CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Deadline: June 1, 2024 (email eneff@gradcenter.cuny.edu if this deadline has passed but you still want to inquire)
Conference: October 24-25, 2024
The CUNY Graduate Center Department of Theatre and Performance conference will be held in 2024, Thursday, October 24 and Friday, October 25, in person only, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Proposals will be accepted through June 1, 2024.
A conference is already a dramaturgical staging of discursive space, through which specific individuals and groups convene to compare+contrast senses of reality, analyze phenomena, and debate courses of action. This conference experimentally tests, critiques, and proposes ways of conferring, understanding the conference itself as a performance and self-reflexively interrogating its own dramaturgical structures. Around which principles shall we orient our forms of discourse? With whom shall we confer, and why? Dealing with issues of institutional and disciplinary discourse ethics, epistemic trust, epistemicide, praxis, and solidarity, this conference stages sites and scenarios for and as the verb, to confer.
The PhD student organizers of “AS PER SOME FORM: TO CONFER” invite proposals in the four following areas. These areas are merely meant as generative prompts: proposals are also welcome that relate to the conference’s formulation in other ways. We will prioritize projects, performances, and discourse practices which are dramaturgically structured to correlate forms with inquiries, concepts, and/or contents over standard academia-style panels and papers.
To propose, please fill out the PROPOSAL FORM. Please include which area you are proposing in (if any), what form your conferring will take, and what you need in terms of space and tech. We are able to support durational processes, public/outdoor elements, video and sound, and hoping to adapt the conference’s forms to proposals rather than vice versa. Interventions or ideas regarding the selection process, the conference’s use of space, and so on, are also welcome. Please reach out to Esther Neff and the Conference Committee eneff@gradcenter.cuny.edu with any questions.
1) INSTITUTIONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS
Interventions, institutional critique, imaginary organizations, temporary and autonomous institutions, practice-as-research, and rehearsive or “process-based” performances are all much-discussed forms of performance. Relational aesthetics, and what Claire Bishop calls “the social turn,” have perhaps settled by now into their own disciplinary mediums with norms and expectations; forms often have participants speaking into microphones set up in the street, sitting in “break out circles,” and putting up post-it notes all over the walls. These “participatory” forms are shared between theatre/performance-as-art and political organizing, just as forms of protest and demonstration often share forms with ritual processions, parades, and military displays. Yet, there are many more forms and forms-of-relation to examine. In this context, we are especially concerned those involving forms of con-ference: committee, council, panel, thinktank, working group, lab, task force. How do we understand and practice “institution” and “organization” as forms of performance, as active, social processes? How do we understand and practice “institution,” “organization,” and conventional “conferences” as stagings, assemblies, or social embodiments? How do institutions and their modes of conferring formalize communications and cooperations? Can institution and organization be performed “theatrically”? How are modes of production, forms of performance, and institutional structures related? How might ameliorated (better?) forms of conference and institutional relation be per-formed?
2) EPISTEMIC TRUST AND EPISTEMIC PLURALISM
Amidst heavily-funded propaganda campaigns mounted by governments, militaries, fossil fuel companies, and other powerful entities, decisions as to whose discourse to accept as “truth” or factual information may be contingent on sharing epistemological principles, political values, and ethical principles. While the representations and processes set up in the theatre may be staged as either realistic representations or subjective stories, trusting and respecting the testimony, worldviews, ideas, and feelings of different individuals and cultural groups is crucial to creating a more inhabitable social reality. Crises in epistemic trust and “information” run deep, and in all directions. Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Miranda Fricker, and others, many realize (not only from “scholarship” but also from personal experience) that colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other paradigms conflate truth with power, invariably constructing self-serving imaginaries while committing epistemicide (“killing off,” erasing diverse knowledge systems, languages, senses, and ideas). How do we recover, render, and recognize excluded, suppressed, or “unknowable” knowledges and in-formations? How can forms of discourse, collaboration, listening, research strategies, and other “dramaturgical” scenarios build epistemic trust and plurality, while resisting propaganda, values-free relativity, and the intentional deception strategies of Empire?
3) DISCOURSE ETHICS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Miwon Kwon demands a theatre that operates not in public space but as public space. Echoing similar Habermasian senses of Öffentlichkeit (the public sphere) as a common good, crucial to maintaining democratic forms of self-determination, Florian Malzachar proposes that theatre’s “special competence” is “bringing people together in situations which are peculiarly real and fictional, actual and symbolic.” Through dramaturgically-structured forms of assembly, “publics” are charged with performing the substantial discourse from which political action is supposed to emerge. Many scholars draw on these Greco-European (and more specifically, German) senses of theatre as a kind of “social technology” that structures discourse and sets up controlled sites for collective judgment. Discourse-based forms of theatre often wrestle with Chantal Mouffe’s notions of agonistic, productive but “respectful” conflicts, and dramaturgies that set up “unsafe” dramatic conflicts between “real world” participants. Public debate, the discourse element, becomes both means and ends of many contemporary performance forms. Who (and where?) is “a discourse community”? What is a “public” and how, where, when, and what ways do different forms of theatre and performance stage public conscience, collective consciousness, discourse, and/or formation of publics themselves?
4) SOLIDARITY AND CONFERENCE
As we write this CFP, our scholarship, our public speech acts, our forms of gathering, and our political, social, and theatrical performances, are increasingly repressed by the very institutions through which we are meant to confer. There are “respectable” forms, and there are “radical” forms, there are words we are not permitted to say, there is language we are not supposed to use; silence and neutrality have become disciplinary values, and academia becomes a less and less viable space for open discourse. We (we, performance practitioners, scholars, cultural organizers, professors, theorists, working at the moment within the structural context, the somewhat shared scenario of this conference that forms a “we”), are in crisis, and our forms of discourse are not the only crux of matters, but rather the matter to which we have the most agentic access, as academics, professors, researchers, and performance-makers. It is difficult, in good conscience, to write up a CFP that says anything other than something that would result in the cancellation of this entire conference (see how syntactically convoluted we have become?). Therefore, we must communicate in code, promising banality and burying our clearest and strongest ideas under gestures and jargon. Fortunately, many of us are practiced at this, with handkerchiefs in our back pockets and watermelon patches on our backpacks. How do coded, underground, and resistant forms of “conference” operate? What role(s) can this (or other forms of) discourse and “conferring” play in seeking justice, moving towards liberation, configuring solidarity?
ACCESS
The CUNY Graduate Center is ADA accessible for those using mobility aids. Conference organizers recognize that this element of accessibility is not sufficient and our aim is to provide—with whatever resources we have—support for any needs that conference participants may have. The Graduate School and University Center does not ensure equal access by providing all student activities with ASL interpretation or other auxiliary aids or service tools. Processes of accommodation must be individually pursued, and so we must ask that you reach out to us with requests that we facilitate such processes (which we are happy to do as organizers!). Please also reach out if you are unable to attend the conference in person for reasons of disability, being immunocompromised, or chronic illness, we may also be able to accommodate remote access.
Masks are not required by the CUNY Graduate Center but we will strongly encourage their use during this conference.
PACBI Statement
In total solidarity with the people of Palestine, the independent student organizer(s) of this conference adhere to the Palestinian International call for Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) and comply with the underlying guidelines of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). In the context of this conference as a project mounted by and affiliated with the DTSA (Doctoral Theatre Students Association) the conference itself is not officially committed to PACBI or BDS since the DTSA has so-far failed to formally commit to any statement on CUNY complicity in genocide, apartheid, or the military industrial complex and the Graduate Center itself has not divested or made any move to do so. The student organizer(s) are unprotected by any institutional affiliation, union (PSC-CUNY) or other entity and are committed to PACBI at full personal risk. Please note also that PACBI does not apply to individuals (no collective punishment) and will end when Palestine is fully returned to Palestinians.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT (Theatre and Performance Department)
The land upon which we gather is part of the unceded territory of the Lenape peoples. We ask you to join us in acknowledging the Lenape community, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. We honor and respect the many Indigenous people(s) still connected to this land.
Esther Marveta Neff 