Performance Research Journal

REMINDER - DEADLINE 19 OCTOBER
Call for Proposals
Vol. 28, No. 5: ‘On Sadness’
(July/Aug 2023)


Edited by After Performance (Felipe Cervera, Alvin Eng Hui Lim, Ella Parry-Davies, Matthew Yoxall)

After Performance is a research group who, since 2015, has held a commitment to being published as a collective. We gather to conjoin authorial voices and relational thinking, and this text stems from that practice. This call for papers was conceived at our last in-person working meeting in Singapore, in 2018, when as a group we were experiencing different aspects of sadness. Our impetus in opening our conversation to the field and through this call is to explore how performance praxis articulates collective experiences of sadness. Our sadnesses, and our proposal to think with them, are temporal, embodied and historically specific. Sadness has a historicity; it circulates and sticks (Ahmed 2004); collective sadness is worldly (Said 1991). How might we, then, think sadness in the collective? 

The purpose of this issue of Performance Research is to inspire responses to experiences, practices and theorizations of sadness. We are also interested in explorations of sadness as refusal, illegibility or fugitivity. Contributions might offer historical scrutiny of, or challenge how, dominant performance histories have codified sadness as a hegemonic expression or feeling. Do these eclipse counter-narratives or unrecorded experiences of non-feeling, numbness, loss, grief, despair or hopelessness that inflect or are adjacent to it? We seek to scrutinize how sadness has been made legible through ways of sensing and reading performance that are racialized, imperialist, gendered or ableist. Who appears as sad? Who does not? Where is sadness intelligible? Where is it opaque (Glissant 1997)? 

We invite contributions to explore how sadness appears in theatre, dance and performance practice and theory. How might we revise the history of sadness in these forms, if we are not looking for sadness as an expression but as an ontology; not as a social withdrawal, but as an affirmation of being, collectively, in the world? What is, therefore, the relationality that sadness affords and creates? In what ways is sadness a practice, a repertoire, an action, a temporality, an infrastructure? How might this be understood through and as performance? 

Canonical theory in performance studies has often been articulated in relation to, for example, an ontology of ‘disappearance’ and an expression of loss or ‘mourning’ (Phelan 1993, 1997; Butler 2004), and in turn a critical response to disappearance that emphasized performance as repertoire and remains (Taylor 2003; Schneider 2011). For Taylor, ‘[d]ebates about the ephemerality of performance are, of course, profoundly political. Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if performance practices lack the staying power to transmit vital knowledge?’ (2003: 5). In response to debates on presence and permanence, what kind of performance theory can emerge in and out of the relentless present tense of sadness, or the pervasive, flattening disappearance of joy? How does performance account for the horizontality of witnessing one another’s destruction? 

In using the quotidian term ‘sadness’ we are consciously opening out from the psychoanalytic and contemporary therapeutic languages of melancholia, trauma and depression, and the dramaturgical ones of tragedy and catharsis – not to refute these diagnostics in themselves, but to refute how they might overdetermine sadness through pathologization or treatment. What would a reading of sadness look like, against colonial legacies that resulted in intergenerational pain and grief, and neocolonial paradigms that demand displays of trauma and prescribe particular ways of treating it? We note that specific forms of performance (such as talking) are required to express or ‘heal’ sadness in the psychoanalytic canon. In what ways do vernacular forms and agencies of responding to sadness – clowning, wailing, procession, breath or sitting, for example – counterpose or challenge locally and/or globally dominant paradigms of sadness? What are the approaches and methodologies that recuperate Indigenous knowledge on sadness from colonial medical categories and pathologies? 

Contributions could also offer insight into how sadness might be approached in performance training and practice. How do you train to be or appear sad? How do we define or question the relation of sadness to authenticity? Taking as a reference Abbas Kiarostami’s Ta’ziyeh (200¬¬3), in which performers were made to cry on cue to express a repertoire of Shia sadness and mourning, we ask when and how sadness might appear as an authentic sense of collective bonding? Conversely, when and why might sadness be an artifice?

This issue invites articles, manifestos, position papers, interviews and artist pages that think through the idea and practice of sadness. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

History of feelings/emotions/affects
Violence, trauma and aftermath
Mourning, bereavement, grief, and death practices
Depression, economy, and somatic symptoms 
Somatic practices and performance technique 
Religion and spirituality 
Psychoanalysis and melancholy
Drama therapy 
Medical anthropology 
Ecomourning
Mental health and well-being in virtual space
Corporate and human resource management
Monuments and sites of mourning
Infrastructures of sadness
Indigeneity and sadness
Performance ontology 
Nothingness/Emptiness 
Durational and site-specific performance 
Genres of tragedy
Stage(d) crying/sadness
Ethics and social behaviour
Content notifications and safe management of the rehearsal room
Confessional and autobiographical performance 

References
Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The powers of mourning and violence, London and New York, NY: Verso.
Glissant, Édouard (1997) Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press.
Kiarostami, Abbas (2003) Ta’ziyeh, performed on 18 July, Teatro Greco, Parma, Italy. 
Phelan, Peggy 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York, NY: Routledge.
Phelan, Peggy (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing public memories, London and New York, NY: Routledge.
Said, Edward W. (1991) The World, the Text and the Critic, London: Vintage.
Schneider, Rebecca (2011) Performing Remains: Art and war in times of theatrical reenactment, Florence: Taylor & Francis.
Taylor, Diana (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
 
Format:
Please send 300- to 400-word abstracts (with a 100-word author bio) for critical essays, artist pages, interviews or practice-research essays that attend to (but are not limited to) any aspect of the above.
Alongside long-form articles, we encourage short articles and provocations. As with other editions of Performance Research, we welcome artist(s)’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 via:
[log in to unmask]   

Schedule:
Proposals: October 2022
First drafts: February 2023
Final drafts: May 2023
Publication: August 2023

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 the 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.

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the DANCEHE list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=DANCEHE&A=1

This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/DANCEHE, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/