Performance Research Journal

The Dynamic Interchange between Scholarship and Practice

AIMS AND SCOPE

Performance Research is a specialist journal published four times a year which aims to promote a dynamic interchange between scholarship and practice in the expanding field of performance.

Interdisciplinary in vision and international in scope its emphasis is on contemporary performance within changing world cultures. Although Performance Research is published in English we welcome submissions in the contributor's preferred language and encourage submissions which challenge the boundaries between disciplines and genres.

The journal has received a great deal of praise for its subject matter and the visual and textual layout of the material. Institutional and Individual subscriptions continue to rise.

The most cost-effective way to subscribe is through membership of CPR.

Mae deuddegfed gyfrol Performance Research wrthi’n cael ei chyhoeddi ar hyn o bryd (2007) a, hyd yn hyn cyhoeddwyd deunaw rhifyn ar hugain, bob un â’i thema benodol sy’n ymwneud ag ymarfer ac ymchwil yn y celfyddydau perfformiadol cyfoes. Mae pob rhifyn yn cynnwys erthyglau beirniadol ac ysgolheigaidd, tudalennau i’r artist, adolygiadau, dogfennaeth a chyfweliadau.

SUBMISSIONS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

Performance Research mainly publishes material relating to the theme of each issue. However, a section of each issue is dedicated to 'off theme' material. For details of our upcoming themes, please contact our Administrator.

We are currently seeking submissions on all areas of performance research, practice and scholarship from artists, scholars, curators and critics and invite submissions and proposals for forthcoming issues.

As well as substantial essays, interviews, reviews and documentation we welcome proposals using visual, graphic and photographic forms, including photo essays and original artwork which extends the possibilities for the visual page. We are also interested in proposals for collaborations between artists and critics.
Proposals may be submitted to the Administrator at the address below on one sheet of A4 or by e-mail attachment containing an abstract, proposed word count and description.

Editors:
Richard Gough , Artistic Director, Centre for Performance Research and Senior Research Fellow, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK
Ric Allsopp , Founder of Writing Research Associates and Research Fellow, Dartington College of Arts, Totnes, Devon, UK

Full details of current issues are available on the dedicated Performance Research Journal web site at: ww.performance-research.net

Detailed Guidelines for Contributors are available on request.
Proposals, suggestions, contributions and enquiries about submission to the journal should be sent to:

Sandra Laureri
Performance Research
Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion,
Wales, SY23 3AJ, UK
telephone: +44 (0) 1970 628716
fax: +44 (0) 1970 622132
e-mail:performance-research@aber.ac.uk
Web site: www.performance-research.net

PLEASE NOTE: The Administrator is unable to deal with subscription enquiries.

If you would like to subscribe to ‘Performance Research’, have any enquiries regarding your current CPR subscription or would like to purchase back issues, please contact Helen Gethin at CPR e-mail:


For contents lists of available back issues and to order these past issues please contact Helen Gethin at CPR or order directly from the bookshop section of this website: www.performancebooks.co.uk

The usual price for journal subscription is £75 however CPR Members can pay the discounted price of £40. To become a CPR member or to subscribe to the journal please contact CPR.


PR 13.1 On Choreography

Edited by André Lepecki and Ric Allsopp

In the contexts of European performance arts in particular, choreography as a term and as a field of activity has shifted radically since the 1990s. Stable and historical definitions of choreography, as inscriptions of movement characterized through compositional approaches to bodily movement in time and space, have moved towards choreographic approaches that question such normative relationships between movement, composition and the production of dance, and expand the notion of choreography as an art that includes a wider range of conceptual tools, materials and strategies. A shift towards the conceptualization of choreography in terms other than or additional to the arrangement of bodily movement has produced a range of performance work that suggests that choreography is a field of contemporary arts practice that provides not only vectors for new forms of trans-disciplinary arts research but also a locus for questioning the orthodoxies of contemporary art work and practice. Through this work choreography can now be seen to invoke, recuperate and incorporate other forms of cultural practice (both historical and contemporary).

A selection of articles from this issue includes:
- Dance in general or choreographing the public, making assemblages. Rudi Laermans
- Jérôme Bel: An Interview. Una Bauer
- How do you want to say Goodbye? A Choreography for a Last Performance. Lin Hixson
- Petrified? Some Thoughts on Practical Research and Dance Historiography. Kate Elswit
- Troika Ranch: Making new Connections. A Deleuzian Approach to Performance and Technology. Susan Broadhurst



13.2 On Performatics

Edited by Richard Gough & Grzegorz Ziółkowski

On Performatics is a special edition of PR inspired by, arising from, and responding to the conference Performance Studies: and Beyond hosted by the Grotowski Centre, Wrocl/aw, Poland. The Polish title of the conference was Performatyka: perspektywy rozwojowe, which can be translated as Performance Studies: the perspectives for development. However, is it more provocative, and potentially more useful, if the literal translation is retained and Performatyka is rendered back into English as Performatics? What might this term suggest? Does it have the potential to function universally and denote a field of study that might otherwise be difficult to capture by the Anglo-American definition of Performance Studies with its specific terms of reference -- a term which is often lost in translation, diffused and confused even as it strives for global recognition. What relevance and currency could Performatics have? Might it function as an adjective of performance as well as a way of analysing it (as an alternative to the over-used and abused ‘performative’)? And what equivalences to Performatyka exist in other languages and cultures and how might they be defined, harnessed and brought into use? On Performatics will reflect on the impact and efficacy of this term in Poland, today and for the future and with a critical historical perspective together with speculation on its potential currency beyond.

A selection of articles from this issue includes:
- Towards an Anthropology of Performance(s). Leszek Kolankiewicz
- The Performative Matrix: Alladeen and Disorientalism. Jon Mckenzie
- The Ceramic Age: Things Hidden since the foundation of Performance Studies. Alan Read
- Song from Beyond the Dark. Dariusz Kosiński
- Surrogate Stages: Theatre, Performance and the challenge of New Media. Christopher Balme
- Back of Beyond. Richard Gough



Forthcoming Issues...

13.3 Congregation

Edited by Claire MacDonald

Congregation brings together writings about performance and religious practice – suggesting in its title a space in which voices gather. The question that Congregation asks is a simple one – how might looking at religion through the lens of performance, that is, through practice rather than belief, illuminate and better inform some of the ways we think about religion? At a time when religion has once again entered the public arena as a divisive and contentious subject, Congregation addresses the religious imagination – exploring how religious practice informs artistic practice. The issue covers a broad territory and many religious traditions, artistic and scholarly approaches, levels of engagement with religious practice and reflections on art, artists, pasts and futures.


13.4 On Appearance

Edited by Richard Gough and Adrian Kear

Beginning from the conviction that appearance matters – and matters as the very ‘stuff’and substance of the kind of things we call performance – this issue examines the materiality of appearance as a key component of theatrical and social events. Exploring the role appearance plays in a range of cultural forms – from body art to live TV, shamanic invocation to video installation, magic show to ‘non-professional’ performance – On Appearance charts the construction, circulation and contestation of some of the imagined possibilities, lived realities, political identifications, and performative opportunities opened up by thinking through the logic of appearance. As well as examining the correlation between modes of appearance and practices of disappearance, and investigating their inscription in the recuperative dynamics of power, On Appearance explicates the ways in which appearance matters in affecting and positively producing the conditions, forms and relations structuring what Jacques Rancière calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’: the political organisation of sense-making activities within the intelligible framework of the visible.


Volume 14 of Performance Research (2009) will include issues on the following themes:
- Performing Literatures (eds. Stephen Bottoms and Richard Gough)
- On Training (eds. Richard Gough and Simon Shepherd)
- On Dramaturgy (eds. Karoline Gritzner, Patrick Primavesi, Heike Roms)
- Transplantations (eds. Ric Allsopp and Phillip Warnell)


Performance Research has currently published its thirteenth volume and to date forty-four thematically-based issues on contemporary performance arts practice and research. Each issue contains critical and scholarly articles, artist's pages, reviews, documentation and interviews.

Performance Research is published quarterly by Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Ltd. To find out how you can subscribe at a discounted rate please contact the Centre for Performance Research.