Current open calls for submissions

Volume 29, Issue 8 - On Exits and Endings

Deadline: 2 April 2024

 

Issue Editors:

Richard Gough and Helena Grehan

 

The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method? Confucius (500 BCE)

 

Exit, pursued by a bear. Shakespeare (1609)

 

I’m glad to see you back, I thought you were gone forever.

Beckett (1965)

 

In this issue of Performance Research, we investigate exits and endings. Our focus on exits considers death, performance, mourning and ritual. But we also embrace the matter of endings. While death is, we might argue, the ultimate ending, there are other endings that are less definitive. These endings can be powerful and comforting but can also be painful or even excruciating. In performance examples may include attending live work without an end but that instead drifts into slow decay, where the audience members or participants must force an ending. Or when we, as spectators, end our experience of a performance by walking out of the theatre, by falling asleep or intervening physically or vocally to bring things to a close. How do directors and actors cope with these kinds of forced endings, the rupture of the walk out (and the disturbance it causes)? How do they resume their craft in response? How do they adjust, adapt and survive? What of the never-ending ‘farewell tour’ or the final performance by an actor, the decision to end one’s career? How do we think about the tribute band, or immersive, machine-generated copy or group that keeps the work alive in some fashion or other? Are these examples a failure to end and exit with grace, or are they important continuations or reincarnations of a sort?

Exits and Endings often work together. One dies and therefore exits the world of the living, but the rituals associated with this event demand a performance of the end. A ceremony is held. People gather, they lament and there is, perhaps, healing. This leads to questions about what exits and endings might entail. What cultural protocols are put in place and how do these protocols shape and inform behaviours? What if the protocols are blocked or inhibited for some reason? If the exit is incomplete? What happens to the body, the soul, the community in this case?

In a broader sense what does or might it mean to leave, for someone to stop, to be no more? What rituals, performances or other creative acts help communities to frame and understand exits and endings when emotional attachment and responsibility are involved? In 2023 major exits from the world of performance have included the deaths of Jane Birkin, Sinéad O’Connor, Barry Humphries, Shane MacGowan, Tina Turner, Glenda Jackson, Mbongeni Ngema, Tom Wilkinson, Lee Sun-kyun and Benjamin Zephaniah, among many others. What public and private rituals occurred around these exits that may have helped those left behind? What are the differences between those who die in public, that is, those who are mourned publicly through state funerals, and those who die beyond the spotlight? Those who die alone, or quietly?

The apparatus for exits and endings in the theatre machine are many and advanced through jargon. From the physical structures of wings, flying bars, exits and traps (grave traps, cauldron, diaphragm, star and vampire traps) to the metaphysical states of ‘corpsing’, freezing, dying (as in failing), or killing (as in succeeding) on stage or playing the Death Role. Together with the technical devices of falling action, slow fade, the finale, exeunt omnes and going dark. Then the inevitable production post-mortem and post-show discussion. And through it all, no matter what takes place on stage, the green (or red) EXIT signs, always lit, always inviting, to guide the audience through safe passage and escape (figure of ‘human moving purposely’). No refuge for the actor who must die (in the play) night after night, perhaps for months, and even for matinees, if the production is successful. What are the techniques for pretending to die on stage (acting dead): breath and muscular control, stillness, mindfulness, a contemplation on life? And how is such frequent and successive death repeated and sustained? And then there are the performers who confound their admiring audiences by actually dying on stage. The list is long, from the French playwright and actor-manager Molière to the British magician/comedian Tommy Cooper, from Japanese Butoh dancer Yoshiyuki Takada to Malaysian snake charmer Ali Khan Samsudin. The modes of ending are many: coughing fits, strokes, heart attacks, being crushed by falling props or failed mechanics, even venom. Less common, the assassination of an audience member, and the irreverent quip ‘other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play’, an enduring badinage for thespians. The play that President Lincoln and the First Lady were watching on 14 April 1865 was the farce Our American Cousin by English playwright Tom Taylor, and the assassin was the actor John Wilkes Booth, who was well-acquainted with the play and the Ford’s Theatre, Washington – both its stage and exits.

Abraham Lincoln’s funeral is still regarded as one of the most elaborate in ‘recent history’. Following a funeral procession from the White House to the Capitol rotunda his body lay in state for several days and then embarked on a train journey through seven states, visiting 170 cities. It is estimated that 1.5 million mourners visited his body and seven million stood to witness the train passing. Standing still, witnessing in silence, walking slowly past, signing a book of remembrance, creating carpets of flowers and candlelit tableaux are all ways to perform civic loss and grief – to mark exit and endings. And state funerals of royalty, presidents and prime ministers allow for opulent and exuberant celebration. In the UK: Queen Victoria in 1901, Winston Churchill in 1965, Princess Diana in 1997 and Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 generated an extraordinary outpouring of civilian grief and participatory mourning. These funerals, like those elaborated in other cultures (Balinese cremations, Zoroastrian/Parsi ‘Towers of Silence’, Tibetan Buddhist ‘sky burials’, Varanasi/Hindu parades) are magnificent performances with multiple levels of participation and coproduction. But the simple wake, the private gathering, the intimate tribute, the care of the ‘end-of-life doula’, or death midwife, and the actions of skilful (and occasionally mischievous) funeral celebrants are all performances that we wish to embrace in this issue.

This is not just the case with humans of course; there are also the exits and endings of animals and plants. Mass extinction due to human-induced climate change, the death of a precious pet, the loss of a favourite species. How do we respond to these exits and endings? Do we accept or resist these losses? What performative actions do we undertake to respond? To capture the loss, to demand change or to mourn? What of the larger potential loss of the planet in terms of habitability? How might we think about, or perform exits and endings in the context of a loss of this scale?

To return to our home context though, how are exits and endings performed within theatre and performance? How 'best' might the dead appear on stage and how do/should/might audiences react? First, of course, they must understand that this is an 'act' to be able to respond to it. These are broad questions that are shaped by different world theatre cultures. Death and dying, exits and endings take particular forms in Noh, Kabuki, Kathakali, kutiyattam, Topeng and Butoh and many other cultural and cultural and religious contexts. Likewise different ages in European theatre have developed different performance traditions: messengers reporting death (unseen) in Classical Greek theatre, in contrast to the gory pageants, mimes and animal sacrifice of Roman theatre, the bloody excess of Jacobean revenge tragedy to the spectacular Grand Guignol and more recently the intense extremity of Sarah Kane’s plays. Exits and endings have taken different forms. Must we consider the art of dying ‘ars moreindi’ and how might we understand this in the context of twenty-first-century performance?

Indeed, what happens when a performance dies mid-performance, on stage? When its ephemerality and precariousness become all too real – when its life falters, when the heartbeat of the show, stalls and crashes. Where do we, as those who remain, go from there? What is the impact or legacy of such an act? What of the act of exiting the stage itself? What are the rituals and conventions that inform how this occurs? The EXIT light and the running figure remain ablaze … when is it the right time to make an exit? When is an exit untimely?

Finally, should we exit gracefully or go should we ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’? (Thomas 1952)

 

We welcome single-authored essays, co-authored contributions, artistic interventions, short provocations, critical reports and other materials engaging with the topic.

 

Submissions may include but are not limited to:

•The politics of death on stage

•State funerals and the performance of mourning

•How do we perform or represent a useful or a good death?

•How to exit gracefully

•Acts of resistance in the face of exits and endings. Refusing to go…

•What is the relevance of ‘ars moreindi’ (the art of dying well) in the contemporary context?

•Professional mourning and its impact on grieving

•Paying respects – queuing, singing, remembering the dead

•Dying for one’s art; the art of stage death and death on stage

•Accounting for the end of a species

•Bringing on the end; responding to work that refuses

•Exiting the theatre; when to go and when to stay.

•Rendering the end of the planet through performance

 

References

Beckett, Samuel (1965) Waiting for Godot, London: Faber and Faber

Shakespeare, William (1609) Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, London: Folger, First Folios.

Thomas, Dylan (1952) In Country Sleep and Other Poems, New York: New Directions

 

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:

Richard Gough: cprgough@gmail.com

Helena Grehan h.grehan@ecu.edu.au

 

Schedule:

Proposals: Outcomes April 2024

First drafts: July 2024

Final drafts: October 2024

Publication: Spring 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.

•           Due to the large number of submissions we receive, we are unable to provide feedback on declined proposals.

 

Volume 30, Issue 1 - On Music

Deadline: 22 April 2024

 

Issue editors:

Tom Armstrong, Georgia Volioti and Christopher Wiley

Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, UK

 

Aims, context and purpose:

This issue of the journal Performance Research seeks to reflect critically on the development of music performance studies across the early twenty-first century while simultaneously showcasing the current status of practice and research on music performance in a range of musical genres and envisaging future directions for the field. Key questions that it aims to address include:

 •  What is music performance studies and how can it address (some of) the challenges, complexities and uncertainties we face in the twenty-first century?

•  How do scholars/scholar-practitioners currently engage imaginatively and critically with music performance in all its multifaceted elements and across different contexts?

•  What does the field of music performance studies (broadly conceived) look like in relation to performance studies across the disciplines?

 

Twenty years ago, the main precursors to a budding field of music performance studies included the musicological branches of music theory and analysis, historically informed performance practice and foundational strands of music psychology research. Over the years, the increasing cross-fertilization of music(ological) studies by the theoretical work of eminent scholars – particularly, Philip Auslander (on liveness), Richard Schechner (on performativity), Georgina Born (on mediation and on a relational musicology), John Rink (on performance analysis), Nicholas Cook (on a systematic retheorization of musicological concepts and approaches) and Darla Crispin and Mine Doğantan-Dack among others (on artistic practice-as-research) – has opened up music performance studies into a flourishing transdisciplinary field of enquiry. But whereas on paper scholars often seemingly tackle the question, ‘What is music performance (studies)?’ by addressing it through a discussion of the emergence of a succession of disciplinary ‘turns’– for example, the ‘performative/practice’ turn, the ‘relational’ turn, the ‘practice/reflexive’ turn, the ‘non-human/materialist’ turn – plenty of work still remains to be undertaken on the theoretical and methodological bases with which music performance scholars and practitioners engage. In seeking critically to interrogate current and future directions in music performance studies, this issue of Performance Research aims to address how disciplinary currents and influences such as the above not only shape (in a ‘top-down’ manner) but are shaped, subverted, cross-fertilized and renewed by scholar-practitioners’ work from the bottom up. In the process, the issue will serve to reflect on the scope and nature of border-crossings and transdisciplinarity for the field of music performance studies.

 

Ultimately, the publication of this issue has particularly timely relevance for re-evaluating the status of music (and music performance) within arts and humanities scholarship in the light of rapidly shifting sociopolitical, disciplinary, institutional and curricular debates and concerns given the many pressures on the contemporary neoliberal university.

 

Contributions to this issue might include, but are not limited to, the following:

● epistemological and methodological issues in music performance research, synergies and oppositions in cross-disciplinary exchanges, mixing of concepts and methods, provocations and critical reflections demonstrated through concrete examples

● practice-as-research (PaR) in music performance, including reflections, critique, new paradigms, PaR as stand-alone tool or as tool in a multi-method approach

● collaboration in performance in cross-genre performance, or cross-agency collaboration and human–non-human interactions

● improvisation in performance of any musical genre

● indeterminacy in performance, for example through open notational approaches, live electronics, flexible ensemble interaction, unpredictability created through interventions in instruments/software/playing techniques and so on

● new interpretations and re-imaginings of musical scores and/or sound documents, including complex notations, re-envisioning narratives of performance history and so forth

● performance analysis/performing analysis, to include critical reflections and/or new developments

● applied empirical performance research such as in music pedagogy or in historical performance practice

● live and technologically mediated performance, inclusive of both physical instruments/material objects and new digital media, performers’ expanded skillsets via technology and/or collaboration

● embodiment in performance, for example, the body in performance, gesture(s) in performance, notation and/as performance choreography

● identities in/through performance

● gender and music performance, including trans performance, performing gender

● post-pandemic performance, incorporating issues such as performance precarity and performing inclusivity

● decolonizing music performance: prospects, challenges, provocations for reconstituting music performance beyond the margins

● music performance and the environment, for example, performance and the landscape, climate change and sustainability

● music performance and healing, performance as therapeutic agent

● the criticism of performance, to include aesthetics and value judgement, evaluation of music performance

● creativity in music performance, examples from research and applied interventions

● performer–audience behaviours, relations and interactions across different contexts

 

Format

•           Authors are invited to submit an abstract of circa 500 words, structured as follows: title, aims/purpose, content outline, impact, conclusion.

•           Following review and selection of abstracts, successful authors will be asked to submit draft articles of 3,500–4,000 (maximum) words in length (including in-text citations and reference list, and any footnotes, though the latter should be avoided unless strictly necessary).

•           Non-standard formats such as artist pages, highly illustrated articles and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies are also warmly encouraged.

•           Authors are asked critically to address, explore or interrogate new theoretical and methodological directions for the field of music performance studies as an integral part of their contribution. Abstracts and prospective articles are invited from across the range of different musical repertories, traditions and methodologies in the study and practice of music performance (see the indicative themes/content above).

 

The editors are looking to commission around 20 to 25 articles in total. They are committed to diversity and inclusion, and warmly encourage contributions from all sections of the academic community, including those who are likely to be under-represented in scholarship. 

 

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:

Tom Armstrong – t.armstrong@surrey.ac.uk

Georgia Volioti – g.volioti@surrey.ac.uk

Christopher Wiley – c.wiley@surrey.ac.uk

 

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.

•           Due to the large number of submissions we receive, we are unable to provide feedback on declined proposals.