Performance Research Journal

SUBMISSION DEADLINE APPROACHING
29.8 On Exits and Endings 
Edited by Richard Gough and Helena Grehan

Deadline: 2 April 2024

Read the CfP and submission guidelines on the PR website: bit.ly/prcallsforsubmissions

The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method? Confucius (500 BCE)
Exit, pursued by a bear. 
Shakespeare (1609)

I’m glad to see you back, I thought you were gone forever. 
Beckett (1965) 

In this issue of Performance Research, we investigate exits and endings. Our focus on exits considers death, performance, mourning and ritual. But we also embrace the matter of endings. While death is, we might argue, the ultimate ending, there are other endings that are less definitive. These endings can be powerful and comforting but can also be painful or even excruciating. In performance examples may include attending live work without an end but that instead drifts into slow decay, where the audience members or participants must force an ending. Or when we, as spectators, end our experience of a performance by walking out of the theatre, by falling asleep or intervening physically or vocally to bring things to a close. How do directors and actors cope with these kinds of forced endings, the rupture of the walk out (and the disturbance it causes)? How do they resume their craft in response? How do they adjust, adapt and survive? What of the never-ending ‘farewell tour’ or the final performance by an actor, the decision to end one’s career? How do we think about the tribute band, or immersive, machine-generated copy or group that keeps the work alive in some fashion or other? Are these examples a failure to end and exit with grace, or are they important continuations or reincarnations of a sort?

Exits and Endings often work together. One dies and therefore exits the world of the living, but the rituals associated with this event demand a performance of the end. A ceremony is held. People gather, they lament and there is, perhaps, healing. This leads to questions about what exits and endings might entail. What cultural protocols are put in place and how do these protocols shape and inform behaviours? What if the protocols are blocked or inhibited for some reason? If the exit is incomplete? What happens to the body, the soul, the community in this case?

In a broader sense what does or might it mean to leave, for someone to stop, to be no more? What rituals, performances or other creative acts help communities to frame and understand exits and endings when emotional attachment and responsibility are involved? In 2023 major exits from the world of performance have included the deaths of Jane Birkin, Sinéad O’Connor, Barry Humphries, Shane MacGowan, Tina Turner, Glenda Jackson, Mbongeni Ngema, Tom Wilkinson, Lee Sun-kyun and Benjamin Zephaniah, among many others. What public and private rituals occurred around these exits that may have helped those left behind? What are the differences between those who die in public, that is, those who are mourned publicly through state funerals, and those who die beyond the spotlight? Those who die alone, or quietly? 

The apparatus for exits and endings in the theatre machine are many and advanced through jargon. From the physical structures of wings, flying bars, exits and traps (grave traps, cauldron, diaphragm, star and vampire traps) to the metaphysical states of ‘corpsing’, freezing, dying (as in failing), or killing (as in succeeding) on stage or playing the Death Role. Together with the technical devices of falling action, slow fade, the finale, exeunt omnes and going dark. Then the inevitable production post-mortem and post-show discussion. And through it all, no matter what takes place on stage, the green (or red) EXIT signs, always lit, always inviting, to guide the audience through safe passage and escape (figure of ‘human moving purposely’). No refuge for the actor who must die (in the play) night after night, perhaps for months, and even for matinees, if the production is successful. What are the techniques for pretending to die on stage (acting dead): breath and muscular control, stillness, mindfulness, a contemplation on life? And how is such frequent and successive death repeated and sustained? And then there are the performers who confound their admiring audiences by actually dying on stage. The list is long, from the French playwright and actor-manager Molière to the British magician/comedian Tommy Cooper, from Japanese Butoh dancer Yoshiyuki Takada to Malaysian snake charmer Ali Khan Samsudin. The modes of ending are many: coughing fits, strokes, heart attacks, being crushed by falling props or failed mechanics, even venom. Less common, the assassination of an audience member, and the irreverent quip ‘other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play’, an enduring badinage for thespians. The play that President Lincoln and the First Lady were watching on 14 April 1865 was the farce Our American Cousin by English playwright Tom Taylor, and the assassin was the actor John Wilkes Booth, who was well-acquainted with the play and the Ford’s Theatre, Washington – both its stage and exits. 

Abraham Lincoln’s funeral is still regarded as one of the most elaborate in ‘recent history’. Following a funeral procession from the White House to the Capitol rotunda his body lay in state for several days and then embarked on a train journey through seven states, visiting 170 cities. It is estimated that 1.5 million mourners visited his body and seven million stood to witness the train passing. Standing still, witnessing in silence, walking slowly past, signing a book of remembrance, creating carpets of flowers and candlelit tableaux are all ways to perform civic loss and grief – to mark exit and endings. And state funerals of royalty, presidents and prime ministers allow for opulent and exuberant celebration. In the UK: Queen Victoria in 1901, Winston Churchill in 1965, Princess Diana in 1997 and Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 generated an extraordinary outpouring of civilian grief and participatory mourning. These funerals, like those elaborated in other cultures (Balinese cremations, Zoroastrian/Parsi ‘Towers of Silence’, Tibetan Buddhist ‘sky burials’, Varanasi/Hindu parades) are magnificent performances with multiple levels of participation and coproduction. But the simple wake, the private gathering, the intimate tribute, the care of the ‘end-of-life doula’, or death midwife, and the actions of skilful (and occasionally mischievous) funeral celebrants are all performances that we wish to embrace in this issue.

This is not just the case with humans of course; there are also the exits and endings of animals and plants. Mass extinction due to human-induced climate change, the death of a precious pet, the loss of a favourite species. How do we respond to these exits and endings? Do we accept or resist these losses? What performative actions do we undertake to respond? To capture the loss, to demand change or to mourn? What of the larger potential loss of the planet in terms of habitability? How might we think about, or perform exits and endings in the context of a loss of this scale?
To return to our home context though, how are exits and endings performed within theatre and performance? How ‘best’ might the dead appear on stage and how do/should/might audiences react? First, of course, they must understand that this is an ‘act’ to be able to respond to it. These are broad questions that are shaped by different world theatre cultures. Death and dying, exits and endings take particular forms in Noh, Kabuki, Kathakali, kütiyättam, Topeng and Butoh and many other cultural and religious contexts. Likewise different ages in European theatre have developed different performance traditions: messengers reporting death (unseen) in Classical Greek theatre, in contrast to the gory pageants, mimes and animal sacrifice of Roman theatre, the bloody excess of Jacobean revenge tragedy to the spectacular Grand Guignol and more recently the intense extremity of Sarah Kane’s plays. Exits and endings have taken different forms. Must we consider the art of dying ‘ars moreindi’ and how might we understand this in the context of twenty-first-century performance? 
Indeed, what happens when a performance dies mid-performance, on stage? When its ephemerality and precariousness become all too real – when its life falters, when the heartbeat of the show, stalls and crashes. Where do we, as those who remain, go from there? What is the impact or legacy of such an act? What of the act of exiting the stage itself? What are the rituals and conventions that inform how this occurs? The EXIT light and the running figure remain ablaze … when is it the right time to make an exit? When is an exit untimely?

Finally, should we exit gracefully or go should we ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’? (Thomas 1952).


We welcome single-authored essays, co-authored contributions, artistic interventions, short provocations, critical reports and other materials engaging with the topic.

Submissions may include but are not limited to:

• The politics of death on stage
• State funerals and the performance of mourning
• How do we perform or represent a useful or a good death?
• How to exit gracefully
• Acts of resistance in the face of exits and endings
• What is the relevance of ‘ars moreindi’ (the art of dying well) in the contemporary context?
• Professional mourning and its impact on grieving
• Paying respects – queuing, singing, remembering the dead
• Dying for one’s art; the art of stage death and death on stage
• Accounting for the end of a species
• Bringing on the end; responding to work that refuses
• Exiting the theatre; when to go and when to stay.
• Rendering the end of the planet through performance


References

Beckett, Samuel (1965) Waiting for Godot, London: Faber and Faber.

Shakespeare, William (1609) Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, London: Folger, First Folios.

Thomas, Dylan (1952) In Country Sleep and Other Poems, New York: New Directions.


Format:
Please send abstracts as per the guidelines below, including a 100-word author bio, for academic articles of approximately 5,000 words, or for shorter articles and provocations, including artist pages and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies. 
 
Issue Contacts:
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: [log in to unmask]
 
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editor: 
Email: Richard Gough [log in to unmask], Helena Grehan [log in to unmask]

Schedule:
Proposals: Outcomes April 2024
First drafts: July 2024
Final drafts: October 2024

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 should be created in Word – this can be standard Microsoft Word .doc or .docx via alternative word processing packages. Proposals should not be sent as PDFs unless they contain complex designs re artist pages.
The text for proposals should not exceed one page, circa 500 words. 
• A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text.
• Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that there is a maximum of five images. If practical, images should be included on additional pages within the Word document.
• Proposals should be sent by email to [log in to unmask]
• Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send. 
• Please include the issue title and number in the subject line of your email. 
• 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 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. 
• Due to the large number of submissions we receive, we are unable to provide feedback on declined proposals.

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