SPECTACULAR LABOR
Performance Studies Focus Group (PSFG) Pre-Conference
Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE)
Proposals due: May 4, 2016
Pre-Conference dates: Wednesday, August 10 and Thursday, August 11
Keynote Speaker: Joshua Chambers-Letson
Chicago, IL: Location TBD
www.athe.org/group/PSFG
“Given the reification of human and commodity relations under capitalism, mimetic truth must be pried open through interpretive labor. Mimesis is this labor: a sensuous critical receptivity to, and transformation of, the object.”
-Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 1997, ix.
“The state and the street, like the shop floor, are venues for performances that allow the spectator to access minoritarian lifeworlds that exist, importantly and dialectically, within the future and the present. James’s workerist theory allows us to think of the minoritarian performer as a worker and the performance of queer world-making as a mode of labor.”
-José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009, 56.
“The work of the actors—their professional work—is organized as part of a set of interlocking industries that produce the recreation that is an essential aspect of the worker’s self-reproduction. For workers outside the ‘leisure industries’ work is what permits leisure in which the work of the ‘leisure industries,’ like the theatre, may be consumed.”
-Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre Communism, and Love. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013, 51.
Spectacular Labor, the Performance Studies Focus Group Pre-Conference at ATHE, will engage theories, methodologies, and practices at the intersection of performance, labor, and work. How does the spectacle of labor affect the production and consumption of art, performance, identity, and the everyday? How might we consider and reconsider structures of power with regard to art-making, audience and affect, and social stratification? How does the representation of labor empower and debilitate those represented? How do contemporary issues of surveillance, the “sharing economy” and globalized market change the way we view and are viewed at work? Might a performative utopia effect change, or does it provide an ephemeral escape to maintain dominant modes?
We seek proposals for academic papers, performances, and experimental formats that examine and challenge our interdisciplinary engagements with labor and work, and their entanglements with aesthetics; artistic, cultural, and quotidian practices; policy and politics; methodologies; race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationalism; and space.
The pre-conference will take place Wednesday, August 10, 2016, 9am to 7pm and Thursday, August 11, 2016, 8am to 12pm at a TBD location in the Chicago area. To encourage socialization and conversation beyond panels and performances, the event will also include meals: breakfast and lunch on Wednesday, August 10, and breakfast on Thursday, August 11.
Our keynote speaker will be Joshua Chambers-Letson, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Chambers-Letson’s research and teaching interests include contemporary art and performance, Asian American studies, Marxist theory, political theory, and queer theory. He is the author of A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theater in Higher Education (ATHE).
We seek proposals for academic papers, live performances, and experimental formats. Submissions might want to consider, but are not limited to:
affective labor (Michael Hardt)
carnivalesque (Mikhail Bakhtin)
the culture industry (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno)
mimesis as labor (Elin Diamond)
performance as failure (Sara Jane Bailes)
“scenes of subjection” (Saidiya Hartman)
performance economies and the “the cost disease” (William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen)
work and labor as a feminist practice
labor and minoritarian performance (José Esteban Muñoz)
Theatre of the Oppressed (Augusto Boal)
neoliberalism and theater
Marxism and performance
The deadline for proposals is May 4, 2016.
For paper proposals, please submit as a single word or pdf document:
1) name and contact information (with email address),
2) an abstract (~300 words), and
3) a brief biography (~250 words);
For performance and experimental format proposals, please submit as a single word or pdf document:
1) name and contact information (with email address),
2) description of performance or experimental format (~300 words),
3) a brief biography (~250 words),
4) technical requirements and duration,
and, if applicable, 5) up to six jpeg images, link to an online portfolio, or other relevant media.
Please submit all proposals, and any questions to PSFG Pre-Conference organizers Steve Luber and Jasmine Mahmoud, at sluber@conncoll.edu and j-mahmoud@u.northwestern.edu
We will notify participants by May 14, 2016.
Submitted by: Melissa Wansin Wong