CALL FOR PAPERS, The Stories We Tell: Myths, Myth Making and Performance, Scenography Working Group, IFTR 2023, Accra, Ghana, 24-28 July 2023.

Within the context of this year’s theme on storytelling; myth; myth-making and in light of the theme of RARE of the forthcoming Prague Quadrennial 2023, the Scenography WG is situating myth within material, embodied and ecological practice and is looking at the capacity of design-led performance processes to act as a catalyst for cultural change through scenographic storytelling.

Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Sapiens (2014) claims that the ability to generate imagined realities through narratives aided large-scale cooperation between humans and the creation of communities which lead to their dominance over other species. In the preface of Re-imagining Indigenous Knowledges and Practices in 21^st Century Africa, drawing from Indigenous scholars from North America, George Dei argues that ‘these literacies, are in effect cultural, spiritual, psychic memories and “living forces” we can learn from’ (Dei in Muyambo, 2022) which may materialise in the here-and-now of performance. Thus, to borrow Karen Barad’s ‘thick-now of the present’ (2017), past, present and future are entangled in the performance of scenographic matter and bodies.

Key to this year’s call for papers is the imbrication of myth within scenographic practices for the creation of wide-ranging ways of ‘telling’ of myth that draw on material and embodied knowledges, rather than a prioritising of language, as is the use of scenographic story-telling processes for creating and sustaining communities.

How might the stories we ‘tell’ through scenographic tools and methods operate within cultural communities to imagine or re-imagine change and act upon it?

We are furthermore looking at the visible and invisible workings and tools of scenographic narration which help orchestrate the entanglement of material-immaterial-social orderings of events for the emergence of ‘invisible scenographies’ (Lotker, 2015) and scenographies that can ‘make us’ (Lotker and Gough, 2013).
What are the symbolic, representational, embodied, ecological or the beyond-representational ways of narrating myth that scenography and scenographics (Hann, 2018) have to offer for re-imagining our world?

Within the above context delegates are invited to respond with papers, practice or seminar provocations on to the following wider themes in relation to storytelling, myth and scenography:

-       Myth as co-creation through materiality and performance.

-       Design-led storytelling of myths as catalysts for change.

-       Staging(s) of contemporary myths and stories.

-       Scenographic participation, belonging, co-creation and myth.

-       Costume, light, materials, objects as a means of storytelling of myth.

-       Scenography and spatial representations of myth.

-       Metaphors, myth, storytelling and materiality of performance.

-       Scenography as a site of myth making and the fantastical.

-       Situated scenographic approaches and practices made global through their telling.

-       Indigenous materialities of performance in relation to myth and story-telling.

-       Expanding scenography culture and myth.

-       Decoloniality in myth making and scenography.

-       Embodied myths, popular culture and scenography.

-       Posthuman, more than human, multi-species narratives and myth.

-       Myth and storytelling as performance design methods.

-       Making the tacit explicit: Myth as a means of passing on tacit knowledge through the materiality of performance.

-       Myth and storytelling as vehicles for scenographers to engage with environmentally responsible practices.

-       Myth and power: practices of distortion or eradication of myth by altering or destroying cultural facts via scenographic means.

-       The myths uncovered from scenographic cultures.

-       Invisible scenographic tools as a means of storytelling beyond-representation.

-       Myth and digital scenography.

-       The invisible labour of scenography leading to change.

-       Folklores, cultures and scenographies.

-       Myth, gender, and scenography.

-       Myth, politics and scenography.

-       Affect; embodied, embedded, extended, enactive cognition and myth-making.