 |
 |
Dear friends and colleagues
Thanks to all of you who have already sent in a proposal for this symposium next year. This is a final reminder with an additional note on potential publication routes. The call for papers deadline is
24th November.
Please consider making a proposal to the forthcoming
Performing Mountains symposium. The call is fully outlined here:
https://performing-mountains.leeds.ac.uk/symposium/
The intention is to publish a selection of the articles and artist pages which arise from or respond to the symposium. With this in mind, the organising team of this event are currently in discussion with
the journal Performance Research.
Headlines are below.
Performing Mountains
An international symposium
on Mountain Culture
Thursday 22nd March 2018 – Saturday 24th March 2018.
School of Performance and Cultural Industries, stage@leeds, University of Leeds
Keynote Performance:
Lone Twin’s – On Everest, (followed by a curated panel of internationally recognised climbers and artists, including Doug Scott CBE)
Mountains are places of ‘great cultural importance’ (Price 2015, p.10). Whilst they might appear to be impervious to human agency and intervention - you can't move mountains after all - they are,
in fact, constantly being shaped by human hands, sometimes benignly and sometimes with permanent malignance. Culture and the production of cultural objects play an integral part in this process comprising an extraordinarily varied gallery of what might be
termed Mountain Arts. The richness of Mountain film, literature and creative writing is celebrated each year across the networks of Mountain festivals (within the UK and internationally) and is contested in hugely popular awards ceremonies such as the Boardman-Tasker.
Fine Art dedicated to mountains has a very long history and its more recent extension into Environmental or Land Art in the last forty years, has enjoyed similar growth. Photography competitions promoted by the many popular and specialist hiking and climbing
magazines, bring the amateur photographer into the realm of mountain artistry joining evermore ambitious photo-shoots staged in mountains by professionals. The inspiration mountains provide for artists of these media is as unmistakable as the mark they make
in the landscape. But where do the live arts fit into this picture, what do they uniquely offer, and what might they contribute in the future?
Drawing an appropriately inclusive audience together to debate and trouble the boundaries of mountain culture, this symposium is dedicated to understanding some of the complexities of this new
field of research, extending its interest with a focus on the live and performed.
As part of the AHRC funded fellowship,
Performing Landscapes: Mountains, we are delighted to invite proposals for papers, artefacts, panels, workshops, readings and performative presentations for this inaugural
Performing Mountains Symposium. Building on the success of our evening
Mountainsides events, our aim is to bring together a network of mountaineers, rock climbers, mountain guides, artists, performers, festival organisers, performance-makers, scenographers, workshop leaders/trainers, historians and cultural theorists
to share in two days of discussion, observation, questioning and exploration. We want to assess the place of performance within mountain culture and to consider how mountain culture in all its diversity helps performance studies and practice rethink itself.
The Symposium is conceived around four broad themes with every possibility for productive crossover:
Each of these themes provokes a set of questions and colleagues are asked to address these directly or indirectly in their proposals, and/or to suggest further questions.
Proposals of 200 words, including a short biography, technical requirements and mode of presentation (paper, panel, presentation, exhibition, workshop, reading) are to be sent to
[log in to unmask] no later than
24th November 2017.
This symposium will help drive the development of a new Mountain Culture Research Network, as part of the ongoing work of the
Performing Landscapes: Mountains Fellowship.
For more information contact the symposium organising team:
Jonathan Pitches
David Shearing
Linda Watson
In collaboration with
Kendal Mountain Festival and supported by the
AHRC
Best wishes
Jonathan
Professor Jonathan Pitches
Chair in Theatre and Performance
Director of Impact and Innovation for PCI
AHRC Leadership Fellow
School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK
Telephone: +44 (0) 113 343 8718
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.pci.leeds.ac.uk/people/professor-jonathan-pitches/
http://www.performing-mountains.leeds.ac.uk
To join, leave or suspend list postings, visit http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/wan