ERWG 2024 cpf

 

The IFTR Embodied Research Working Group invites papers and other contributions that explore the rich interweavings of states of emergency and tragedies with embodiment and embodied practice and research.

 

States of emergency seem to have become the normal embodied basal state that our bodies have been intensely articulating on a daily basis. Tragedy is a source of embodied tensions that can generate or destroy stories and lives - real ones or enacted. They can be a source of culture and of strength but also a mortal weapon in an individual or community. As much as it can be an opportunity it can also be an end or a new beginning. Tragedy can reveal colonial and decolonial embodiments. 

 

The ERWG is not only interested in the survival tactics that involve being with/in the multiple crises that surrounds our being, but is also interested in articulating the crises that have been embodied in our daily lives. And how process of decolonisation of embodiment and imagination can elevate and ask questions of how can we generate new critical narratives of embodied practice and research. 

 

Alongside the conference’s CFP that outlines a series of tragedies that are present in our living: 

 

“tragedy may account for the consequences of unequal relationships among social agents from the global North and the global South; the disorders in the longstanding hierarchical linkages between humans and non-humans; the rise and return of political personalities that have caused the further breakdown of already delicate public systems and services; the decimation of the world’s resources amid unprecedented health crises and environmental disasters; and, not least, the destitute ways of life among the oppressed who are caught up in highly colonial, imperial, capitalist, neoliberal, heteronormative, and racist regimes”

 

The working group is interested in the tragedies that emerge in and out of the body. From this perspective we ask:

 

What are the responses the bodies reveal to the tragedies it experiences? 

How are the emergencies and tragedies embodied and disembodied and what are the performative products of these embodiments? 

Can the living in a constant state of emergency impact on the embodiment of culture, gender, race, religiosity ….. ?

What do individual or community emergencies generate and/or influence in individual or community embodied practices? What sort of embodiments it creates?

How does the embodiment of tragedy impact on the social  and cultural realms?

Could embodiment inform and respond to states of emergencies?

What new critical knowledges are necessary to articulate new states of embodiment?

 

For the 2024 meeting of the ERWG we invite participants to address the theme of the conference in relation to embodiment and embodied practices. 

 

As in previous years, we invite proposals for presentation and exchange through a wide range of forms: written, danced, sung, performed, audio-visual, imagined, embodied. 

 

Abstracts of between 200 and 250 words are invited for this conference from scholars, teachers, researchers, artists, and students of theatre arts, theatre studies, performance studies, and other related disciplines.