Dear colleagues,
We now invite submission of papers and proposals for the Performance and New
Technologies Working Group at TaPRA, University of Worcester, 8th to 10th
September 2015. Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions. We look
forward to seeing you there.
:
Digital Memory and Techno-nostalgia: Remembering / Dismembering Performance
Call Deadline: 17 April 2015
The ephemeral nature of live performance has always forced practitioners,
critics and notaries to consider ways of committing performance to memory. The
act of remembering itself was first expressed through theatrical means by
Giulio Camillo and his memory theatre – giving birth to a performative
technology, a mnemo-technic reliant on the theatrical frame. The commitment of
the ephemeral act to memory most often happens through technological means,
which in the digital era produce audio-visual traces that can appear to lend
some objectivity in the act of remembrance. If technology defines how we
remember live performance, then performances are re-membered –and thus
reconstructed– through the lens of those technologies dominant at their times.
The digital times we inhabit entail an inevitable commitment of ephemeral acts
to the im/materialities of the digital; but how do our ever-prolific digital
memories alter the ways we remember performance? And what new technologies
affect memory, either as mnemonic, or as the means by which to adapt, extend or
develop the way we recollect and what is re-membered?
The past is a place for both recollection and re-imagination with no same
version of the past evident. Nevertheless, until recently, records of live
performances would more often be linear narratives, canonical in viewpoint, and
restricted to archival use. Digital technologies and mobile networks allow
immediate and wide access to technologies of recording, storage and retrieval,
which enable participation in the creation of individual and shared memories,
and challenge the canonicity of performance records. For this reason, digital
encounters with the past tend to intersect recollection with story-telling,
often relating the sameevents and circumstances through multi-voiced narratives
that offer supplementary or competing perspectives. We invite participants to
reflect on emergent digital story-telling techniques and intermedial modes of
narration as practices of performance documentation. When everyone becomes a
potential archivist of performance acts, performance documents cease to be
linear, authorial narratives; instead, they become the micro-documents of
multiple, fragmented experiences. How can we, individually and collectively,
remember, narrate and re-enact performance through its digital detritus? How
can we tap into the richness of multiplicity afforded by ‘heritage from below’
practices (Robertson, 2012) without ‘dismembering’ the actual performance act?
Furthermore, as digital technologies become ever more dominant in our daily
lives facilitating and complicating them in equal measure, there is an
increasing trend to look back to technologies of the past with some nostalgia.
Nostalgia, from the Greek nostoV (nostos, return home) and algoV (algos, pain),
denotes the yearning to return to an experience of place or community that has
been lost. A ‘homesickness of sorts’, it suggests ‘an attempt by actors in the
present to return to a comfortable and ideal setting.’ (Pinch and Reinecke in
Bjisterveld and van Dijck, 2009:166) Recently, technonostalgia is being
expressed through looking back at analogue technologies as objects and
processes of desire, through ‘excursions into vintage gear’ (ibid). The
nostalgic return is bound by horizons of melancholy, sentiment, menace, and
emotion. We ask, what is the affective potential of mnemonic devices– digitised
photographs, social networks, sounds, music, video, graphics, words, and somas
– and of ‘excursions’ into old media? What new combinations bring about shifts
in the emotional temperature of our search for times lost, and how do those
affect performance memories?
This Call invites contributors to consider how we remember both performance and
technology, as well as performance through technology, in a digital era.
Proposals might consider the following issues, though these are not exclusive:
* Remembering Performance through Technology
* Remembering Technology in Performance
* Performance and Digital Memory / Re-collection
* Collecting Ephemeral Acts / Performance and Digital Archives
* Performance and Techno-nostalgia
* Documentation Devices and Methods Intersecting Analogue and Digital
* Heritage from Below and Performance Legacies
* The Materiality of Performance Memory
* Documenting Somatic Memories
* Dismembering /Forgetting /Erasing Performance
* Sound-theatres and Auditory Spaces of Memory
* Performance Memory and Affect
This year, the Performance and New Technologies Working Group will be
collaborating with the Performance and Documentation Working Group by holding a
joint session, due to common interests. If you believe your paper/presentation
is most appropriate for this session please state so. Please note that final
decisions will be made by working group conveners.
Proposals
Please send a 300 word proposal, a short biographical statement, and an outline
of technical requirements by 17th April to both Maria Chatzichristodoulou,
[email protected] and Jeremy Kelly, [email protected]
Proposals, if accepted, may be directed into a range of presentational formats:
traditional panels (with 20 minute papers); pre-circulated papers that form the
basis for a short presentation and discussion; or, where appropriate,
performance-based panels. While we welcome statements of preference, final
decisions will be made by the working group convenors and will be indicated at
the time of acceptance. We welcome alternative, practice-as-research or
performative proposals that engage rigorously with the theme, but these must be
achievable with limited resources and within a 20-30 minute time period.
The Working Group also warmly welcomes participants who do not wish to present
a paper this year.
The convenors of the Performance and New Technologies Working Group are Maria
Chatzichristodoulou, Jeremy Kelly and Martin Blain.
Please note: Only one proposal may be submitted for the TaPRA 2015 Conference.
It is not permitted to submit multiple proposals or submit the same proposal to
several Calls for Papers. All presenters must be TaPRA members, i.e. registered
for the conference; this includes presentations given by Skype or other media
broadcast even where the presenter may not physically attend the conference
venue. If your paper has been accepted, yet you have not registered for the
Conference by the final registration deadline of 14 August 2015, we will deem
you no longer intend to participate and present at TaPRA 2015.
--
Dr Maria Chatzichristodoulou
Lecturer in Performance and New Media
Programme Leader MA by Research & PhD in Theatre and Performance
Disability, Equality and Diversity Tutor
School of Drama, Music and Screen
University of Hull
Room: Loten L104
Cottingham Road
Hull, HU6 7RX, UK
T. +44 (0) 1482 465076
http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/drama.aspx
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