Call for Papers: Theatricality, Performance, and the State – 7-8 June 2018

Call for Papers: Theatricality, Performance, and the State – Queen Mary 7-8 June

“’The State must wither away.” Who says that? The State…’ He assumes a cunning, furtive expression, stands in front of the chair in which I am sitting – he is impersonating ‘the State’ – and says with a sly, sidelong glance at an imaginary interlocutor: ‘ I know I ought to wither away.’

Benjamin with Brecht, 22 June, 1938

“In order to work,” Samir Amin remarks, “capitalism requires the intervention of a collective authority representing capital as a whole. Therefore, the state cannot be separated from capitalism.” While seemingly self-evident, this insight sits at odds with a tendency in theatre and performance studies and in political theory towards what Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, following Foucault, have diagnosed as ‘state-phobia’ (2016). In this framework, the state figures as an outmoded analytical category, to be replaced by neoliberal market forces and other de-centred analytics of power. Thus, theatre and performance – as well as the ‘creative economies’ more broadly – come to be evoked as either unwittingly complicit in the retraction of the state from governance and welfare (Bishop, 2012), or conversely held up as either instantiations of civil society (Jackson, 2011) or as an oppositional public sphere that has the potential to escape the state’s long arm (Balme, 2014).

 

While these interventions all offer useful insights into performance’s relationship to neoliberal governance models, the recurring oversight of the role of the state in its imbrication with both performance and discourses of theatricality runs the risk of eliding this relationship altogether. Yet, since Plato at least, the dangers and uses of theatre to real or idealised states has been a recurring feature in philosophical, governmental and political discourses. Moving beyond the focus on ‘anti-theatrical’ prejudice (Barish, 1981) which often informs the analysis of these discourses, what else might be uncovered through reflecting on the usefulness of theatre and performance for articulations of theories of statehood? Additionally, as posited by Amin, if the state cannot be separated from capitalism, what might be the value of discussing performance and theatre through (re)considering the state as central to the relationship between theatre and capitalism? Conversely, how might theories of performance and theatricality allow for a renewed understanding of the state’s position in globalized capitalism? Following on from this, how might reading the globalised economy alongside the ‘planetary extension of the state’ (Lefebvre, 1975) expand understandings of theatre’s political function across regional sites? How do states participate in the performance of the “world-configuring function,” (Balibar) of borders, especially considering the living legacies of colonialism and decolonization and the contemporary prevalence of geopolitical isolationism and border regimes? Can the state continue to be thought of a site of progressive struggle?

This conference aims to address an epistemological lacuna by bringing the modern state back to centre stage in thinking about and through theatre, theatricality and performance. We invite scholars to reflect on how the state limits, organizes, supports, and develops theatre and performance, but also on how theatricality and performance, as conceptual models, offer productive ways to think and understand the modern state and its apparatuses. We encourage a wide array of theoretical and empirical approaches to this subject and invite varied disciplinary modes including history and historiography, labour studies, geography, political economy, philosophy, literary and cultural theory and theatre and performance studies.

Suggested topics can include:

  • The state as censor / the state as defender of freedom of speech
  • The state’s active role in the development and regulation of theatre institutions and organizations
  • The state’s performance of itself (as military, as territory, as police, as justice, as ruler)
  • Theatre and sovereignty
  • Gendered, racialized, and other forms of state violence
  • Statelessness and its performances
  • The dialectic of nation and state
  • The performative desire for a state in histories of decolonization
  • States’ instrumentalisation of reproductive labour
  • Riots, strikes and other modes of collective organizing against the state’s legitimacy
  • The borders of the modern state
  • Absolutism’s legacies/ Absolutism’s others

 

Confirmed keynote speaker Dr. Tony Fisher, title TBC

Tony Fisher is Reader in Theatre and Philosophy, at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and its associate director of research. His monograph, Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. He is also co-editor (with Eve Katsouraki) of Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) which examines the theory of agonism in relation to political performance. He is currently co-editing two further volumes, Theatre, Performance, Foucault! with Kélina Gotman (Kings) for Manchester University Press; and – also with Eve Katsouraki – Beyond Failure: New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance for Routledge. Tony has published essays on theatre, politics, and philosophy in a number of journals, including Performance Philosophy Journal, Cultural Critique, Performance Research, and Continental Philosophy Review.

The convenors welcome proposals for traditional papers of 20 minutes in length, practice research demonstrations, panels and performances . Please email all abstracts (no more than 300 words in length), an additional few sentences of biographical information and details of the audio-visual technology you will need to make your presentation to Faisal Hamadah (f.hamadah@qmul.ac.uk) or Caoimhe Mader-Mcguinness (c.madermcguinness@kingston.ac.uk). The deadline for the submission of proposals is Monday 30th April 2018.

 

https://theatricalityperformanceandthestate.wordpress.com/

#SEDdigest – Events and Opportunities Digest – Wednesday 21 March 2018

Here’s our latest March edition of the best events and opportunities we get sent in and outside the School.

Please do get in touch if you have any listings for our next edition.

Events

The week ahead

MA Live Art Launch | G.O. Jones Lecture Theatre | Monday 26 March | 7pm | Free

An exciting and unprecedented new MA Live Art will begin in September 2018*, convened by the Drama Department at Queen Mary University, London in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency (LADA).

 

Shakespeare is Dead? – The Great Shakespeare Debate | Tuesday 27 March | 5.15pm | Free

This house proposes that the inclusion of Shakespeare in the higher education curriculum and theatre and arts programming obstructs decolonization.

Join students, performers, policy makers, scholars, teachers, artists and artistic directors to debate what place Shakespeare has in education and the arts today.

 

Inaugural Lecture: Andrew van der Vlies | Skeel Lecture Theatre | Thursday 29 March | 6.30pm | Free

How has writing from and about South Africa travelled beyond the borders of the country? How has it made readers feel, and why might this continue to matter? Using key examples from the past 130 years, the lecture will survey the trajectory of South African writing as a category, ask how and why some texts have become well known internationally while others have not, and consider the importance of the personae that South African writers have (or been thought by readers to have) adopted, as well as the significance of the material forms that texts have taken—the guises, or indeed ‘personae’, under which they have travelled. Texts from and about South Africa—not to mention readers encountering them—have had to find ways to grapple with questions about the appropriateness or otherwise of representations of the country’s diverse people and complex politics. (Appropriate can, after all, be an adjective and a verb.) This lecture will therefore also grapple with the politics of speaking—and writing—positions, including this lecturer’s own. It will address South Africa’s often problematic place in postcolonial studies, and will argue for the continuing relevance of the study of the country’s literature here and now.

 

For more events follow us on Twitter

 

Jobs, Careers Events & Paid Internships

Career Appointments at QMUL

Current students and recent graduates can book a bespoke careers appointment to help with: finding jobs, making your applications better and even interview practice.

 

 

Opportunities, Calls for Participation & Volunteering

FREE Young Producers Programme – Young & Serious | Deadline: 26 March

Fri 20 Apr 18 – Sat 24 Nov 18

We are looking for the UK’s most motivated and talented aspiring event producers to become part of our FREE professional development programme, Young & Serious for participants aged 18-25.

Young & Serious is an exceptional opportunity for young people to build their professional network alongside career development, gaining experience of working within the arts, music and events sectors. Participants will have the chance to attend industry events, talks and workshops, work with exciting national & international artists and programme and deliver music activity. Participants will also work towards a Bronze Arts Award accreditation throughout the year.

As part of the programme, young people will be invited to take part in a FREE professional development residency in London (20th-22nd April 2018), which will form an integral part of the year long training course.

To find out more and details on how to apply to take part, please click here serious.org.uk The deadline for applications is the 26th March 2018.

 

Wilton’s Music Hall – Edinburgh Festival Award 2018 | Deadline 23 April

Wilton’s is looking for small to mid-scale companies (graduate companies only, current student companies will not be eligible) who are creating a piece of new work and would like to enter the Wilton’s Edinburgh Festival Award 2018 scheme.

We are looking for work that will have not have been produced before the Edinburgh Festival, which is new, exhilarating and fits in with Wilton’s mission to produce world-class original, contemporary theatre.

The winner will receive two weeks free rehearsal space in Wilton’s AALP Studio Monday – Thursday (10.00 – 22.00) w/c 16th and w/c 23rd July.

There may also be the opportunity to try out the show in Wilton’s Cocktail Bar or the Hall.

To enter please fill in the application form, available on our website wiltons.org.uk and return it by Monday 23rd April 2018.

The judging panel will be made up of Wilton’s Executive Director Holly Kendrick and Wilton’s Associates Steph Street, Justin Audibert, Rachel Bagshaw and Richard Beecham.

 

Calls for papers

No listings this week.

Graduate Edd Hobbs independent producer invites you to Farah Saleh’s ‘Brexit means Brexit’

We were delighted to hear from BA & MA Drama graduate Edd Hobbs about Brexit Means Brexit a show he’s producing.

Here’s what Edd had to say:

I have been working as an independent producer since completing my BA and MA with QMUL Department of Drama, and I’m currently producing PS/Y’s Hysteria programme (ps-y.org).

I’m writing to invite you to the premiere of a new dance commission by UK-based Palestinian choreographer Farah Saleh, investigating the collective mental health of UK residents after the EU Referendum. The project has been developed in collaboration with chartered psychologist Victoria Tischler, Professor of Arts & Health and Head of Dementia Care Centre, University of West London.

The performance is taking place on Friday 23 March 2018 – 7:30pm, at Siobhan Davies Studios.

Full information can be found here

Tickets are normally £5 but we offering a further 25% discount for QMUL students. Before completing check out in Eventbrite please click ‘Enter Promotional Code’ and type the code ‘student’.

We would be delighted to see you there!

All best wishes,

Edd Hobbs

RIFT Theatre’s Void – call for participants in audience research project

17 and 18 March 2018

  • ​​How can audiences contribute to the future of theatre?
  • How should new technologies be used to shape the way theatre appears and feels for audiences?

If you’re a theatre-goer who is interested in how audiences might play a part in the future development of the form, then we would like to invite you to participate in a project run jointly by Queen Mary University of London and RIFT theatre company. We are looking for 20 audience members to take part in a study of immersive theatre experience centred on RIFT’s VOID, a performance for a solo spectator commissioned for this year’s Vault festival.

 

What will it involve

We are looking for 20 audience members to participate in piece of immersive theatre for a solo spectator. You will receive a free ticket for the performance, and a £10 theatre voucher. In return we ask that you agree to some limited video and data recording of your experience, and a post-performance interview with a member of Queen Mary’s research team. Following the performance, you will also receive a copy of the recordings as a unique record of your experience.

If you would like to be involved, please email your name and contact details to: stagingatmospheres@gmail.com stating your preference for attending a performance on either 17th or 18th March. As the performance can only accommodate one spectator at a time, there are a variety of slots available between 18.00-20.00 on Saturday 17th March and between 18.00-21.15 on Sunday 18th March. If you have a particular preference, please let us know, and we will do our best to accommodate you.

Please be aware that some of the performance includes accounts of consent issues and sexual trauma.

 

How long will it take

The performance lasts thirty minutes, and each interview will take no longer than twenty minutes.

 

Will my responses be confidential 

The interviews will contribute to a research project funded by the Arts an Humanities Research Council; this process has been scrutinised by QMUL’s ethics committee, and all details will be fully anonymised in any public or academic material. You will be free to withdraw if you wish to.

#SEDdigest – Events and Opportunities Digest – Wednesday 14 March 2018

Here’s our digest #7 of events and opportunities in and outside the School.

Please do get in touch if you have any listings for our next edition.

Events

Book ahead

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) | 15-19 May 2018 | 7.45pm | £5-18

Support the WOW Women in Creative Industries award-winning Professor Lois Weaver at the Barbican in May!

“Combining a Dr Strangelove-inspired performance with a daring forum for public conversation, this show explores ageing, anxiety, hidden desires and how to look forward when the future is uncertain.

The stage features a round table, doomsday images projected on a screen, echoing the War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s film. In our Situation Room, twelve audience members are invited to become a Council of Elders to discuss the global issues of the day, as the company weave in satirical insights and spirit-lifting humour.

Adopting the characters of a bombastic general and ineffectual president, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of Split Britches lace this interactive piece with both playful urgency and lethargy, encouraging discussion about the political landscape.”

The week ahead

World Literature and the Archives of Criticism | 17 March 2018 | QMUL – Mile End | Free

A one day colloquium, which includes panels with interests such as:

  • Adhira Mangalagiri (Queen Mary University of London), ‘Imagining the World in 1950s Chinese Literature’
  • Becky Roach (Kings College London), ‘World Literature: World Computing’
  • Angus Brown (Birmingham), ‘The World History of Close Reading’
  • Graham Riach (Oxford), ‘Freak Time and Spatial Form in Bruno Schultz and Tamura Taijirō’
  • David James (Birmingham), ‘World Fiction and Critical Humility’

And a keynote by guest Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm) on:

‘Southern Itineraries: The Fate of Literature in the Archives of Criticism’

Download the schedule here

 

For more events follow us on Twitter

 

Jobs, Careers Events & Paid Internships

Career Appointments at QMUL

Current students and recent graduates can book a bespoke careers appointment to help with: finding jobs, making your applications better and even interview practice.

 

Programming Assistant (p/t) at The Albany | Deadline: 19 March 2018

A London-based performing arts venue that work around cultural diversity and creativity are looking for a Programming Assistant to join their team. Could it be you? >>

 

2 roles: Participation Producer and Administration Assistant at Pacitti Company | Deadline: 3 April 2018

“We are pleased to announce two new job opportunities with Pacitti Company.

Participation Producer
The Participation Producer is responsible for supporting the development of SPILL Festival’s mass participation public engagement events and the Think Tank public programme. The Participation Producer will work to deliver an exceptional year-round programme of work that engages, educates and invigorates the local community and ensures meaningful development for local audiences.

For more information and to apply please download an application pack along with an equal opportunities form.

Administration Assistant
As the Administration Assistant, you will play a pivotal role in the Company, helping the running of a wide range of administration duties, occasionally acting as the first point of contact for enquiries for SPILL Festival, the Think Tank or Pacitti Company overall.”

 

Opportunities, Calls for Participation & Volunteering

Call for participants in RIFT theatre project | 17-18 March

RIFT Theatre’s Void – call for participants in audience research project

17th and 18th March

 

How can audiences contribute to the future of theatre?

How should new technologies be used to shape the way theatre appears and feels for audiences?

 

If you’re a theatre-goer who is interested in how audiences might play a part in the future development of the form, then we would like to invite you to participate in a project run jointly by Queen Mary University of London and RIFT theatre company. We are looking for 20 audience members to take part in a study of immersive theatre experience centred on RIFT’s VOID, a performance for a solo spectator commissioned for this year’s Vault festival. 

 

What will it involve

We are looking for 20 audience members to participate in piece of immersive theatre for a solo spectator. You will receive a free ticket for the performance, and a £10 theatre voucher. In return we ask that you agree to some limited video and data recording of your experience, and a post-performance interview with a member of Queen Mary’s research team. Following the performance, you will also receive a copy of the recordings as a unique record of your experience.

 

If you would like to be involved, please email your name and contact details to: stagingatmospheres@gmail.com stating your preference for attending a performance on either 17th or 18th March. As the performance can only accommodate one spectator at a time, there are a variety of slots available between 18.00-20.00 on Saturday 17th March and between 18.00-21.15 on Sunday 18th March. If you have a particular preference, please let us know, and we will do our best to accommodate you.

 

Please be aware that some of the performance includes accounts of consent issues and sexual trauma.

 

How long will it take

The performance lasts thirty minutes, and each interview will take no longer than twenty minutes.

 

Will my responses be confidential 

The interviews will contribute to a research project funded by the Arts an Humanities Research Council; this process has been scrutinised by QMUL’s ethics committee, and all details will be fully anonymised in any public or academic material. You will be free to withdraw if you wish to.

 

Calls for papers

No listings this week.

#SEDdigest – Events and Opportunities Digest – Wednesday 7 March 2018

Here’s our digest #6 of events and opportunities in and outside the School.

Please do get in touch if you have any listings for our next edition.

Events

Book ahead

Shakespeare is Dead: The Great Shakespeare Debate | Tuesday 27 March 2018 | 6pm | Free

This house proposes that the inclusion of Shakespeare in the higher education curriculum and theatre and arts programming obstructs decolonization.

Join students, performers, policy makers, scholars, teachers, artists and artistic directors to debate what place Shakespeare has in education and the arts today.

Have your say.

Cast Your Vote.

Inaugural Lecture: Andrew van der Vlies | Thursday 29 March | 6.30pm | Free

Abstract

How has writing from and about South Africa travelled beyond the borders of the country? How has it made readers feel, and why might this continue to matter? Using key examples from the past 130 years, the lecture will survey the trajectory of South African writing as a category, ask how and why some texts have become well known internationally while others have not, and consider the importance of the personae that South African writers have (or been thought by readers to have) adopted, as well as the significance of the material forms that texts have taken—the guises, or indeed ‘personae’, under which they have travelled. Texts from and about South Africa—not to mention readers encountering them—have had to find ways to grapple with questions about the appropriateness or otherwise of representations of the country’s diverse people and complex politics. (Appropriate can, after all, be an adjective and a verb.) This lecture will therefore also grapple with the politics of speaking—and writing—positions, including this lecturer’s own. It will address South Africa’s often problematic place in postcolonial studies, and will argue for the continuing relevance of the study of the country’s literature here and now.

Bio

Andrew van der Vlies is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Postcolonial Studies in the School of English and Drama. Born and raised in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, he completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford and taught at the University of Sheffield before joining Queen Mary in 2010. He is the author of the books Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford, 2017) and South African Textual Cultures (Manchester, 2007), and of a number of scholarly articles and chapters on South African literature, visual culture, gender studies, and print cultures (including contributions to the Oxford Companion to the Book, Cambridge History of South African Literature, and Oxford History of the Novel in English). He is editor of a collection of essays on Print, Text, and Book Cultures in South Africa (Wits, 2012), and lead editor of the scholarly journal Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies (Taylor & Francis). Forthcoming books include editions of Zoë Wicomb’s non-fiction (Yale), and of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (Edinburgh). Van der Vlies also holds an honorary appointment at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa.

 

The week ahead

QMTC: New Writing Festival | 10-11 March 2018 | QMUL – Mile End | From £6

 

New Writers’ Festival is always one of our favourites of the year, as we show off the talented playwrights QM has. This festival celebrates new writing, new stories, and a range of voices and styles. It’s bloody brilliant – and you should definitely come and watch!

The Woman Who Gave Birth to a Goat | Camden People’s Theatre | Wednesday 14 March | £10

Join our grads Hugo Aguirre and Lizzie Manwaring for a bizarre journey of a woman who, in five months, will be having a kid (literally).

For more events follow us on Twitter

 

Jobs, Careers Events & Paid Internships

Career Appointments at QMUL

Current students and recent graduates can book a bespoke careers appointment to help with: finding jobs, making your applications better and even interview practice.

 

Opportunities, Calls for Participation & Volunteering

Paid opportunity for women of colour | Roundhouse | Deadline: Friday 6 April

‘We are forming a performance collective for women of colour to create a new piece of work: Hive City Legacy. This will be performed in the Sackler Space. This is a paid opportunity for the selected performers.’

 

Calls for papers

No listings this week.

QMUL’s Professor Lois Weaver Wins WOW Women in Creative Industries Award

We are delighted that Queen Mary University of London’s Professor Lois Weaver has won the Fighting the Good Fight Award at WOW Women in Creative Industries Awards.

Professor Weaver wins representing; ‘four decades of commitment to work engaging the widest possible public in feminism and human rights through performance’ and was in a hotly contested category with Kate Mosse and Rachel Whiteread.

Set up in 2016 by Jude Kelly CBE, Artistic Director, Southbank Centre, and founder of WOW – Women of the World, the WOW Women in Creative Industries Awards recognise significant achievements made by women in the arts, tech, music, film, games, media, fashion and advertising, and celebrate the women and men progressing equality in the arts and creative industries. They were the first ever cross-sector awards to honour women and genderqueer and non-binary people, who are leading the way in the creative industries.

The winners were announced at a ceremony at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, from 12pm on Wednesday 7 March 2018 as part of the Women in Creative Industries Day, the first day of Southbank Centre’s WOW London 2018 festival, supported by Bloomberg.

The impressive panel of judges includes: Tate Director Maria Balshaw CBE; Anne-Marie Curtis, Editor-in-Chief of ELLE Magazine; Martin Green, CEO & Director, Hull City of Culture 2017; Amy Lamé, London’s first Night Czar and co-founder of Duckie; John McGrath, CEO & Artistic Director of Manchester International Festival; Dame Julia Peyton-Jones DBE, Senior Global Director of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac; Jenny Sealey MBE, CEO & Artistic Director of Graeae; Nikesh Shukla, author, and editor of The Good Immigrant; and Deborah Williams, CEO at Creative Diversity Network. The judging will be convened by Jude Kelly and arts editor, broadcaster and critic, Sarah Crompton.

More information

  • Full day tickets, including the award ceremony, are on sale for £25 at southbankcentre.co.uk
  • Find out about Professor Lois Weaver’s work.
  • Lois’ Theatre company Split Britches is presenting their show Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) at the Barbican in May: tickets
  • Study Drama at Queen Mary University of London

English and Drama in World Top 50 (QS World Subject Rankings)

It’s fantastic news for the School of English and Drama in the recently announced QS World University Rankings By Subject.

Here’s the lowdown from our Head of School Warren Boutcher.

As the wind rattles your windows and the snow threatens your footing, consider that no School in QM has as high an international reputation as English and Drama – not Law, not Linguistics, not Medicine.

That’s according to the 2018 QS World University Rankings. English has held its position at #32 (inside the top ten for the UK), and Drama – oh well done! – has gone up from #30 to #23 (for Performing Arts).