit the audience’s responses and interactions with the surrounding world. In exploring the forms of theatre involving urban or natural spaces, abandoned or reshaped contexts, or guided paths through unusual delimitations of the performative space, we also invite to take into consideration the recent literary and theoretical debates on the representations of space and place, geopoetical and geocritical approaches as well as the ecocriticism, since they all interweave spatial issues with phenomenological implications and political outcomes in the broadest sense. Those approaches – usually usually applied to the history of ideas, cultural traditions and narrative and poetical discourses – are potentially fruitful for an analysis of contemporary theatre, one of the most suitable arts where different ways to experience, inhabit, narrate and counter-narrate spaces are formulated and performed.

We welcome theoretical interventions as well as analyses of performances. Some possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

- the politics of fiction and the politics of spaces;

- the national imagination between text and translation;

- geopoetical, geocritical or ecocritical interpretations of performances;

- myth, place and theatre;

- the adaptation of traditional plays in new spatial contexts;

- the relationship among art, architecture and urban studies;

- spatial experimentation and gender issues;

- spatial experimentation, fiction and new media;

- postmodern critique and contemporary theatre;

- the spatial experience of the audience in concrete or virtual spaces;

- narration and/or counter-narration of abandoned, forgotten or excluded places

 

Deadline for abstracts

15 May 2017

Deadline for completed articles

31 August 2017

Carmen Gallo mailto:cgallo@unior.it

Clément Lévy mailto:clement.levy@fu-berlin.de

CC mailto:anglistica@unior.it

URL: https://www.anglistica-aion-unior.org/call-for-papers