We invite artists and scholars, planning to attend the PSi conference in Hamburg 2017, to participate in an open Working Group meeting on Dramaturgy and Performance. This year we will facilitate discussion in rotating groups around themes and problems drawn from participant’s responses to a series of questions. Thus we invite each participant to send us a written response to any of the questions highlighted below. These responses will be distributed among all responders. Please forward your response (max. 500 words) and a short bio (max. 100 words) to pil.hansen@ucalgary.ca by May 1, 2017.

The PSi working group on Dramaturgy and Performance will engage three broad subjects over the coming years: How we respond to the ways in which new research paradigms have expanded dramaturgy; the forms of emergent and embodied thinking that dramaturgical awareness facilitates; and the ethical dimensions of the choices that dramaturgy enables. In the 2017 session in Hamburg, we address these subjects through a focus on dramaturgical attention to interactions, affect, and forms of agency.

There currently are dramaturgical and theoretical tools available to consider an overwhelmingly large amount of factors that inform agency and affect interaction. To offer a few examples these include:

• Understandings of human cognition that enable us to make choices about how we direct attention, facilitate sensory and embodied perception, draw on autobiographical memory, and generate new memories.
• Notions of presence that consider implicit memory of skills and new learning active parts of the interactions between collaborators that generate performance.
• Approaches that take into account the agency of environments, objects, and processes that are not human-centred and how they act on the embodied perception of human beings as they perform and respond to performance.

With this context in mind, we invite the PSi community to join us in responding to the following questions:

1. How do we act on this impossible-to-grasp-at-once overflow of factors when dramaturging or researching processes of creation, performance, and audience experience within and beyond the performing arts? 
2. Why do we look at some factors and not others and how do we choose positions?
3. How do our choices actively shape the attention, relationships, and actions we take part in fostering?
4. What are the ethical and political implications of such choices?
5. Are we promoting or constituting new hierarchies or relationships between elements in the world?

The objective of this Working Group session is to map positions, generate possible answers, and articulate new questions. All members of the Performance Studies community are welcome to contribute in writing, during the session, or both.  The PSi Dramaturgy and Performance working group is chaired by Pil Hansen (CA) and co-curated by Imanuel Schipper (GE) and Maaike Bleeker (NL). We would like to recognize the important contribution of the group’s founders, Peter Eckersall and Marin Blazevic, and thank them for trusting us with the future of the group. Questions can be addressed to pil.hansen@ucalgary.ca.