Dear Colleagues, 

I am delighted to share the TaPRA 2024 Documenting Performance Working Group Call for Papers

TaPRA 2024 Documenting Performance working group
Deadline: Wednesday 10 April 2024

Performance Scenes of the Ordinary

The ‘Documenting Performance Working Group’ theme ‘Performance Scenes of the Ordinary’ for the annual TaPRA 2024 conference takes its cue from Christina Sharpe’s latest book Ordinary Notes (2023) where the note form itself sutures memory, observation, racism and violence from everyday scenes. Tenderness and intimacy also appear as a means to weave hope into writing at this bleak moment in history. Our interest in the ordinary also stems from an enthusiasm for performance scenes and performance fictions that have the potential to, as Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows state, ‘call forth a people’ (2019). With this in mind, the call has been staged as though a conversation between the co-ordinators, one we hope you will feel invited to join.

RC: I’m thinking a lot lately about forms and ways of life, or ordinary practices, that can query what we have come to regard as our consensual reality. I’m interested in collective efforts, or performance scenes, to push against the systems and structures that we have come to know and live within.

EB: In the writing of Lauren Berlant, a recourse to the ‘scene’ stages a minor intervention, a scalar shift from the general to the particular. It’s about exemplification, staging an instance that can be folded, perhaps, into a generalization. I’m interested in this as a methodological question, and a political one too.

VM: I think of the word ‘scene’ attached to visibility in and beyond Black performance. In his book Embodying Black Experience (2010), Harvey Young says something about the status of Black people as ‘seen/scene’ that seems to me to usefully complicate how we think about spectacle.

At the crux of soliciting a (soon to be announced) name change for the working group, the co-convenors Rebecca Collins, Vanessa Macaulay and Emma Bennett are keen to issue forth such a call with the aim to bring together a variety of scholars. We invite proposals from artists, writers, curators, activists and other practitioners whose work engages with and expands upon study, collection, exhibition, teaching, practicing and the writing of art and culture. We are interested in proposals that might experiment with alternative modes of writing and sharing knowledge to explore the limits and possibilities of the conference paper format. We wish to explore ‘Performance Scenes of the Ordinary’ as strategy, method, a stretched moment in time – in writing and practice. Papers that are engaging with a range of disciplinary literature that cross various fields of study are especially encouraged. Given our chosen thematic, we welcome submissions that may include the following:

The underwhelming/overwhelming within performance scenes of the ordinary.
Seen/scene as connected to visibility in and beyond Black performance.
The role of ‘performance scenes’ in case-making, exemplification, fictionalization, prefigurative politics, and/or disciplinary regimes in the work of, for example, Christina Sharpe, Lauren Berlant, Saidiya Hartman, and Sara Ahmed.
Performance scenes/seens and performance fictions.
The limits of consensual reality and its potential collective alternatives.
The stretching of a scene to slow it down without restaging harm.
Events / Eventfulness / The Spectacular and The Ordinary.
The Infra-Ordinary (after Georges Perec).
Notes, notation, and other modes of archiving the ordinary, particular, personal, local or embodied.

Proposals must be submitted via https://forms.gle/7zdmdbt9StaxjbEh9 by April 10, 2024. If you require another format please get in touch with the working group convenors [log in to unmask]

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