The Theatre & Architecture Working Group invites proposals from researchers and practitioners for our meeting during the 2022 IFTR World Congress

CALL FOR PAPERS: THEATRE & ARCHITECTURE WORKING GROUP

IFTR World Congress 2022, Reykjavik

20-24 June, 2022

 

Shifting Centres / Unsettling Grounds

 

Deadline for bursary applications: 15 December 2021

 

Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2022

 

For our meeting during the 2022 IFTR World Congress, the Theatre & Architecture Working Group will explore the topic of ‘Shifting Centres / Unsettling Grounds’. Intersecting with the main conference topic of ‘Shifting Centres (In the Middle of Nowhere)’, we see the meeting as an opportunity to reconsider what it is to create and critique theatre architecture, performance spaces, and cultural venues – with a focus on the unsettled/unsettling politics of ground, land and territory. We will use our meeting to begin working towards a future publication on this topic.

 

The topic ‘Shifting Centres’ suggests a concern with the shifting relationships and tensions between variously configured centres and peripheries. To this we add ‘Unsettling Grounds’ as a way to consider how we might redress the physical and conceptual grounds upon which our actions take place. If performing and performance space generally involves an event of ‘taking place’ then where, what, and whose place is being taken? What does it mean to design performance and construct performance space in a precarious world pushed to its limit by climate catastrophe, mass migration and unruly pandemics that threaten established borders and the territories they contain? And how might marginal or peripheral practices and approaches offer us ways of responding critically and creatively to these multiple pressing conditions of precarity?  

 

The Covid pandemic – with its profound disruption of theatres and performance spaces globally – serves as a catalyst for rethinking and challenging our perceptions of cultural venues, performance spaces, and the relationships between architecture, performance, land, and culture which they embody. We invite presentations and provocations that engage with marginalised practices and approaches to unsettling our shared assumptions about where our actions take place.

 

Proposals may address (but are not limited to):

 

-        Theatre architecture, performance space and post/de/colonialism

-        Ground, soil, habitat, landscape and territory

-        Boundaries, margins and edges.

-        Performance and terrestrial politics

-        Transitions, movement and migration

-        Precarity, vulnerability and performance space

-        Resilience and preparedness

-        Place, displacement and emplacement

-        Nomadic theatre, and de- and re-territorialization

-        Land and violence (historic and contemporary)

-        Ventilation, circulation and ‘dead’ air

-        Margins and marginality

-        Indigenous and place-based ecologies and epistemologies

-        Performance space and the state

-        Performance space, performance design and the city

-        Legacies of Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri’s Land/Scape/Theater (2002)

-        Theatres and performance spaces as loci for struggle and resistance

-        Theatre architecture, colonial histories, and post/anti-colonial struggles

-        Cultural landscapes

-        Occupation

-        Haunting

-        Contesting domination

-        Settler atmospheres

-        Theatre and more-than-human-life

-        Site-specificity and site-responsiveness in theatre and/or architecture

-        Theatre & architecture in the anthropocene/industriocene

-        Performance as vibrant assemblage of body and architecture

-        Performance space and social justice

-        Theatre as an ecologically transformative gesture

-        Spatial performativity and spatial agency

 

We invite proposals for presentations that may take one of the following forms: academic papers (15 minutes), PechaKucha presentations (20 slides x 20 seconds), screenings, short workshop demonstrations or performative engagements with the theme. Please be mindful that resources and time for workshops or performative engagements will restricted. When submitting your proposal please make it clear what form your presentation will take.

 

About the IFTR Theatre & Architecture Working Group

 

The purpose of the Theatre & Architecture Working Group is to explore all that theatre architecture has been historically, is at present, and might be in the future. We consider built projects alongside unbuilt or speculative architectures, studying these from a wide range of practical and theoretical perspectives. We continue to investigate the ways in which space can be manipulated to bring performers and spectators into dynamic relationship inside traditional theatre auditoria, while also asking how else the disciplines of theatre and architecture intersect. For further information about the Theatre & Architecture Working Group please visit: https://www.iftr.org/working-groups/theatre-architecture

 

Abstract Submission

Please submit abstracts through the Cambridge Core website. In order to make a submission you will need to become a member of IFTR first: https://www.cambridge.org/core/membership/iftr. When you submit your abstract please make sure that you indicate that you are submitting to the ‘Theatre & Architecture Working Group’. Please also send a copy of your abstract to the Working Group conveners via email.

 

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 31 January 2022.

 

IFTR bursary information

https://www.iftr.org/conference/bursaries

 

The deadline for bursary applications is 15 December 2021.

 

Our Process

We pre-circulate written papers (of up to 3,000 words) to members in advance of the conference to  encourage in-depth exchange and a constructive and supportive ‘workshopping’ of members’ ideas during our meetings. To facilitate this process we ask that presenters email copies of written papers to the conveners in advance of the conference for uploading to the group’s shared Dropbox. We also strongly encourage members to attend every session of the Working Group during the conference so as to contribute to discussion throughout.

 

During the IFTR Conference we warmly welcome individuals who wish to take part in the group's discussions, but who do not want to submit a paper.

 

Working Group Conveners

Prof. Dorita Hannah: dorita.m.hannah@gmail.com

Dr Shauna Janssen: shauna.janssen@concordia.ca

Dr Andrew Filmer: awf@aber.ac.uk