Welcome to EASTAP

The deadline for article submissions for issue 4 of Sinais de Cena: Performing Arts and Theatre Studies journal to be published in 2025 has been extended. Information on submission norms is available on the journal’s website. Extended Deadline: September 30, 2024.

Call for papers (nr. 4) Performance, Ecology and the End of the World

Performance, Ecology, and the End of the World

(coord. Gustavo Vicente)

The reflection on the potential of performing arts to rethink humanity’s relationship with the natural domain has been gaining clearer contours since the end of the 20th century. The challenge launched by Una Chaudhuri in 1994, through her article “There must be a lot of fish in that lake: toward an ecological theater” – which demanded from theatrical practice a consistent response to the environmental crisis – is, by many, considered the kick-off of the field of knowledge associated with what we today call Eco-performance or Eco-theatre. Since then, a growing number of authors have been delving deeper into the terms (material, philosophical, cultural, and/or political) through which artistic practice can be articulated with ecological thinking (e.g., Baz Kershaw, Wendy Arons and Theresa May, Alan Read, Vicky Angelaki, Carl Lavery, Lisa Woynarski), developing new questions and conceptual perspectives around the capacity of the performing arts to bring about a change in attitude towards the way we live on Earth.

Full CfP available at https://revistas.rcaap.pt/sdc/chamada-dossie-ecologia ...

☠️ Deadine Extended!! 💀

EJTP CfP: Exile and (Neo)Nationalism
European Journal of Theatre and Performance (EJTP)

Call for Proposals, Issue 9

Exile and (Neo)Nationalism

Guest editors: @ya.na5771 and @pieter.verstraete

proposal deadline EXTENDED: 1 September 2024

In the last few decades, we have seen an increase of migration waves testing the border policies of (Fortress) Europe whilst impacting cultural debates and artistic expressions around asylum, exile, and (forced) displacement. The latter has also caused an increase of supportive cultural programs dedicated to art in exile. In literary, cultural, and theatre scholarship, we have seen the emergence of diaspora as a critical concept for reflecting on contemporary politics, the state of our democracies, and established definitions of societies and communities, calling into question deep-rooted nation-state models. In fact, as Meerzon (2012) has suggested, diasporic and exilic communities pose a direct counter-arrangement to Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (1983), as a product of their own collective imagination and practices of integration. The exilic community, on the contrary, is based on rupture, disparateness, and bifurcation, but also on a shared experience of displacement, which defines newly forming transnational communities. It was Brecht who already referred in his exilic poem ‘Über die Bezeichnung Emigranten’ (‘On the Term Emigrants’, 1937) to the exiles as ‘us’ against ‘them’, those who expelled.

Full CfP on the EJTP website! ...

Discover EJTP’s latest issue 7!

Moving from Russia to France to Japan, then crossing the Atlantic to Latin America, and having a final stop in Iceland, EJTP issue 7 travels across various geographical regions in a way that reflects the scope and aims of EJTP. For even while this journal is called the European Journal of Theatre and Performance, it is acutely aware of the fact that Europe does not exist in isolation from other parts of the world. The running thread emerging from this issue seems to confirm this condition: in times marked by a deep sense of urgence and crisis, it has become hard, if not impossible, for the performing arts to shy away from the world that surrounds us and to question instead what imaginative alternatives artists might have to offer.

The contributions featuring in this issue’s Essays section were submitted in response to an open call without a predetermined theme. What connects these essays, however, is how they each dive deep into the either explicit or implicit ways in which theatre and performance artists have dealt, or are still dealing, with the distinct political realities making up their world. The topics range from Russian artists living in exile and struggling with the traumatic burden of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; to the representation of war in nineteenth-century puppet theatre; to the strategic overturning of conspiracy theories through experimental radio art.

The Scholar in Focus section provides a curated sample of the writings of Lola Proaño Gómez, an esteemed expert in Latin American theatre and the Associate Scholar of the 2023 EASTAP Conference in Aarhus. Several of her texts appear for the first time in English translation in this issue.
The From the Archives section focuses on the challenges that archivist Sigríður Jónsdóttir has been facing after being appointed as a single staff member to build a new performing arts division within the National and University Library of Iceland.

The issue concludes with the Book Reviews section, featuring five reviews of recent publications that interestingly expand on some of the major topics also addressed throughout other contributions in this issue. ...

We are delighted to announce that the prominent playwright, director and performer Marco Paolini @marcopaoliniofficial (“La Fabbrica del Mondo”) will be the EASTAP Associate Artist for the #EASTAP24 Annual Conference in Sitges.

Marco Paolini is one of the most important voices in the Italian ‘’theatre of narration’’ movement and in the theatre for civil rights in Europe. He is the author of some iconic performances and works such as Il racconto del Vajont (“The Tale of the Vajont”), a 1993 performance on the Vajont catastrophe performed hundreds of times in Italy and broadcast live on public television in 1997.

With “La Fabbrica del Mondo” project, he is active in challenging and discussing the idea of ecosystems in theatre, ecological theatre and creative processes. In 2023, he was the promoter of the theatre project VajontS 23, a collective reflection on the Vajont tale and the future of the environment and climate change. Many artists were invited to create their own production of VajontS, based on the peculiarities of their local area, giving rise to a European event with more than 1000 institutions involved at continental level. ...

Open Call

EJTP currently welcomes the submission for the Essays Section for Issue 8. If interested, send your article by 15 July 2024.

Articles submitted to EJTP should be between 6.000 and 9.000 words, and follow the Journal Style Guide, which can be downloaded on our website. A Word Template for articles is also available at EJTP’s website. Authors are kindly requested to familiarise themselves with the profile and aims of the Journal at the EJTP webpage.

Please send your article to ejtp_editors@eastap.com.

All submitted articles selected by EJTP’s Editorial Board undergo double-blind peer review by anonymous experts. Please note that contributions in the Essays Section must be based on original work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

For any queries related to publishing in EJTP, please contact the Editors-in-Chief Luk Van den Dries or Timmy De Laet at ejtp_editors@eastap.com. ...

Call for papers (nr. 4) Performance, Ecology and the End of the World

Performance, Ecology, and the End of the World

(coord. Gustavo Vicente)

The reflection on the potential of performing arts to rethink humanity’s relationship with the natural domain has been gaining clearer contours since the end of the 20th century. The challenge launched by Una Chaudhuri in 1994, through her article “There must be a lot of fish in that lake: toward an ecological theater” –[i] which demanded from theatrical practice a consistent response to the environmental crisis – is, by many, considered the kick-off of the field of knowledge associated with what we today call Eco-performance or Eco-theatre. Since then, a growing number of authors have been delving deeper into the terms (material, philosophical, cultural, and/or political) through which artistic practice can be articulated with ecological thinking (e.g., Baz Kershaw, Wendy Arons and Theresa May, Alan Read, Vicky Angelaki, Carl Lavery, Lisa Woynarski), developing new questions and conceptual perspectives around the capacity of the performing arts to bring about a change in attitude towards the way we live on Earth.

One of the main issues addressed by this interdisciplinary field is the anthropocentric tradition of the theatrical medium itself, within which humanity has occupied the central role of artistic questioning, relegating contemporary practice to the sphere of culture, as opposed to a savage idea of nature that exists “outside” the world. Some more recent practice has attempted to break with this bipartite logic, insofar as it has sought to consider the natural environment, not only through its biological attributes but also ethical ones – recognizing, in this way, the complexity inherent to human understanding of the network of ecological relationships in which it is necessarily integrated and the intrinsic value of other forms of life.

Read the full CfP on the EASTAP website. ...

Call for papers deadline extended to 17 March!

Don’t forget that, in order to submian abstract, you must be a member of EASTAP. Please renew your membership on our website - link in bio.

#EASTAP24
See you in Sitges! ...

We are sad to learn of René Pollesch’s untimely passing. His more than 200 plays are and will remain unique memories: René Pollesch did not write his texts to be staged beyond the performances he himself created together with his actors and scenographers. They were published in print, but he did not allow them to be restaged by others. They were personal, they were in the moment, precisely by being cut and pasted textual montages. Only weeks before Pollesch’s sudden and unexpected death on 26 February, his latest piece had premiered at the Volksbühne, which he led as artistic director since 2021. It was entitled Well nothing is okay, a solo evening with Fabian Hinrichs who had already starred in Pollesch’s Kill Your Darlings. Pollesch became the darling of the 21st century theatre scene and urban intelligentsia across the German speaking countries – and while they laughed about the wit and esprit of Pollesch’s superficially banal textual outpourings, it escaped the most how his theatre exposed and ridiculed the intellectual and not least ethical vacuity of the dominant discourse and its celebrated protagonists. It was this vibrancy of engagement, this new way of thinking an epic-dialectic theatre of the present that, by refusing representation, all the more mirrored and critiqued the society within which it was embedded, that inspired and energised theatre makers across Europe – even if even they may not have understood a single word of the supercomplex montages. With Pollesch’s early death at the age of 61, the Volksbühne era that had commenced with Frank Castorf’s appointment in 1992, and where Pollesch had worked initially mainly in the satellite Prater stage, has come to its end. This is a loss for European theatre. ...

New #EASTAP24 Conference poster design! 🌱❤️ ...

EASTAP is pleased to announce the publication of the book, Performing Arts and Intimacy. The volume features the work of EASTAP colleagues Luk van den Dries, Alix de Morant, and Rui Pina Coelho.

The book can be downloaded free of charge from the link below: http://monographs.uc.pt/iuc/catalog/book/374

Synopsis
The relationship between performing arts and intimacy expresses itself in multiple and contradictory valences, creating heuristic possibilities with profound socio-political implications. The opening of the individual intimate sphere to other intimate spheres configures an act of interpersonal sharing that allows the privilege of the experience of another human being in that which is most profound and singular. But a fair analysis will lead us to recognize that, under certain circumstances, this space of intimacy may also (and perhaps should) legitimately remain closed to others. It is within this framework that, through their creators, theatre and the performing arts have developed interesting ways of dealing with problems of the intimate sphere in the contemporary world. Since performative work invariably leads to the investigation of bodily, emotional, mental, and relational processes of the human condition, this edition intends, through an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach, to contribute to the mapping of the concept of intimacy in its relationship with the performing arts in a plural, political and affective way.

A book launch will take place on 25 October at 5pm. More info here: https://atuarnomundo.wixsite.com/atuar-no-mundo ...

Congratulations to playwright Jon Fosse for winning this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature! 🥳 ...

The Executive Bureau of EASTAP is deeply saddened to learn about the untimely passing of our Ukrainian colleague professor Maya Harbuzyuk, Professor of Drama Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. We had only met this energetic pedagogue, inspired theatre dramaturg and engaged researcher, who was instrumental in introducing decolonial thinking into Ukrainian theatre studies in a pioneering way for European theatre research, at this year`s EASTAP conference in Aarhus in June. In a moving and deeply insightful presentation, she reflected there on how Ukrainian drama and theatre negotiates which voices are being heard and which narratives told in a drama about war produced within the war itself. We send our condolences to prof. Harbuzyuk`s family and her colleagues, and send particular sympathy to our colleagues at Jagiellonian University in Krakow who had supported her and other Ukrainian colleagues through the war, also sponsoring her participation at this year`s EASTAP conference. We will publish a commemoration on the organisation`s website in due course. ...

The European Journal of Theatre and Performance id delighted to announce that Rustom Bharucha, who was EASTAP’s first Associate Scholar, has joined the Journal’s Advisory Board.

Rustom Bharucha is a writer, cultural critic and dramaturg based in Kolkata, India. He is the author of several books including Theatre and the World, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Terror and Performance, The Question of Faith, In the Name of the Secular,Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, Rajasthan: An Oral History, a co-edited volume with Paula Richman on Performing the Ramayana Tradition, and, more recently, The Second Wave: Reflections on the Pandemic through Photography, Performance and Public Culture.

Do check out our webinar with Prof. Bharucha in conversation with Dr Agata Łuksza, which is available on our website and Facebook page.

A warm welcome back to Prof. Bharucha!

#europeantheatre #journal #editorialboard ...

#EASTAP23 Day 2 has begun! Today we welcome our Associate Scholar Prof. Lola Proaño Gomez speaking about ‘The Dramaturgy of Research’ in the context of studying political theatre in Latin America. ...