Archive for March 2022

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[Commlist] CfP Bodies and Performance WG TaPRA: Bodies Beyond the Archive: Traces, temporalities, and disruptions

Mon Mar 07 17:54:21 GMT 2022




*Bodies Beyond the Archive: Traces, temporalities, and disruptions*

Bodies and archives occupy significant space in the conceptual and practical approaches to performance studies. From Diana Taylor’s (2003)/The Archive and the Repertoire/to Rebecca Schneider’s (2016)/Archives Performance Remains/, scholars have explored how archives and processes of reenactment and re-membering function and the ideologies supporting them. In///Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect/(2012), Mel Y. Chen expands notions of animacies to conceptualise ‘the shifting archive’ (p. 16).  By adopting a fluid approach to transgressing the borders of animate and inanimate, life and death, Chen’s writing embraces a postcolonial lens, giving voice to views that have historically been subject to denials and erasures. Drawing on indigenous approaches, such as the writings ofJonathan Goldberg-Hiller and Noenoe K. Silva (2011), Chen evolvesconcepts of animacy which are less characterized by a categorical, stringent attachment to human exclusivity but instead embracethe notion of having many bodies, human and nonhuman across many temporalities.Intertwined with these approaches to decolonising the archive, is the need to contextualise systems of oppression in order to understand embodied racial trauma and enable the process of collective healing.

Thus, the archive is a source of politics and power with the potential to impact present perceptions and future imaginings of historically oppressed groups/communities.How might performance disrupt or reinforce the logics of value which underpin existing approaches to bodies and archives?How can performance function as a praxis to/body forth/the archives of the future? In 2014 two important bodies of work sought to engage with archival practices and human bodies as exhibits. Matt Fraser’s/Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability Was Kept in a Box/reassessed the ways in which disability and disabled people are portrayed in museums. Brett Bailey’s/Exhibit B/embarked upon a reenactment of colonial exhibitions to offer a critique of nineteenth-century ‘human zoos’. The two performances, whilst very different in nature and the way in which they were received, addressed the notion of power and privilege within archives; specifically what bodies are archived and how.

This dynamic of power and privilege has been similarly evident in the online materials available during the pandemic. While online content sharing, which often bypasses industry gatekeepers, is often understood to be more democratic, egalitarian and accessible than in-person performance, the initial un/availability of professionally filmed performances revealed systemic exclusions from the archive.For example, an email request to Digital Theatre+ in June 2020 for filmed theatrical work by Black British playwrights was answered with a list of Shakespeare productions from Black and Asian theatre companies (email correspondence). While certain exclusions were attended to in the desperate institutional scrambling that followed the May 2020 BLM protests, there remain significant historiographic questions about the value systems and attendant material conditions that underpin practices of video and digital archiving of performance.

In conceptualising disruptive approaches to archives,Prarthana Purkayastha (2019) examines the structural limitations of contemporary practices, advocating for the foregrounding of moving bodies and historical functions as potential anti-racist strategies. This call for papers invites responses (in the form of traditional papers, workshops, performative practices) that critically reconsider the problems and possibilities (current and future) of performance archives and the bodies represented within and moving beyond them. These responses might offer strategies for the development of counter and ‘shifting’ archives.

*Possible themes include, but are not limited to:*

  * Bodies as archives for racialised trauma
  * Performing training as an unmarked archive of ‘standard’ bodies
  * Archives in flux
  * Archives and erasure: bodies removed, overwritten or overlooked
  * Bodily remains and the archive
  * Decentering the archive
  * Queering ‘the archive: queer archives, counter archives and subcultures
  * Bodies in digital archives
  * Bodies at risk in archives/Archives at risk as bodies of work
  * Future imaginings of postcolonial archives

*References*

Chen, Y, M (2012)/Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect/. Duke University Press. Durham.

Goldberg-Hiller, J and Silva, N (2011)/Sharks and Pigs: Animating Hawaiian Sovereignty against the Anthropological Machine/. South Atlantic Quarterly Volume 110 Issue 2: pp.429–446.

Schneider, R(2016)/Archives Performance Remains: ​​/*//*/Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment/. Routledge. London.

Taylor, D (2003) The/Archive and the Repertoire: Perorming Cultural Memory in the Americas/. Duke University Press. Durham.


    Conference structure


    The 2022 annual TaPRA conference at the University of Essex will be
    a hybrid event, facilitating participation by online delegates
    alongside those attending in-person.

In the event of a cancellation of in-person conference activities due to, for instance, COVID restrictions, the event would run entirely online and all registered in person delegates would be offered the opportunity to attend as online delegates, with the difference between in-person and online registration fees refunded.


    Process for submitting a proposal

Please email abstracts (no more than 300 words in length), and an additional few sentences of biographical information to the Working Group Convenors ((bodiesandperf /at/ tapra.org) <mailto:(bodiesandperf /at/ tapra.org)>)by*23.59 on 18 March 2022*.

*IMPORTANT:*Please indicate at the point of submission if you intend to attend the conference in person or online. This information is vital so that the conference organisers can effectively plan the infrastructure for the event and Working Group Convenors can schedule panel sessions effectively.


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