Conference 2025: Performing Carnival: Ekstasis*Subversion*Metamorphosis #IFTR2025 Cologne | 9-13 June 2025

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

The Samuel Beckett working group, first convened in 1996, meets every year at the IFTR conference. The group provides a forum for discussions of current research approaches in Beckett studies undertaken by scholars around the world. It has consistently had a wide range of international participants from Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia, and encourages new members from other regions as well.

KEYWORDS

  • Modern and Postmodern Theatre
  • Adaptation and Translation
  • Inter -medial -cultural -national Performance
  • Archive
  • History and Historiography
  • Ecology
  • Ecocriticism and Ecodramaturgy

EMAIL ADDRESS

sbwg.iftr@gmail.com

 

CFP FOR IFTR 2025

Call for Papers for the Samuel Beckett Working Group at IFTR

in Cologne, Germany, 9th–13th June 2025

 

Greying the Carnival:

Samuel Beckett Inverting / Inverting Samuel Beckett

 

Samuel Beckett’s drama may not be yet mapped as a site of carnival; nevertheless, the Beckettian dramatic ecosystem is open to a sense of the carnivalesque. In Europe and the northern Americas, the carnival tends to be understood as a secularised Christian tradition, the religious roots of which are enshrined in the epistemology of the word. Originating from the Latin carnem levāre – the removal of the flesh (OED) – the carnival used to be a festive threshold leading into the frugality and modesty of Lent. Yet, such grassroots street performances have thrived beyond this limited cultural, historical and geographical frame. We notably think about the African and Indigenous carnivals, such as Canboulay, which operated as spiritual, political and cultural performances of resistance and rebellion against domination and exploitation (Browne, 2018). It is therefore necessary to first decentre the event of “the carnival” in order to zoom in on “the carnivalesque” as a complex phenomenon.

The carnivalesque has been providing historians, ethnographers and anthropologists with “a tool for broader historical analysis of non-carnival festivities bearing carnival characteristics” (Testa, 2021) and literary critics with a lens through which to analyse the aestheticization of “a carnival sense of the world” (Bakhtin, 1984a). Combining both approaches, theatre and performance scholars may find in the carnivalesque a concept through which to identify and examine cultural manifestations of the phenomenon beyond the performances of carnival, tracing its evolution and hybridisation across various real and fictional milieux. We propose to begin our investigation into the topic of the conference with a provisional definition of the carnivalesque that owes a debt to Mikhail Bakhtin’s study, but attempts to be inclusive of contexts other than the popular culture he scrutinized: a reflective, subversive and playful politics and aesthetic of illusion, relying on symbols that blur dualisms to express a desire for freedom, while limning its limits. By dualisms, we think in particular of the real/the ideal, life/death, doom/hope, continuity/rupture, centre/margin, top/bottom, male/female, human/animal, order/anarchy and revolution/entertainment, but this list is not exhaustive and deserves to be expanded, to adapt to the complex and shapeshifting manifestations of the phenomenon.

            The carnivalesque seeps into Beckett’s oeuvre, mostly in an embodied fashion, but not only in this manner: obvious occurrences can be identified in the onomastics of the Kraps and the Piouks; Vladimir’s and Estragon’s commedia dell’ arte inspired lazzi (Kern, 1966); the excess of Lucky’s logorrhea; Hamm’s need to keep playing; Krapp’s boozing as well as his clownish makeup and costume; Winnie’s ritualistic attention to costume and props; and the staging of the grotesque body with the laughter and hiccups in Play or the character of Mouth. However, Beckett’s plays do not “digest” those carnivalesque elements easily, rather putting them to the test of what we could refer to as the anti-carnival of a (post-)catastrophic everyday. If the carnival is characterised by the gathering of masses, feasting and abundance, Beckett’s plays perform the opposite with masses disappearing, food and other vital resources depleting. Yet, both operate as a suspension: a point of convergence and departure. The carnival may be understood as a “temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank” (Bakhtin, 1984b, 10) – a pause in the course of the everyday. Beckett’s oeuvre is ruled by the imperative to “go on” in the anachromism of “grey time,” “where there is neither simply action nor its opposite, but a call to keep paying attention to the intensity of time that resists the black and white of a crisis” (Salisbury, 2024). As is so often the case with Beckett, we are left with scales of grey: an ode to the complex and the paradoxical. At a time when contradiction and debate have become difficult, when freedom of speech keeps oscillating, we propose to revisit Beckett’s plays as sanctuaries of the uncertain, the contradictory, the paradoxical – a grey carnival.

In practice, the tension between tradition and innovation is always at the core of production and often yields questions about the possibility to invert or subvert Beckett’s legacy and artistic paradigms. This battle has often been fought on the grounds of gender, whereby queering Beckett appears as a magnifier of gender topics and issues already at play in the work, as well as new epistemological ways of unearthing systems of power, domination and exploitation. Cross-casting and drag remain a vexed issue in the performance history of Beckett’s work both in his lifetime and afterwards. On the one hand, the Beckett Estate – in its mission of “protection” and “preservation” – tends to impose a strict adherence to what is thereby construed as a gender politics, often applying a binary approach, which is not directly traceable in the texts. On the other hands, queer performances of Beckett not only bring to the surface the queerness of the texts, but they can also provide a path to explore the “masquerade” of femininity (Butler, 2015), the identity of characters beyond the binary, and some plays like Happy Days even become vehicles for performing what it is to be “stuck in [one’s] body” (Nando Messias, qtd. in Heron, 2022). Furthermore, as the Beckettian oeuvre is being remediated, further troubling the border between the real and the virtual, and presence and absence, we are compelled to investigate how new creative technologies are themselves political and aesthetic tools that both (re-)produce an already existing Beckettian carnivalesque, while also complexifying, hybridizing or inverting it (Johnson and Heron, 2020). In the geographical Beckettian “centres”, this prolific creative engagement with the work is often made accessible to the public as part of festivals, drawing masses in a carnivalesque celebration of Beckett and his work (McTighe, 2023), which disrupts not only social time (a break from quotidian life) and phenomenological time (the effect of Beckett’s slowed-down dramaturgies on audience members), but also the temporality of theatre-making (a shift in the somatic approach to rehearsing those slow-paced pieces) and marketing (programming short plays in neo-liberal contexts). In other words, as Trish McTighe eloquently puts it, “Each festival constructs ‘Beckett-time’ out of the normative fabric of cultural time” (McTighe, 2023). The carnivalesque durée as / of / in / against Beckettian festivals thus calls for a broader reassessment of our collective consumption of art, as well as our modes of celebration of bodies of work and artists.

All papers related to Beckett’s drama or Beckett in performance are welcome. We also encourage proposals in English and in French pertaining, but not limited, to the following topics:

 

⁃                Beckett and the carnivalesque

⁃                Beckett as anti-carnival

⁃                Beckett’s clowns, fools and jesters

⁃                Beckett and the grotesque

⁃                Beckett and commedia dell’arte

⁃                Beckett and costumes and props

⁃                Beckett and festivals

⁃                Beckett and technologies of hybridization

⁃                Queering, inverting, subverting Beckett

⁃                The carnival of Beckett’s doodles

 

 

The Samuel Beckett Working Group is an evolving international community of researchers, which seeks to support the development of excellent research on Beckett’s drama and Beckett in performance. We welcome postgraduate and early-career researchers, as well as faculty, independent researchers and artists. We value the participation of Beckett and non-Beckett experts alike, as both categories partake in the maintenance of a healthy interdisciplinary ecosystem. The submission of work at various levels of development is encouraged from early ideas on a project to work in progress to nearly finished papers. This community strives to offer rigorous and constructive feedback through respectful engagement with each other’s work. Our core values are inclusivity, diversity and care.

 

Abstracts can be submitted via the IFTR Cambridge Core portal. Please note that you must renew your membership or become a member in order to submit:  

https://www.cambridge.org/core/membership/iftr.

 

The deadline for abstracts for working group papers is 15 January 2025.

 

Papers of up to 3,000 words in length are to be distributed by 9 May 2025.

 

For information about the general conference, please check the IFTR website. Please also check for updates on the Samuel Beckett Working Group page at https://www.iftr.org/working-groups/samuel-beckett.

 

If you have questions about the group or about attending please contact the working group convenors, Céline Thobois-Gupta, cthobois@tcd.ie, and Trish McTighe, t.mctighe@qub.ac.uk.

 

Please note that papers to be presented at the Working Group are distributed and read by all the participants ahead of the meeting. At the Working Group sessions presenters give short résumés of their work, followed by a lengthy discussion period (each presenter has 30 to 45 minutes in all, depending on the number of presenters). This is an extremely effective method, which allows ideas to be discussed, debated and evaluated, with participants suggesting directions for the presenters’ work-in-progress. There is limited space for presenters; there will also be a limited space for auditors, who may also be sent the papers to and be encouraged to engage in the discussions during the sessions.

 

Works Cited

 

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press, 1984a.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 1984b.

Browne, Kevin Adonis. High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 2018. 

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2015.

Johnson, Nicholas E., and Jonathan Heron. Experimental Beckett. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Heron, Jonathan. “‘Restriction Gives Freedom:’ A Dialogue between Jonathan Heron and Nando Messias.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 34, no. 1 (2022): 79–91.

Kern, Elizabeth. “Beckett and the Spirit of the Commedia Dell’Arte.” Modern Drama 9, no.3 (1966): 260–7.

McTighe, Trish. Carnivals of Ruin. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Oxford English Dictionary, under “carnival.”

Salisbury, Laura. “Waiting with Beckett in the Anthropocene.” Journal of Beckett Studies 33, no.1 (2024): 14–40.

Testa, Alessandro. Rituality and Social (Dis)Order: The History of Popular Carnival in Europe. Routledge, 2021.

 

CONVENERS

Trish McTighe – t.mctighe@qub.ac.uk

Céline Thobois-Gupta – cthobois@tcd.ie

 

MISSION STATEMENT

 

Since its formation in 1996 by Prof Linda Ben-Zvi, the Working Group has striven to provide a space for diverse and international engagements with the work of Samuel Beckett. The core mission of the group is as follows: 

 

  • Developing and sustaining an international community of researchers on Beckett’s drama and Beckett in performance.
  • Bridging between the various IFTR working groups by building partnerships, as well as between several generations of researchers by welcoming auditors from the New Scholars Forum.
  • Connecting researchers and artists within and beyond Beckett studies as part of an interdisciplinary ecosystem.
  • Fostering conversations and collaborations between PG, ECR, faculty, independent researchers and artists.
  • Providing an experimental space for research dissemination and project development.
  • Supporting the development and publication of excellent research on Beckett’s drama and Beckett in performance through rigorous and constructive feedback.

 

The group sets topics for each meeting, either adopting the theme of the IFTR conference or focusing on a specific play or theory in the hope of eliciting a lively exchange of ideas. Participants' essays are circulated approximately one month prior to the meeting, and at the actual sessions presenters briefly summarize, but do not read, their papers. Group members then discuss each work in detail for at least 30 minutes, asking questions, offering constructive comments and making suggestions for further research. We also endeavour to regularly present our work at a general panel within the annual conference to further embed our activities within the conference. The group has been meeting every year not only at the IFTR conferences but also at submeetings (Southampton and Tokyo in 2012 and Budapest in 2017) since 2010. An online interim meeting takes place in November/December each year. 

 

CURRENT PROJECTS

Samuel Beckett & Ecology, ed. by Trish McTighe, Céline Thobois-Gupta & Nicholas Johnson, Bloomsbury-Methuen Drama, forthcoming in 2025. 

In response to the ever-growing urgency of the ecological crisis, the vitality and the creativity of art and literature have been singled out as sources of hope by Nobel Prize awardee in chemistry and coiner of the ‘Anthropocene’, Paul J. Crutzen. Samuel Beckett was not an environmental artist, but his oeuvre, poised between forms of precarity and hope, is a rich territory for the exploration of the most pressing issues of our time: the rift between the human species, its technological and economic advancement and the ecologies that sustain it all. 

In recent years, Beckett’s name, aphorisms and work have frequently been invoked relative to this global crisis, helping stimulate debates on ecology, the arts and the ecosystemic place of the human. Beckett and Ecology is the first full-length book to offer a wide range of scholarly responses to the ecological crises provoked, mediated, or challenged by Beckett’s work. The volume reflects on the varied practices and narratives in Beckettian intermedial ecologies, offering new insights into the connections between Beckett and the Anthropocene in the terrains of translation, adaptation, performance and the visual arts. Chapters also explore the potential of Happy Days (1961) for posthuman and ecological thought, and the role it has taken in eco-theatre. Short bursts of writing, entitled ‘Coups de gong,’ are woven throughout the volume and testify to the variety of Beckett-inspired local responses to global climate instability.

 

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS / OUTPUTS

 

  • Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett, ed. by Laurens De Vos, Mariko Hori Tanaka, and Nicholas Johnson, Brill, 2021.

This collection offers a wide-ranging treatment of the voice in Beckett; it addresses the voice within a range of media including music, theatre, film and radio as well as engaging with philosophical and psychological investigations of voice and vocality. 

  • Influencing Beckett, Beckett Influencing, ed. by Anita Rákóczy, Mariko Hori Tanaka, Nicholas E. Johnson, L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2020.

A compelling collection of essays enriching our understanding of Beckett's cultural inheritance in the twentieth centre. 

  • Beckett at 100: Revolving It All. Edited by Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

This collection of twenty-two essays is based on, but not limited to, essays presented at the Trinity College, Dublin centenary celebration in April 2006. The Beckett Working Group was invited to feature in the central academic program where approximately 40 papers were presented.

  • Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, 2004.

The book contains twenty-one essays by leading Beckett scholars, as well as twenty-four drawings of Beckett by his friend and noted Israeli painter, Avigdor Arikha.

Other recent IFTR-related publications (essays, book chapters and articles) by group members are accessible via the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BxvYGj2Vj1wOqkT8d_PO-y9pE5XGt8Ktpj3J4eEl8Uo/edit?usp=sharing

OTHER

 

  • Summary of work ethics: To fulfil our goals, it is imperative that we create and sustain an environment that is inclusive, professional, and collegial for academics of every background and of any identification or affiliation at various career stages. We invite all working group members to promote a culture and climate of mutual respect and tolerance, free from discrimination, bullying, exploitation, intimidation, and harassment. This society is designed to enable members to perform their work with dignity, integrity, and a joyful sense of community. 

 

  • Postgraduate and ECR mentorship programme: the Samuel Beckett Working Group offers a mentorship programme to postgraduate and ECR members. Thanks to a network of volunteer established scholars, junior members of the working group can  be paired with a mentor upon request and will receive feedback on their work, as well as advice on their projects, throughout the year. We welcome more established scholars who would like to volunteer as mentors.  

 

  • History: Linda Ben-Zvi founded the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the IFTR meeting in  Jerusalem, Israel, in 1996 and convened till the IFTR meeting in Stockholm, 2016. The late Julie Campbell convened the IFTR meetings in Osaka, Japan (with Mariko Hori Tanaka) in 2011 and in Barcelona in 2013. She also convened a submeeting in Southampton in 2012. The book Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett commemorates her and her work. Anita Rakoczy organized a sub-meeting in Budapest, Hungary, in June 2017: proceedings are published in Influencing Beckett, Beckett Influencing. Matthias Korn convened the IFTR meeting in Sao Paolo in July 2017. Mariko Hori Tanaka and Nicholas Johnson convened the meeting in Belgrade 2018. Trish McTighe was elected convener of the working group in 2018. 

 

 

 

  • Other resources:

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