The work of scholars aligned to this group may be socially motivated, or take as its focus socially engaged theatre practices. However, it may also combine action and analysis through modes of ethnography, collaboration, storytelling, or performance practice that reflect a socially engaged methodology. The group also promotes ethical and institutional critique, and was formed in 2016, when PSi’s Dwight Conquergood Award made its 10th award for work in Conquergood’s “spirit”. What is that “spirit” exactly, and what critical, historical, mnemonic, affective, and ethical landscapes and lineages coalesce to contour it? We hope to provide mutual support in the areas we have in common: working on questions and with people that have historically been under- or mis-represented in scholarship, and working across the disciplinary structures of performance, ethnography, or other socially engaged research areas.

The working group is convening a series of virtual exchanges titled Neighbourhoods Roro within the PSi Constellate 2021 program.

Matt Yoxall (Chiang Mai University)
Jazmin Badong Llana (De La Salle University, Manila)
Ella Parry-Davies (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)

Ben Spatz (they/them), bnspatz@gmail.com

Petra Kuppers, (University of Michigan), chair Community Performance working group.

This working group focuses on the praxis of performing design and designing performance through a global sharing of research, facilitated by coordinated events, embodied actions, ongoing discussions and discursive writing. Negotiating between performance studies and the visual/spatial/performing/culinary arts, the fluid network aims to explore theoretical underpinnings, new modes of inquiry and generative processes and practices while questioning agency around the development, fabrication, and experiencing of material, virtual, social, and political acts, environments and events.

If you are interested in Performance + Design Working Group, please contact co-chairs Dorita Hannah and Beth Weinstein. > Website Performance+Design

The PSi working group on Dramaturgy & 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.

The working group is inclusive; when convening at a PSi conference or event, an open call for participation will be distributed well in advance. This call will include a subset of discussion themes and an invitation to submit discussion prompts in the form of 1-page responses to a series of open-ended questions. The working group sessions are generally organized as a combination of 2-3 minute presentations, facilitated work in smaller groups, and feed-back/discussion in a larger group.

Call for PSi29 in London, UK.

INVITATION: We invite artists and scholars attending the PSi29 conference in person to participate in our open Working Group meeting. This year, the group will focus on DRAMATURGY AND ETHICS. During our meeting, we will discuss the ethical dimensions and responsibilities of dramaturgy in facilitated groups, while drawing on the participants’ optional submission of written responses to the questions raised below. Our objective is to map positions, generate possible answers, and articulate new questions.

CONTEXT: Engagement with ethics has increased as attention has shifted from artwork to artistic process; boundaries between creation and research have become porous; the precariousness of creative labour has become visible; artistic and educational organizations have committed to equity, diversity, inclusivity, accessibility, and decolonization (EDIAD); and our awareness of interdependent relationships, care, and consent between humans and more than humans has grown.[i]  These attempts to reduce the harm of practices and change or disrupt oppressive norms take place at a time where global warming, unsustainable growth, and political polarization compete to conclude the Anthropocene era, making our work on imagining futures both harder and more urgent. Despite increased awareness, current responses to these complex and interconnected crises (societal, economic, climate) by the cultural and educational organisations that dramaturgy often operates within remain systemically constrained by the same forces that have caused the crises.

QUESTIONS: In this situation, what are the ethical responsibilities and potentials of dramaturgy? How can dramaturgy and dramaturgs be the agent(s) of ethical consideration? How do research ethics (considering harm, benefits, and consent), EDIAD, and relational ethics inform dramaturgical principles, practices, and choices? What are some of the challenges and dilemmas ethical thinking brings to dramaturgy and vice versa? In what ways do ethics affect how we create, whom/what we create with, and the relationships we build and steward? Who or what are at the centre and margin of our dramaturgical principles? What are useful ways to re- or de-centre? Whose knowledge are we recycling and what are the resources we use? How is that honoured and what do we offer in return? Are the dramaturgical ethics of activist, avant-garde, and traditional practices different? What kinds of ethical dramaturgical practices and forms of inquiry do we (hope to) advance? How can dramaturgy help change or care for the operating systems (and the languages of) performance? Can dramaturgy question, disrupt, resist, make (us) pause, or even force change to harmful practices and systems … ethically? In what ways can dramaturgy hold the space needed to imagine futures?

INSTRUCTIONS: If you would like to participate in the working group at PSi29, then please consider submitting discussion prompts, provocations, and/or reflections in response to the theme of “dramaturgy and ethics” and the associated questions. Your written response should be maximum 500 words and submitted to pil.hansen@ucalgary.ca by May 1, 2024 (with a “DRAMATURGY WG” subject line). Contributors of written responses will be invited to offer a brief summary of their prompt/reflection at the beginning of our session. Drop-in participation without writing is also welcome.

This working group is the third in a series engaging with the following topics: 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.

Warm regards,

Pil Hansen (working group Chair and Co-Convenor; UCalgary, Canada)

Katalin Trencsényi (working group Co-Convenor, 2024; Uniarts, Finland)

[i] Links to two short articles by the conveners that provide additional context on ethics in dramaturgy and research (Trencsényi 2022; Hansen 2023).

If you would like to know more about the Dramaturgy & Performance Working Group, please contact the chair Pil Hansen

The membership is made up of international practitioners, independent scholars, postgraduates, emerging scholars and established figures – all of whom engage with the ideas of a diverse range of philosophers including: Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciere, François Laruelle, Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault. But for the most part, this research wants to move beyond the mere application of philosophy to performance and to explore the philosophical dimensions of performance alongside the performative dimensions of philosophy.

The working group coordinates research events and publications that allow members to examine connections between performance and philosophy. Members research the nature of the relationship between philosophy and performance in a variety of contexts, such as: the use of philosophy as a methodology in Performance Studies; performance theory and practices exploring philosophical themes; philosophers’ writings on the theatre and performance; dramatic texts by philosophers.

Members pursue research questions including, but not limited to, the following:
How might philosophy and performance relate? To what extent might performance be understood as that which puts philosophy into practice?
What are the benefits and risks of the translocation of concepts from philosophy into the study of performance? What are the values and problems of configuring an individual philosophers’ work as a methodology for the study of performance: the Deleuzian, Derridean, Foucauldian etc.? •
Can philosophy be understood as performance? Can performance be understood to be doing philosophical work?
A special issue of the journal Performance Research, “On Philosophy and Participation” was commissioned following the 2009 interim conference in Aberystwyth and was published by Routledge in December 2011.
Documentation of the groups contributions to PSi 15 in Zagreb, PSi 16 in Toronto, PSi 17 in Utrecht can be found on the working group’s own website.

As a member you will receive a regular mailing list information on the group’s forthcoming activities. You will also be invited to join the group’s website, which includes a members database.

 The chairs of the Performance in Historical Paradigms Working Group are Aniko Szucs (NYU) and Iona Szeman (U of East Anglia).

Among Artistic Research’s primary characteristics is its potential to expand traditional epistemological frameworks for the discovery, creation, and dissemination of knowledge and experience. Artistic Research provides rich and robust contexts for investigations of both tangible events and the affective ambience that they generate. Thus the Porous Studio is designed to realize a productive laboratory of experimentation at the permeable borders of theory, philosophy, pedagogy, practice and research—one that underscores the notion of annual continuity and the practical/symbolic significance of studio/site/process at the PSi conferences. We are a constantly mutating social network of artists, which over successive years maps itself onto sites in different cities, countries and continents.Porousness thus indicates both an opening of the traditionally private domain of the artist’s studio to the public nature of performance research and practice, and a determination to engage with local artist-researchers to explore the specificities of performance in the region.

The Artistic Research Working Group is planning a 3-day intensive in the PSi Constellate 2021 program. Please keep an eye on the Constellate program and PSi news for an open CFP and more event information.

We have two workshop series and a depository planned under the PSi Constellate 2021 program. Please take a look at the Constellate program page for more information. This working group has recently reemerged with new curatorship and we are looking forward to shaping it with participants over the coming years.

Contact email: Adelhed Mers (amers@saic.edu)