New England Theatre Journal is indexed in the International Index of the Performing Arts and the MLA Bibliography.

The deadline for submissions is January 20, 2010. You are, however, encouraged to submit contributions at the earliest possible date so that full consideration may be given to them. Inquiries and communications regarding the submission of articles are welcome.

MANUSCRIPTS

All contributions should conform to the following guidelines:

1. Three copies should be submitted, between 15-30 pages in length. Author’s name should not appear on manuscript pages.

2. The latest edition of the MLA Handbook should be followed strictly.

3. Include a cover sheet with the title of the article, your name, your affiliation, title, mailing address, telephone numbers and email address, a 50-75 word abstract, and a brief biographical paragraph.

4. Notes, references, charts, or figures should appear at the end of the article on separate pages.

Articles pending disposition by NETJ should not be submitted to another publication unless released by the Editor of NETJ. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed envelope with sufficient postage. Manuscripts are juried anonymously in order to assure the highest possible publication standards.

Manuscripts should be sent by January 20th to:

Stuart J. Hecht, Editor
New England Theatre Journal
Department of Theatre
Robsham Theatre Arts Center
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Ph. 617/552-4612
Email:  hecht at bc.edu

Harnessing the Power of Performance:
Documentation Strategies for Theater and Dance

Throughout history, capturing performance through various media has been challenging. Performance historians have based their work on archeological artifacts, paper records, oral history and memory, audio recordings, and film documentation of dance and theater performances. Each method – in itself ephemeral – presents challenges due in part to limitations inherent in its physical characteristics: images fade, paper crumbles, and memory fails.

This session will address and assess past, current, and future methodologies for harnessing the power of performance – and the extent to which these approaches and strategies support or impede research. We invite papers addressing the many forms of documentation – from depictions of Athenian performances on vases to computer-generated dance notation/animation.

Papers might consider:

• How do documentation strategies negotiate, undermine, or emphasize power?

• How do developments and changes in technology impact performance studies?

• How do cultural politics and the power of societal perceptions of theater and dance affect performance documentation?

• How do documentation strategies or models strengthen or undermine our understanding and appreciation of performance?

• How have theater and dance practitioners, librarians and scholars collaborated to develop effective documentation strategies?

• What are the limitations and drawbacks of video and film documentation of performance?

• How will the proliferation of born-digital objects impact documentation of theater and dance?

• Do artists have the ethical right to resolve that their work may perish with them?

Please submit one-page Proposal as e-mail attachment by February 15, 2010 to:

Susan Brady, Chair, TLA Plenary Program Committee
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
 Susan.Brady at yale.edu

c/o The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, New York 10023

In her ground-breaking 1989 volume Making A Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre, Lynda Hart remarked, “The latter half of the twentieth century has seen an emergence of women playwrights in numbers equal to the entire history of their dramatic foremothers.” In 2008, however, nearly twenty years after Hart’s volume signaled a kind of golden age of women’s theatre writing, playwrights Sarah Schulman and Julia Jordan convened a “standing-room-only” town hall meeting in New York City to discuss a bias in the subsidized New York theatre that has male writers being produced four times more than women. Clearly, despite the ground-swell of women’s writing for the theatre that Hart captured in 1989, what she called “the last bastion of male hegemony in the literary arts” has, in the early twenty-first century, not yet been dismantled. For this special issue, the editors invite essays that center on issues relating to women playwrights who have been active within the past twenty years and that explore such topics as: the politics, economics, and material conditions of production and reception as they pertain to women playwrights; concerns and techniques in playwriting by women; innovative theoretical frameworks and critical methods for articulating the political and aesthetic affiliations and interventions of women playwrights; and the impact of such historical developments as the critical turn to feminist performance in the 1990s, the move toward gender studies, the rise of queer theory, and the articulation of postcolonial criticism as they have affected academic and scholarly engagements with women playwrights.

Please send inquiries about this special issue to Penny Farfan, Coeditor, Theatre Journal ( farfan at ucalgary.ca), and Lesley Ferris, Guest Coeditor ( ferris.36 at osu.edu). Submissions should be e-mailed to Bob Kowkabany, Managing Editor, at  doriclay at aol.com by April 15, 2010.

–
Penny Farfan
Co-editor, Theatre Journal
Professor of Drama and English

The Tufts University Department of Drama and Dance seeks mid-career applicants for an Associate or a Full Professor of Drama, with a specialization in classical, medieval, early modern, Baroque or Rococo theatre. This is a fulltime, tenure-track position with an anticipated starting date of September 1, 2010.

The Department of Drama and Dance provides a strong liberal arts approach to the intellectual, historical, and aesthetic dimensions of performance. Our undergraduate program in drama integrates acting, design, directing, dramatic literature and criticism, performance studies, technical theatre, and theatre history. Modern dance and creative work are the core curricular elements of our undergraduate dance program, which also offers several non-western forms throughout the year. The program of study leading to the doctor of philosophy or master of arts degree in drama embraces theatre history, dramatic literature, dramatic theory and criticism, and research. It is expected that graduate students will already have attained a level of proficiency in the creative and/or performance aspects of theatre.

Located about five miles northwest of Boston, within easy access by public transportation to the cultural and social resources of Boston and Cambridge, Tufts is recognized as one of the premier liberal arts colleges within a research university. Excellence in scholarship and teaching are the school’s highest priorities. Its signature strengths are its emphasis on the application of scholarship to civic engagement and active citizenship, as well as its commitment to preparing today’s generation of university students for transformational leadership in a changing world.

Qualifications:
• Required: doctorate and substantial record of scholarship and publication
• Required: demonstrated commitment to excellent university teaching and advising (ideally, with some instruction of graduate students)
• Required: demonstrated leadership potential
• Preferred: administrative experience
• Preferred: experience in directing plays
• Preferred: teaching students from under-represented groups

Areas of Research and Teaching:
• Required: concentration in pre-modern theatre (classical to 1750)
• Preferred: ability to teach pre-modern dramatic theory
• Preferred: competence in foreign languages

Responsibilities:
• Assume chairmanship of the department, anticipated within one year of hire
• Teach new or existing undergraduate courses in theatre history and/or dramatic literature, theory, and criticism
• Teach graduate seminars in specialized areas of research and scholarship
• Advise Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses, judge written and oral comprehensive examinations, participate in graduate admissions
• Advise undergraduate majors and senior thesis projects
• Direct a departmental major production every two or three years (if mutually agreeable)
• Support the university’s ongoing commitment to active citizenship and service

To apply: Please send a letter of application and a current CV to Barbara W. Grossman, Chair, Department of Drama and Dance, Aidekman Arts Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155. Short-listed candidates will be contacted for scholarly materials and the names of three references. Review of applications will begin on January 20, 2010, and will continue until the position has been filled. We will conduct on-campus interviews during the spring 2010 semester.

Tufts University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer. We are committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty. Members of underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

Call for Papers

The Theatre Students of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York announce their second graduate student conference, in conjunction with the conferral of the 2010 Edwin Booth Award by the Doctoral Theatre Students Association.*

According to New York based playwright Charles Mee, “there is no such thing as an original[.]“** His (re)making project, an endeavor that highlights his own method of creative production while encouraging borrowing and overlap by other playwrights and performers, resists the notion of an “original” in artistic creation. Mee suggests that the (re)makings of classics and (re)presentations of “originals” become the vehicles “through [which] the culture speaks, often without the speakers knowing it.”* Practiced citationality, intertextuality, and ideas of “twice-behaved” properties have come to the fore in analysis of postmodern theatre, dance, and performance as well as in recent investigations of canonical literature and poetry. How might an analysis of how art (re)creates itself (re)make discussions of the author, the creative process, and the effect on audiences, readers, and participants?

Larger questions loom behind these considerations of artistic creation and originality: can any art be original, or truly called new? Are such claims ever feasible or useful? And when texts, stories, or performances are openly (re)made, what are the implications of such gestures? Do new forms emerge when we elaborate upon spectacle or add novel technology in (re)presentations? What happens when practitioners push the proverbial envelope, exposing the body or staging violence in innovative (and possibly problematic) ways? Finally, who can assert authorship/ownership over such (re)makings? Can representation ever project the politics of the avant-garde if it has always already been done?

We invite proposals for papers and panels exploring these and related questions. The one-day graduate student conference will take place at CUNY’s Graduate Center and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center on May 3rd, 2010. The conference will be followed by the 2010 Edwin Booth Award, which is being awarded by CUNY’s Doctoral Theatre Students Association to Charles Mee. Papers and panels do not need to directly address Mee’s work.

Proposals might consider themes such as, but not limited to:

-Issues of intertextuality and citation in literature and performance

-Questions of ownership, adaptation, and reappropriation of ideas
-The (re)making nature of the avant-garde

-Issues of copyright

-Use of technology and multimedia in performance

-Ethics of (re)presentation

-Authority, authorship, and power-sharing in collaborative projects

-(re)Presenting violence and brutality

-New paradigms in theatre economics
-Performing history

-Theatre as process

-Aspects of stage/performance spectacle

-Sex, nudity, and other representations of the body

-Adaptation: What happens to content when it moves across media?

Please send proposals or abstracts of 100 to 300 words to Bethany Holmstrom, Rayya El Zein, and Kelly Aliano at  TSGCCUNYconference at gmail.com by January 30, 2010. Please include a cover letter stating name, affiliation, and A/V requirements. For more information, the CFP, and deadlines, check out the conference blog at http://opencuny.org/tsgccuny/.

* For more information about the DTSA and the Booth Award, please see http://web.gc.cuny.edu/theatre/dtsa/booth.html

**charlesmee.org/html/about.html

The Department of Performing Arts at Southern Oregon University invites applications for a full-time, nine month, tenure-track position in the Theatre Arts program beginning in September of 2010. This is an undergraduate program of over 230 majors, offering BA, BS & BFA degree options. The Theatre Arts division of the department is seeking a director/scholar, who as a key member of a strong performance and academic faculty, would be primarily responsible for teaching both a series of directing courses and the core upper division theatre history courses. Expertise in and an ability to teach additional specialized courses covering topics such as dramatic literature, world theatre, theatre & western culture and/or theory & criticism is desired. All teaching in the department is focused on a traditional liberal arts undergraduate education as a central tenet of the University’s core mission. Non-teaching responsibilities will include participating in curricular development, departmental and university committees, as well as directing in the department’s production program. This is an opportunity to join a dedicated faculty, working in a well-regarded theatre program that is a dynamic part of a collaborative, arts-oriented community, which includes the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. A PhD is required along with significant professional and/or academic teaching experience. Salary is commensurate with position, rank and responsibilities. All applications must be received by January 4, 2010 to receive priority consideration. Late applications may be considered, but only at the discretion of the committee. The committee will begin reviewing applications as they are received. Send a letter of application, vita, a sample of scholarly writing, statement of teaching philosophy and the contact information of three professional references to: Professor Deborah Rosenberg, Chair of Search Committee, Department of Performing Arts – Theatre, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, OR 97520. (Southern Oregon University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer committed to development of an inclusive, multicultural community.)

Director, Center for Shakespeare Studies
Associate Professor of Theatre Arts
Southern Oregon University
Ashland, Oregon

Seattle, WA
18-21 November 2010
The Renaissance Seattle Hotel

Embodying Power: Work Over Time

Theater and dance are fellow travelers. Sometimes they are close friends, sharing lodgings, swapping influences, commenting on the same delights and disturbances, even taking a turn or two on the floor together. Sometimes they are rivals, insisting on their own visions of aesthetic merit, concepts of time, space and body, and relationship to history and culture. And sometimes they take divergent paths, walking at different paces, occupied with their own thoughts and casting barely a glance toward one another. Next year will be a time of reunion for these two embodied arts, a time for exchanging ideas and reflecting on their long relationship.

In order to facilitate this reunion, the 2010 joint conference will revolve around the concept of corporeal power. In physics, power is defined as work divided by the time needed to complete the work, or work over time. We seek to focus on the moving body in performance and examine how power has “worked” on/through/with bodies throughout history (over time). We encourage applicants to consider the generative possibilities of clusters of words such as power, movement, mass, gravity, so as to envision the possibility of a politics that is embodied, as weight in bodies in motion, in which there are collisions, reactions between forces in a kind of ‘Newtonian’ universe of dance-theatre. In foregrounding the politics of moving bodies, we hope simultaneously to blur the disciplinary boundaries between dance and theater, and mine the productive relationships between them. Though the focus of the conference is on the intersections of theater and dance, applicants are encouraged to explore the wide variety of embodied, expressive cultural forms (theatre, dance, ritual, fiesta, performance art, international festivals, religious, civil observances, everyday life, etc.). Too, applicants might consider the moving body in theater, theatricality in dance, and genres of performance on and off stage that don’t fit into neat categories.

Proposals might consider the following questions:

How does power operate in and within performance?

How has power been negotiated in the performing arts (between audience and performer, among different performance traditions, over time)?

How do bodies in motion negotiate and enact power?

How are bodies inscribed by power; how are bodies strategically resistant to power?

How are bodies subject to different kinds of forces: gravity, aging, technique, economics, racializing and sexualizing discourses?

How are bodies capable of generating power of their own?

What are the forces that exert power over moving bodies? And what are the forces that moving bodies generate?

What do we mean when we talk about the “transformational or liberatory power of performance”?

How does power circulate within performance pedagogy?

How is power negotiated in terms of culture and identity?

What are the economics of power in performance? Who defines performance genres? Where is the legislative power?

What are the hidden powers of performance?

How and why do performances elicit embodied responses, and how can embodied spectatorship make power visible?

How can different methodological approaches, from dance studies, theater studies, and/or performance studies, work together to assess the role of embodiment in performance?

Participation Guidelines

Plenary Presentations: We invite proposals for individual plenary papers and/or presentations: these presentations are “plenary” in the sense that they address the entire conference and nothing runs concurrently with them. Proposals take the form of an abstract (max. 250 words) that includes name, affiliation, mailing and email addresses. Full-length papers will not be accepted, with the exception of graduate students who wish to be considered for CORD’s Graduate Research Award, who must submit a full-length paper in addition to an abstract. Proposals will be selected by the program committee with an eye towards topics that advance conversations in and about the fields of theatre, dance and performance studies. We encourage both “traditional” and “performative” papers. Individual presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Those proposals not selected for plenary presentations may be invited to turn their presentation into a working session instead. Also, those whose proposals are not selected for plenary presentations will have the opportunity to apply to a second call for participants in accepted working sessions.

Working Sessions: We invite proposals for working sessions: this category includes roundtables, seminars, research groups, reading groups, forums, workshops, as well as formats that have yet to be imagined. “Working sessions” is a general category that allows the session leader(s) to convene small groups around a proposed area of inquiry or practice, and to structure a method and format that best suits the goals of the group. No formats will be privileged over others; all proposals will be given equal consideration according to their merit. Proposals include a rationale for the intellectual/scholarly/artistic merits of the session as well as a rationale for its format, and must be accompanied by the “ASTR/TLA/CORD Working Sessions Proposal Form,” attached below. Proposals related to the conference theme are particularly welcome, but not necessary. We strongly encourage working session proposals that would explicitly bring together theatre and dance scholars. Once the program committee makes its selection of working sessions, each session convener will issue a specialized call for participants for that session; this second round of calls for participants in working sessions will be posted on the ASTR and CORD and TLA websites, with a late May deadline for submission.

For more information about ASTR working sessions see: http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSe…

For more information about CORD working sessions see:
 http://www.cordance.org/2010-conference

All submissions must be received by 1 February 2010 and should be sent as e-mail attachments, in MS Word, to:  astr.2010 at gmail.com.

Inquiries are welcome; please contact Nadine George-Graves or Anthea Kraut at  astr.2010 at gmail.com with program questions or Nancy Erickson ( NEricksn at aol.com) with any questions about conference logistics.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE 2010

Anthea Kraut, University of California, Riverside, Co-chair

Nadine George-Graves, University of California, San Diego, Co-chair

Susan Brady, TLA representative

Stacy Wolf, Princeton University

Juliet McMains, University of Washington

Scott Magelssen, Bowling Green State University

David Saltz, University of Georgia

Patrick Alcedo, York University

Cindy Garcia, University of Minnesota

Deborah Paredez, University of Texas, Austin

Zelma Badu-Younge, Ohio University

Clare Croft, University of Texas, Austin

Helen Thomas, London College of Fashion

James Harding, University of Mary Washington

SanSan Kwan, California State University, Los Angeles

Michelle Granshaw, University of Washington

For more information on the organizations, and their respective honors and awards, see: http://astr.org/, http://tla.library.unt.edu/, and http://www.cordance.org/

ASTR/TLA/CORD 2010 WORKING SESSIONS PROPOSAL FORM

Please use this form for all proposals other than plenary proposals.

Session Title:

Name(s), institutional affiliation (if any), and email address of Session Leader(s):

Expected Number of Participants:

Select the preferred session length[1]: □ 1-hour session □ Standard 2-hour session □ 3-hour session

Is the group an ongoing ASTR group? (formerly known as a Research Group)[2]

Yes No

Rationale (please attach a 300-word description of your session, articulating its focus, scholarly importance, and relevance to the conference theme or mandate of ASTR, CORD, or TLA):

Format (please attach a 200-word description of the format your session will take—e.g. seminar, working group, reading group, roundtable, workshop, etc[3]), articulating the relationship between the proposed format and the goals of the session, and, in the case of ongoing groups, the stage of the group’s work. Please also articulate why you would prefer a 1-hour, 2-hour or 3-hour time slot).

[1] 3-hour sessions cannot be guaranteed.

[2] It is assumed that ongoing groups will continue their work as appropriate; however, they are not guaranteed scheduling as part of the conference, and will compete for slots according to the merits of their proposals.

[3] This list is not intended to limit possible formats, and no formats will be privileged by the conference committee. All proposals will be given equal consideration according to their merit.

I’ve been asked to speak from a Canadian position, so I’ll start, as an epigraph, with a line by that great Canadian Neil Young sung on a recent album in his archetypally Canadian high-pitched whine: “there’s a bailout comin’ but it’s not for me.”

I want to be clear about what I understand “the current climate” in our title to be: it’s a social and economic crisis precipitated by the collapse under its own weight of rampant capitalism and consolidated as a crisis by our collective failure to take the opportunity provided by that collapse to abolish a system that has despoiled most of the population of the world, human and non-human, and by our decision, rather, to prop up its corpse through an enormous investment of funds that have never been available for social programs, child poverty, or AIDS in Africa, and by further attacks on the workforce and its unions.

That said, I would like to address some of the questions about the “current climate” and its applications from where I sit within the Canadian academy, and I will do so more anecdotally than have my some of my colleagues on the panel—in part because I sometimes wonder whether the rush to acquire empirical evidence in the current “knowledge economy” might be part of the problem around the increasing corporatization of the University. This type of statistical empiricism and knowledge management has long been suspect in the arts and humanities, and in relation to questions of cultural difference, in particular, it raises many red flags for me at a time when many are attempting to decolonize methodologies. In any case, I have some stories that I think may be representative:

1. In the immediate wake of the economic downturn, my home university almost immediately dropped our Women’s Studies program, in spite of the fact that the savings realized in doing so were minimal: there were no faculty directly appointed to the program, its offerings being dependent upon faculty from other programs within the university. One secretary’s salary was saved, but the university was able to appear to be acting with “fiscal responsibility” while excising a politically troublesome program. The last time there was a financial crisis, it was our (politicized) Centre for Cultural Studies that was cut—in spite of the fact that the Centre actually brought more money in to the university in the form of grants than it cost the institution in office space or administrative support. No business or professional programs have ever been trimmed. These stories form part of a larger pattern in which crises are used, or manufactured, in order to discipline the institution into an acceptable corporate model of governance and compliance—to make infrastructural change, ideologically motivated, while evading charges of ideological pressure or the infringement of so-called academic freedom.

2. Also at my home institution we are losing the only faculty member of colour in our Theatre Studies program to another university. He is leaving in part because of the weight and unfair responsibility involved in being the only faculty member of colour, and in part because he wants to live and teach in a place where he has a community. This means that we will have even more trouble than we already have in attracting and retaining students who do not see themselves reflected at the front of the classroom, we will continue to draw suburban white students whose parents want them to be somewhere “safe” (ie, white)—and the cycle will continue. There is no money in this “climate” to replace this departing faculty member, so we will lose the position; but even if the funds were there, it is always a huge battle against the hegemonic, reproductive economy of hiring, promotion and tenure to attract, hire, and retain faculty of colour, and to allow them the privilege the rest of us have, once hired, to teach and research in whatever area they wish rather than in their own ghettoized corner of the the curriculum.

3. I was thrilled this year when an extraordinary Afro-Jamaican-Canadian dub poet, dub-theatre practitioner, playwright and performer came to Guelph to work with me as a graduate student on the history and practice of dub theatre. She is an outstanding intellect, a gifted practitioner, and a wonderful addition to any classroom or program lucky enough to have her. In recent weeks, however, she has been considering leaving the program (and the academy more generally), because of the fundamentally reproductive, capitalist economy of admission, tuition, evaluation, graduation, promotion and tenure that obtains within the academy. She is reluctant to endorse such a system through her participation, reluctant to submit herself as a docile subject of its performative disciplinarity, and understandably reluctant to bear the weight of the responsibility of trying to change such a system from within as one of its few rebellious subjects of colour who is unfairly charged, as a student, with teaching the rest of us.

4. I was discussing this student’s situation recently with Honor Ford Smith, founder of Jamaica’s Sistren theatre (and former teacher, in Jamaica, of the student’s mother), whose own doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto I had been privileged to co-supervize. Honor is, as many of you will know, a genius. We talked about the student’s situation, and Honor spoke frankly about the ways in which gaining academic accreditation (which she herself did late in her career) was enabling, but also about the ways in which it inevitably involved unutterable loss, including a kind of loss of self. As she said, “it changes you.”

5. I have been in rehearsal recently with Floyd Favel, an accomplished Plains Cree theatre director from the Poundmaker reserve in Saskatchewan who is also an accomplished playwright and actor, whose voice and video image welcome visitors to the American Indian Museum on the mall in Washington DC. Floyd told me in a break in rehearsals that he had no faith in the formal education system, for anyone, but especially for his people, and that he favoured self-education and study with elders. He did not say, but I assumed that he was referring to the inevitability of the education system as it now stands to function in relation to Native peoples, at least, as an ongoing and powerful technology of colonization and continuing cultural genocide. Why do those of us who teach Native theatre in the academy—myself included—need to have PhDs and other insignia of colonial authority? Why aren’t we hiring elders to do this, folks who have not succumbed to the disciplinary rigours of the system? Elders don’t rely on charts, graphs, stats, and other technologies of the knowledge economy. They tell stories.

Taken together, these anecdotes have huge implications for what we teach, who chooses what we teach, who teaches it, how it is taught, who is in the classroom, and where “authority” rests. Some of these questions may seem familiar or theoretically old-fashioned—not on the cutting edge of scholarly or pedagogical concern. But I would argue that the current economic so-called “climate” has made them increasingly urgent because of the very retrenchments and exclusionary practices that crisis enables. And I would argue that these questions have everything to do with what we and our students are teaching, reading, and practicing. You can’t use the tools, voices, methodologies, authorities, and practices of the master to dismantle the master’s house; you can’t allow the methods, epistemologies, protocols and standards of the master to screen access to and success within an educational system that is fundamentally culturally reproductive, and then expect it to change. And as a white man disciplined in the colonizing knowledge economy I can’t without great difficulty teach an increasing body of work to which the settler-invader is simply irrelevant: it’s not simply about resistance or subversion any more; it’s not about “us.” What the “current climate” does, however, is place in stark relief—as did the near collapse of capitalism—the priorities, protectionisms, and power plays that are more veiled in more “liberal” moments of relative financial ease. That’s the best that can be said for it, and it is perhaps a place to start.

The Association for Asian Performance (AAP) invites submissions for its 10th annual conference in Los Angeles, at the Hyatt Century Plaza Hotel, on August 2, 2010. The AAP conference is a one-day event, preceding the annual ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) conference and held at the ATHE conference hotel.

Proposals are invited for papers, panels, workshops and roundtable discussions. The deadline for proposals is March 15th, 2010.

* Proposals for individual papers should include a brief abstract. Individual presentations should be limited to 20 minutes so that there will be time left for questions and discussion. Visual materials (slides, video etc.) are strongly encouraged.

* Panels should be composed of three paper presenters and one discussant or four paper presenters. Proposals for panels should provide a brief statement that explains the session as a whole and the proposed subject of each paper.

* Roundtables offer an opportunity for participants to discuss a specific theme, issue or significant recent publication. A maximum of six active participants is recommended. While a roundtable proposal will not be as detailed as a panel proposal, it should explain fully the session’s purpose, themes or issues and scope.

* Proposals for workshops by performance practitioner(s) with expertise in specific Asian performance traditions are welcomed, particularly workshops that overlap with a panel theme or paper presentation. Workshop proposals should include an abstract explaining methods and goals. Workshops should be designed to run no longer than 80 minutes.

We encourage suggestions for innovative alternatives to the panels, individual papers and roundtables described above.

Proposals should include the following:

1. Title of panel, roundtable or paper.
2. Names of all the presenters, including chair and/or organizer and discussant (for panels and roundtables.) A few biographical sentences about each presenter.
3. Affiliation, specialization (field/region), mailing address, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of al participants.
4. Explanation of the session (for panels, workshops and roundtables); abstract of each panel presentation or each paper.

Proposals should be emailed to the conference organizer, Claudia Orenstein  corenste at hunter.cuny.edu

If you need help locating other scholars to participate in a panel or roundtable, please submit a preliminary description of your proposal before February 1 so we can post it on the AAP website. Alternatively, you can post your suggestions for a panel there directly by logging on to the site at:

http://www.yavanika.org/aaponline/

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ALL PROPOSALS IS MARCH 15, 2010.

All presenters are expected to join AAP. Membership is $40 per year ($25 for students) and includes a subscription to the Asian Theatre Journal.

Call for Papers: “Re-defining Popular Entertainments”

To launch our new peer reviewed, inter-disciplinary e-journal, we invite scholars and scholar/practitioners to contribute to the ongoing debate and discussion about the nature and scope of popular entertainments. The issue’s title recognises that scholars have made signal contributions to the topic especially in the last 35 years, but as well that there is a need to extend the discussion particularly in the light of new mediatised developments and the new audiences that they have created. We believe that popular entertainments are inextricably connected to “liveness” and the co-presence of performers and spectators. Yet the nature of performance and of presence may well have changed and in turn have affected the production and reception of popular entertainment.

We would therefore invite expressions of interest by scholars from a range of complementary disciplines: theatre and performance studies, health, history, psychology, dance, fine art and music, as well as performing arts curators and archivists, which address one or more of the following:

* To what extent have changing notions of “liveness” affected the nature of popular entertainment?
* How have popular entertainments been affected by their globalisation?
* What is the role of popular entertainment in the formation of national identities?
* Does popular entertainment still have a place in the formation and building of community identity?
* What are the new genres and styles of popular entertainment that have extended its scope and impact?
* Are the current orthodoxies related to the binary construction of high/low art still relevant?
* How have audience configurations and the spaces of performance changed in the last 30 years?
* Have changes in space and spatiality affected the performance of the popular?
* Have such changes affected the nature of performers of the popular?
* How should popular entertainments be recorded and documented?

These are merely suggested topics for investigation and we would welcome other perspectives that relate to the focus of our inaugural issue.

Expressions of interest can be sent directly to the General Editor, Victor Emeljanow
 Victor.Emeljanow at newcastle.edu.au
The deadline for completed articles is December 12 2009

Popular Entertainment Studies is based at and supported by the School of Drama, Fine Art and Music, University of Newcastle, Australia