Call for Submissions - PARtake: Journal of Performance as Research

[Marcos Steuernagel]

Dear Colleagues,

PARtake is accepting submissions and proposals for our upcoming issue. Please see the call below.

PARtake: Volume 1, Issue 2, Summer 2016

Participation in/and Research: Ethics, Methodologies, Expectations

PARtake is an e-journal dedicated to exploring the theory and application of performance in practice, and the research outputs created through these processes. Performance as Research is, for us, an investigation into the material, epistemological, and ontological fundamentals of all forms of performance, intended or otherwise. We seek work created and critiqued from the “scholartist” perspective.

Call for Submissions (Abstract/Proposal Submission Due December 15, 2016)

General Call:
How do you articulate and define Performance as Research? How can this methodology open up possibilities for novel ways of understanding the synergy between artistic practice and theoretical inquiry?

When we write about performance, what happens to that performance? How does our writing about performance re-perform, redefine, and recreate the work? In this process, what does the source material now become? In what ways can the language we use to document or describe what happens in a specific space and temporality radically open up the work and its associative discourse/s, rather than act as a restraining force through analysis? There are many languages to explore and utilize in this investigation. We invite experiments in writing about/for/in performance. We invite the act of writing as research in itself, as a way to infiltrate, aerate, and celebrate the discoveries embedded in the process of making—and presenting—artistic work.

Call for Themed Section:

Participatory practices have begun to be a popular form in the 21st century, arguably supplanting more “passive” modes of performance. Terms such as immersive, embodied, augmented, engaged, one-on-one and interactive are increasingly being attached to performance as ways of defining and marketing these practices. What are the implications of participating in and with performance as research? When a member of a performance project, what are the ways in which one might develop an objective/subjective dialectic? If you are inviting outside participants into your research as a way of assessing the aesthetic and social impacts of the work, what are the possible attendant ethical responsibilities? How do we articulate the methodologies of embodied and participatory research in order for others to expand their own questioning? When designing participatory performance, what are the social implications of the process? What expectations do we take into research projects that require the participation of others?

For this special themed section we seek material that addresses these questions (amongst others):

¥ How is the embodied nature of participation related to aesthetics?

¥ What is the material relationship between the body and narrative in participatory performance?

¥ What is the relationship between aesthetics and affect in participatory experience?

¥ How does agency inform the meaning-making processes of participation?

¥ How does digital and online participation manifest its affect and impact in interactive work?

¥ How does participation inhabit the in-between spaces—between performers and participants, artefacts and people, reality and action?

¥ How does disability (of any sort) get approached when considering participation? How do we address access to these sorts of works?

¥ How does language, and the untranslatability of languages (including body language) impact participation? How does translation operate in these in-between spaces?