Theresa J. May, founder and artistic director of Earth Matters on Stage, and Wendy Arons, director of the Performance and Ecology Public Art Initiative have issued a call for papers for a jointly edited publication, Essays in Performance and Ecology to be published in 2011.
The proposed anthology of essays, interviews, and artist statements will include papers dealing with ecocritical concerns as they relate to theatre and performance. The editors are especially interested in explorations that employ the science of ecology as a critical framework, or employ environmental history to contextualize performance.
The topics welcomed include, but are not limited to:
- the ecological situatedness of language
- the dialogic relationship between onstage/offstage ecological discourses
- intersections and complications of landscape/body
- performances that participate in/reflect ecological debates
- ecology, technology and representation
- the cultural (de)construction of ‘nature’
- performative intersections of social justice and ecological issues
- partnership projects in the arts and sciences
- ecological dramaturgy
- community/place and ecology
- the body as a site of ecological intersections
- the ecologies of theatrical space
- semiotics of ‘nature’
- subjectivity/inter-subjectivity and the ecological self
- animal representation on/off stage
- eco-activism/community-based performance.
The editors encourage submissions by artists working in the area of eco-performance and who reflect critically on their work and/or process, and encourage proposals that engage a question about how performance (broadly constructed) has or might function as part of ecological communities.
A working or final draft or an abstract of 500 words should be sent as an attachment to both editors by 15 October:
Wendy Arons, Associate Professor of Dramatic Literature and Dramaturgy, Carnegie Mellon University
warons@andrew.emu.edu
