07 November, 2023
EXTENDED
Call for Papers, panels, workshops and announcement of key note speakers
STAND IN PLACE / STANISLAVSKI AND PLACE
4-6 APRIL 2024
WAAPA, EDITH COWAN UNIVERSITY
PERTH/BOORLOO, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
The call for papers, panels or workshops for the 2024 Stanislavski and Place conference has been extended until 18TH December 2023. We thank those who have already submitted abstracts.
We are pleased to announce in addition to the keynote speaker of Prof. Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds), delegates will also be treated to curated panel presentation featuring the leading artists Kate Champion and Maitland Schnaars.
WAAPA is also excited to announce that we will be hosting the 2024 AusAct: The Australian Actor Training Conferenceto be held April 2nd and 3rd April. There will be a discounted registration if you are interested in presenting at both events.
Pitches has published on Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and science, and mountain performance. In addition to his keynote on mountainous opportunities: interrogating place in ritual, theatre, and performance training, he will be offering a masterclass on Meyerhold technique (applications pending).
Champion is one of Australia’s leading directors and choreographers, having worked with One Extra, Legs on the Wall, Sydney Theatre Company, DV8, and is currently artistic director of Black Swan State Theatre Company in Perth, Western Australia.
Schnaars is a Noongar man and an award winning performer and theatre artist. He co-founded the international company Corazon de Vaca, as well as performing with Black Swan, Queensland Theatre, Griffin, and Wadumbah Dance Group. Schnaars is currently artistic director of Yirra Yaakin theatre, Perth.
Please contact Jonathan Marshall for more details about S Word s-word2024@ecu.edu.auand Gabrielle Metcalf for more details about AusAct g.metcalf@ecu.edu.au. Please note the call for papers for AusAct will be sent early in November 2023.
S WORD PROLEMA
Stanislavski was clear that the actor must take their place in the theatre. His writings are full of injunctions to reflexively situate oneself with respect to the stage, set, actors, objectives, and so on. Echoing Stanislavski’s conceptual and physical praxis, modernist performance makers such as Meyerhold and Schlemmer went on to postulate that the actor brought their own sense of place onto the stage, shaping the performance space and enabling performer to align themselves, their attention, and their movements to a range of axial placements and combinations, as in Laban’s kinesphere. Later theatre makers as varied as Declan Donnellan and Suzuki Tadashi have suggested that the theatre is a place of life-and-death struggle, a site where a battle for survival is conducted by both characters and the actors themselves.
The act of the performer taking their place in their body in the theatre developed in parallel to the importance of ‘place’ in the world of the playwright and in the places represented on stage. Stanislavski’s not always happy peer, Anton Chekhov, has been described as the “first environmental playwright,” with scripts such as Uncle Vanya (1898) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) being concerned with the places wherein they are set, with the environmental and socio-political conditions andhistories etched across their landscapes. Interestingly, there is a rich tradition of Australian plays which are strongly connected to place, No Sugar (Jack Davis, 1985), Cloudstreet (Nick Enright and Justin Monjo, 1998, after the novel by Tim Winton), When the rain stops falling (Andrew Bovell, 2008), and more recently, City of Gold (Meyne Wyatt, 2019).
For the forthcoming Stanislavski and Place symposium, we call for submissions for academic papers, artist presentations, and panels, which consider the places of theatre arising from or existing alongside Stanislavskian performance and acting praxis. We invite you to Stand in Place with us, on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja/Country, here at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, Perth/Boorloo, and interact with this place, as you tell us about your places.
Topic areas could include (but are not limited to):
1) Performance and theatre in relation to ideas of being in place and being out of place
2) Stanislavskian performance in your place (what changes with/in it?)
3) Placemaking and theatre making
4) Futures of Eco dramaturgy and theatre form
5) Decolonisation strategies and First Nation knowledge of place and performance
6) Beyond Stanislavski, extending his ideas in concepts of place/space
7) Training in relation to ideas of place including but not limited to intercultural/transcultural form and practice
8) Site specific and place specific performance modes in relationship to realism, Stanislavski and actor and audience relationship
9) Movement, body weather and other performance modalities and training methodologies
Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to s-word2024@ecu.edu.au Applicants should specify if they are planning to represent a conventional oral conference paper (20 mins), a panel (60 mins + questions; pls. list participants), or practical workshops (20 – 60 mins).
All enquiries to Renee Newman r.newman@ecu.edu.au or Jonathan W Marshall jonathan.marshall@ecu.edu.au