Current open calls for submissions

Volume 30, Issue 6 - On Scores

Deadline: 13 January 2025

Issue Editors: Kevin Egan, Michael Pinchbeck, Rachel Rimmer-Piekarczyk and Jane Turner

The concept of the score has become a key principle in the work of many performance makers. The term can, and has been, interpreted in a multitude of different ways across the spectrum of arts and performance disciplines as it provides an often radical means of subverting and challenging the eurocentric dependence on a logocentric means of fixing and legitimating particular creative practices. It could be argued that traditional conceptions of ‘score’ serve as a mechanism for documenting, inducing and reproducing live performative phenomena that exist outside of mainstream practices.

From the mid twentieth century onwards in many cultures considered to be Western, the expansion of the score into an instructional, invitational and conceptual entity has been explored. Some Fluxus examples include the work of Ben Vautier, George Brecht and Alison Knowles that reside on the edges of quotidian behaviour, music and culinary production. Meanwhile visual scores have been historically bracketed as ‘conceptual art’ and include instructional works by Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry and Art & Language. In music, minimalist composer Terry Riley’s In C (1968) served as a performance score that encouraged a group of musicians to create something unique each and every time it was performed; here scores worked with notions of chance and ‘unforeseeable interactions’ (Albiez and Pattie 2016: 6).

In dance, the task-based, mathematical scores of postmodern choreographer Trisha Brown also played with notions of chance; for example, Brown’s 1975 work Locus was choreographed using a three-dimensional drawing of a cube that functioned as an imaginary framework in space. Sequences of movement were randomly generated by the dancer who used a mathematical system to determine which of her body parts would make contact with 27 different points marked off on the cube.

Alongside these experimental aleatory approaches to composition and performance, practitioners Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created a set of Oblique Strategy cards (1975) that enabled anyone/everyone to engage in creative practice, thus breaking down the esoteric belief that artists were an especially cultured elite and promoting art as an action that could be created by anyone/everyone, anywhere/everywhere.

More recently, further departing from the perception of the score as a closed system that leads to a predetermined outcome, postmodernity has led to an expanded understanding of score; the deconstruction of dominant notions of score reposition it as a device with the potential to open up a range of interfaces and encounters – what Tim Etchells defines as ‘incomplete objects and, effectively, as sites of unrealized potential’ (2015: 88).

In many instances, the score breaks with the notion that it serves to reproduce literalness – what Knyt (2014: online) sets out as a difference between a score that is an ‘interpretive’ text versus a score as ‘total’ instruction. In such examples, what is the role of the performer? Impact Theatre Co-Operative’s (Claire MacDonald, Pete Brooks, Graeme Miller, Steve Shill et al.) influential physical theatre project titled The Carrier Frequency was revived from its 1984 incarnation by Stan’s Cafe in 1999. The performance was restored from fragments of documentation that were excavated. Frances Babbage, writing of her experience in seeing the 1999 show, cites Mike Pearson: ‘These are not acts of reconstruction, but of recontextualization. They stand for the past, in the present’ (Pearson in Babbage 2000: 98). This example demonstrates postdramatic theatre’s displacing and repositioning of the performer in score-focused work, as seen in other work by companies like Reckless Sleepers, where ‘making sense of this score is the focus; working out the physical relationships between performers, objects, actions and texts’ (Egan 2019: 178).

Based on these examples, an expanded understanding of score might conceptualise it as a stimulus, structure or framework for the making of work. It may also become the key trace of a performance after its moment has passed, serving as an artefact that resists the ephemerality of performance in the historical landscape, what Carl Lavery has termed the ‘postscript’ (Lavery 2009: 37). Such conceptions were debated at the ‘Performing Scores / Scoring Performance’ international conference convened by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Performance Research Group at HOME in Manchester, UK, from 11–12 July 2023. This wide-ranging conference explored myriad uses and further interpretations of the notion of score across a range of artistic and performative disciplines including performance, dance, drama, theatre, music, film, photography and textiles, demonstrating the current valency of scores as an expanded and vital practice not just in Europe and America but also in China, Russia and for First Nations people of Australia.

A provocative range of issues and questions sparked by the conference have consequently led to this issue. These included etymological interpretations of the word ‘score’; ideas that the score can be conceived as a literal cut or wound that scores the performer’s body, leading to a process of scarification or indeed, stratification; the score as a form of scaffolding that not only enables initial knowledge to become embodied but to be discarded once knowledge has been incorporated; conceptualizations of a score as a map or guiding principle, a desire path that scores the landscape, a mechanism to enable co-produced knowledge and as a tracing of what was and, thus, creating a palimpsest of engagements.

As well as illustrating further exemplifications of the use of and creation of scores, this issue seeks to engage in debates, which may include the extent to which a score can act as a freeing agent – whether there is a paradoxical nature of structure and agency that raises questions around whether scores should function as rigid or porous entities. Similarly, the notion of fidelity, and, by extension, infidelity and whether such qualities are innate to the process of scoring and, in turn, the extent to which a rejection of the score creates opportunities for accidental revelations. The issue asks whether the process ‘to score’ can be both a creative and destructive act, akin to an artist slashing their canvas. To build on, and further interrogate the concept of the score, this issue invites contributions from a range of disciplinary fields in the form of full-length articles, articles, artist pages or manifestos. There is potential for the issue to include scores made by artists in a bid to capture either a ‘blueprint’ or an ‘aftermath’ of performance or event. The issue seeks to present ‘scoring’ as both a methodology and form of documentation while also embracing its multiple functions and interpretations.
 
Contributions might address, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Embodying scores / The scored body
• Archiving scores / Performing the archive
• Knowledge production and scores
• Approaches to analysing scores
• Composed theatre and musical scores
• Choreographic scores, improvisation and instant composition
• Material objects as scores that activate physical movement
• Graphic Scores that serve as an interpretative art/performance object
• Scores to enable digital or hybrid performance practice
• Scores, the performer, and patterns of authority
• Scoring as non-textual archive or repertoire
• Collaboration and the use of scores
• Dramaturgical analysis of historical scores
• Scores and temporality
• Scores and transmission
• Scores as pedagogy
• Transposition and translation of scores
• Re-enactment of existing scores
• Scoring practices across cultures
• Scores as blueprint for performance
• Scores as post-script of performance
• Scores as trace/detritus/aftermath
• Scores that sit between documentation and generative tool
• The economy/ecology of scores  

Format
Authors are invited to submit an abstract of circa 500 words. Following review and selection of abstracts, successful authors will be asked to submit draft articles of 5000 – 7,000 (maximum) words in length (including in-text citations and references). Non-standard formats such as artist pages, highly illustrated articles and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies are welcome. The editors are committed to diversity and inclusion, and warmly encourage contributions from all sections of the academic and artistic community, including those who are likely to be under-represented in scholarship.

Co-Editors:
This issue will be co-edited by Kevin Egan, Michael Pinchbeck, Rachel Rimmer-Piekarczyk and Jane Turner. The editorial team is based within the Performance Research Group at Manchester Metropolitan University. The group consists of internationally recognised theatre-makers, performers, directors, dramaturgs, choreographers, curators and scholars with longstanding relationships with the theatre and performance industry. It nourishes world-leading, industry-focused and interdisciplinary research in the field of performance. The group develops practices and builds dynamic structures that bring performance artists, researchers and the creative sector into productive dialogue with one other, in Manchester and globally.

Schedule:
Proposals: January 2025
First drafts: May 2025
Final drafts: September 2025
Publication: January 2026
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to the PR office: info@performance-research.org
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors via: Michael Pinchbeck M.Pinchbeck@mmu.ac.uk.

References:  
Albiez, S. and Pattie, D. (eds) (2016) Brian Eno: Oblique music, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Babbage, Frances (2000) ‘The past in the present? A response to Stan's Cafe's revival of “The Carrier Frequency”’, New Theatre Quarterly 16(1): 97–9.
Egan, Kevin (2018) ‘Schrödinger’s notes: A minimalist equation for a Reckless Sleepers project’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 39(2): 177–97.
Etchells, Tim (2015) ‘Live Forever / In fragments, to begin ... ’ Performance Research 20(5):87–95.
Knyt, Erinn (2014) ‘Between composition and transcription: Ferruccio Busoni and music notation’ Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press, 11(1): 37–61.
Lavery, Carl (2009) ‘Is there a text in this performance?’, Performance Research, 14(1): 37–45.


General Guidelines for Submissions:

• Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website – www.performance-research.org – and familiarize yourself with the journal.
• Proposals should be created in Word – this can be standard Microsoft Word .doc or .docx via alternative word processing packages. Proposals should not be sent as PDFs unless they contain complex designs re artist pages.
• The text for proposals should not exceed one page, circa 500 words.
• A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text.
• Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that there is a maximum of five images. If practical, images should be included on additional pages within the Word document.
• Proposals should be sent by email to info@performance-research.org
• Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.
• Please include the issue title and number in the subject line of your email.
• Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
• If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On final acceptance of a completed article, you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.