REMINDER: Call for Proposals
Vol. 26, No. 6: ‘On Air’ (September 2021)

Issue Editors:
Evelyn O’Malley (University of Exeter) 
Chloe Kathleen Preedy (University of Exeter)

Reminder: Proposal deadline 2 November 2020

Air is a fundamental aspect of our existence. Its vital role in sustaining life is matched by its phenomenological significance, defining our relationship to the world around us. As ‘the very medium that makes interaction possible’ (Ingold 2012: 77), air shapes human modes of expression, including performance. Yet the necessity, the inescapability, of air can be a source of vulnerability, as long-standing concerns about air quality and the consequences of atmospheric pollution reflect. Such questions have recently taken on new significance: for all its devastating impact on lives and economies around the world, one much-discussed by-product of the COVID-19 pandemic is the improvement in urban air quality, while at the same time the spectre of airborne transmission has deepened and complicated public awareness of the air we breathe. Nonetheless, it remains easy to forget about this invisible, often intangible, element, even as its presence pervades every aspect of our lives.

Recently, artists and scholars have begun to engage more extensively with the matter of air. Performance can make the atmosphere and its operations visible, as in Teac Damsa’s touring production of Swan Lake/ Loch na hEala (2016–present), in which thousands of white feathers dance on the air currents; Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford’s wind-powered kinetic sculpture Halo (2013); or Olafur Eliasson’s 2003–4 Weather Project installation at Tate Modern. Fujiko Nakaya, who has been making air visible with her performing fog sculptures since the 1970s, presented London Fog #03779—featuring dance performances by Min Tanaka—outside the same gallery in 2017. Inside theatre buildings, air has shaped the material conditions in which audiences encounter performance. In 1952, for example, smog infiltrated Sadler’s Wells Theatre, halting a performance of La Traviata after the first act, while in 2018 Texas’s open-air Shakespeare Festival pumped air conditioning through the floorboards of the Miller Outdoor Theatre to help cool actors during scorching performances of The Comedy of Errors and Hamlet. In recent years, air quality has become a thematic subject of the stage and screen: Caryl Churchill’s radio play Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen (1971) offered a dystopian evocation of London’s smog-filled future; Ben Elton’s play Gasping (1990) addressed the corporatization of clean air; the BBC’s SoICanBreathe season (2017), designed to raise awareness of global air pollution, featured numerous short films on the topic; and the Camden People’s Theatre’s 2018 Shoot the Breeze encouraged Camden Council to adopt a new air pollution policy. Performance can also draw attention to air quality in more direct ways, with artists highlighting the risk of urban air pollution on a global scale: from the California-based project Particle Falls (2010), which used laser light scattering to track particulate matter, to Michael Pinsky’s Pollution Pods, which emulated the air of five different global cities while on display in Trondheim and London (2017–18). In another 2017 response, performance artist Brother Nut wandered Beijing for 100 days vacuuming up polluted air and turning it into bricks; the start-up company Graviky Labs uses a similar technology to transform the particulate matter in polluted air into ink that is used by artists from Bangalore to Boston. Open-air performance offers a rich resource for exploring such questions of air quality and the impact of pollution, providing fresh perspectives on our historical and contemporary interactions with the air. 

This issue, ‘On Air’, seeks to expand the scope of existing academic enquiry (Sharpe 2016; Staging Atmospheres 2017; Hamilton and Neimanis 2018; McCormack 2018; Welton 2018; Welton and Déchery 2020) by considering how performance might encourage more careful apprehension of this life-sustaining element. Our aim is to appreciate the diverse ways in which air is utilized, experienced and/or evoked within contemporary performance practices, asking questions about the unique relationship between air and performance and about how performance studies can contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the aerial environment: from the local air we breathe, to the atmosphere of our planet. We invite artists, cultural theorists, environmental historians, open-air theatre makers and scholars to contribute pieces that consider how air is conceived in a diverse range of performance contexts, and welcome proposals for articles, artist’s pages, creative pieces with associated multi-media, interviews or new writing. We aspire to envelop the place of performance in an environmental understanding of air, and to consider how attending to the matter of air might help performance studies and practice rethink itself.
 
Areas of potential interest and intersections with performance may include, but are not restricted to:

•	aerial modes of performance 
•	aerial resources and renewable energy 
•	air pollution and climate change 
•	air shows, drones, and military technologies 
•	air- and site-specific or immersive performance 
•	air, health and bodies, including airborne contagion
•	airy dramaturgies 
•	amphitheatre drama 
•	applied and socially engaged performance 
•	atmospheric ‘things’ and ‘envelopes’ (McCormack 2018), for example, balloons and bubbles 
•	breath and the air 
•	environmental histories of the air 
•	environmental racism and contaminated air 
•	geoengineering 
•	geographies and aerographies 
•	historical air in contemporary theatre 
•	new materialist readings of air in performance 
•	open-air performances 
•	post-human and ‘transcorporeal’ approaches to the air (Alaimo 2010)
•	‘slow violence’ and air pollution (Nixon 2011)
•	urban and non-urban air

SCHEDULE:
Proposals: 2 November 2020
First Drafts: February 2021
Final Drafts: May 2021
Publication: September 2021
 
FORMAT:
Alongside long-form articles, we encourage short articles, provocations and other forms of creative response. As with other editions of Performance Research, we welcome artist’s pages and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies, combining words and images, as well as more conventional essays.
 
ISSUE CONTACTS:
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to Performance Research at: [log in to unmask]
 
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:
Evelyn O’Malley: [log in to unmask] 
Chloe Kathleen Preedy: [log in to unmask] 


General Guidelines for Submissions: 
• Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website (www.performance-research.org ) and familiarize yourself with the journal. 
• Proposals will be accepted by email (Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF)).
 Proposals should not exceed one A4 side. 
• Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send. 
• Please include the issue title and issue number in the subject line of your email. 
• Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that all attachments do not exceed 5 MB, and there is a maximum of five images. 
• Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. 
• If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On the final acceptance of a completed article you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research. 

References

Alaimo, Stacy (2010) Bodily Natures: Science, environment, and the material self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Déchery, Chloe and Martin Welton (2020, forthcoming) ‘Staging Atmospheres: Theatre and the atmospheric turn’, Ambiances. 

Ingold, Tim (2012) ‘The Atmosphere’, Chiasmi International, 14, pp. 75-87. 
 
McCormack, Derek (2018) Atmospheric Things: On the allure of elemental envelopment, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Neimanis, Astrida and Jennifer Mae Hamilton (2018) ‘Open Space Weathering’, Feminist Review 118 (1), pp. 80–4.

Nixon, Rob (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sharpe, Christina (2016) In the Wake: On blackness and being, Durham and London. Duke University Press. 

Welton, Martin (2018) ‘Making Sense of Air: Choreography and climate in Calling Tree’, Performance Research 23 (3), pp. 80–90.

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