Current open calls for submissions

Volume 30, Issue 2 - On Coalitions

Deadline: 10 June 2024

How do we account for difference in collaborative pursuits? How do we discuss collective experience without deploying the totalizing ‘we’? What are the appropriate leadership models for an effective achievement of pluralist and intersectional agendas, based on equality, diversity and inclusion?

This issue of Performance Research considers coalitions – artistic, political, institutional or otherwise – and the performances that make them possible and that they, in turn, generate. We, the two editors of this issue, coming together from different parts of the world, invite you to revisit coalition as a term, so to review its geneaologies and manifestations in various facets of dance, theatre and performance. We see the need for this discussion as relevant to the current geopolitical moment and its probable coalitional histories, as well as in light of the recent articulations of global majority as an epistemological category in our field.

We are also interested in parsing through the resonances, tensions and usage of terms that may in principle aspire to perform similar political gestures. Originally proffered by radical feminists of colour as an alternative to white feminism’s notions of sisterhood (Fowlkes 1997), the term ‘coalition’ has also been deployed in solidarity by some white scholars such as Judith Butler in a range of works from Gender Trouble (1990) to Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015). Where terms such as ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’ have been critiqued as problematic because of their Marxist implications (Nancy 1991), or the potential ‘anxiety of subjugation’ (Kunst 2015: 82), ‘assembly’ has emerged as a conveniently capacious term to account for less transgressive forms of political solidarity through spontaneous gathering (Butler 2015; Eckersall and Grehan 2019; Malzacher 2023) and/or for the notion of the social that anticipates a post-humanist dimension (Latour 2005). Inspired by jazz and by Édouard Gliassant’s ideas of Blackness, Fred Moten (2003) deploys the term ‘ensemble’ for its semantic capacity to denote the ontological, phenomenological, aesthetic and socio-political dimension, thus expanding its pre-existing remits. However, in opting for the term ‘politics of affiliation’, Dorinne Kondo clarifies that ‘coalition represents a fraught, power-laden process that assumes incommensurability and cannot guarantee a “safe place”' (2018: 109). These various investments in articulating the power in and of the collective speak directly to dance, theatre, performance and adjacent practices and have indeed been, as evidenced by our short overview, productive as critical vocabularies for performance research. Yet, we see in coalition a specifically political will towards targeted action. What is a coalitional dramaturgy – whereby dramaturgy stands for a ‘way of working’ – and how might we identify it in various artistic, cultural, political and post-human scenarios?

In this context, we are interested in the potential of the term ‘coalition’ to allow for the examination of political agency and the generative nodes of solidarity specific to performance research. We hope to produce an issue that addresses and exemplifies the interplays between coalitional micro and macro cosmoses: from projects of coalitional institution-building in theatre and performance studies, such as the current leadership models adopted by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), collaborative and coalitional research methodologies for performance research (Brown et al. 2021a and 2021b; Radosavljević 2023), leaderless/heterarchical artistic practices (Radosavljević 2019), collectivism and coalitional laboratory-based artistic production and formations (ruagrupa; Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol), among other possibilities. We are also interested in how these formations may relate to coalitional politics in contemporary full and semi-democracies and to historical supra-governmental bodies like the United Nations (UN), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and others.

We aim to provoke a recalibration of the coalitions we engage in: how we think and make relations in and through performance and the institutions enabling performance-making and its study. How might contemporary dance, theatre and music performance practices enact coalitional politics? What might the histories and geneaologies of these political solidarities be? How might artistic and research coalitions relate to the political spectrum established by European modernity (left<>right)? What methodologies, problems, policies and educational paradigms arise from coalitional politics, such as the ones enacted by categories like ‘global majority’? How are dance, theatre and performance related to large-scale supra-governmental bodies such as ones mentioned above?

We invite articles, manifestos, position papers, interviews and artist pages that think through the idea and practice of coalitional politics. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Coalitional ethics and aesthetics
  • Coalitional politics and cultural policy
  • Digital coalitions
  • Emergence of coalition and self-organization in artistic practice
  • Ground-up epistemologies
  • Heterarchical forms of leadership
  • Coalition and process
  • Concepts of coalition vis-à-vis ensemble, assembly, affiliation, allyship, co-presence, solidarity, community
  • Coalitions across race, gender, ability
  • Coalitions across borders
  • Coalitions across artforms
  • The UN, EU, ASEAN and similar supra-governamental bodies
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) and more-than-human coalitions
  • Performance, war and conflict resolution
  • Coalitional editorial work in performance research
  • Artistic collectives and activism
  • Extinction rebellion and green politics
  • Collective creation in dance, theatre and performance-making
  • Coalitional leadership in dance, theatre and performance studies and practice
  • Coalitions, collisions and failure
  • Post-human coalitional politics and practices

 

Bibliography

Brown, Kevin, Cervera, Felipe, Iwaki, K., Laine, Eero and van Baarle, Kristof (2021a) ‘Postmortem: On process and collaborative editing’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 36(1): 13–21, DOI: 10.1353/dtc.2021.0038.

Brown, Kevin, Cervera, Felipe, Iwaki, Kyoko, Laine, Eero and van Baarle, Kristof (2021b) ‘Antemortem: Collaborative research in theatre and performance studies’, Global Performance Studies 4(2), DOI:10.33303/gpsv4n2a1.

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, New York, NY and London: Routledge.

Butler, Judith (2015) Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Eckersall, Peter and Grehan, Helena 2019 The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, 1st edn, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, DOI: 10.4324/9780203731055.

Fowlkes, Diane L. (1997) ‘Moving from feminist identity politics to coalition politics through a feminist materialist standpoint of intersubjectivity’, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza, Hypatia 12(2): 105–24.

Kondo, Dorinne (2018) Worldmaking: Race, performance, and the work of creativity, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Kunst, Bojana (2015) Artist at Work: Proximity of art and capitalism, Alresford: Zero Books.

Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor–Network–Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Florian Malzacher (2023). The Art of Assembly. Political theatre today, Berlin and New York, NY: Alexander Verlag & Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.

Moten, Fred (2003) In the Break: Aesthetics of the Black radical tradition, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991) The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Radosavljević, Duška (2019) ‘The heterarchical director: A model of authorship for the twenty-first century’, in Peter Boenisch, David Bradby and David Williams (eds), Directors’ Theatre, 2nd edn, London: Palgrave Macmillan Red Globe Press, pp. 246–67.

Radosavljević, Duška (2023) Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the digital age, London: Routledge.

 

Format:

Please send abstracts as per the guidelines below, including a 100-word author bio, for academic articles of approximately 5,000 words, or for shorter articles and provocations, including artist pages and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies.

 

Issue Contacts:

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:

Felipe Cervera fcervera@tft.ucla.edu and/or

Duška Radosavljević duska.radosavljevic@cssd.ac.uk

 

Schedule:

Proposals: Outcomes June 2024

First drafts: September 2024

Final drafts: January 2025

Publication: March 2025

 

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.