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

*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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