Performance, Religion, and Spirituality Working Group
Call For Papers
Performance, Religion, and Spirituality Call for Submissions for IFTR
IFTR - Performance, Religion, and Spirituality
Working Group's conference call
2024 - Manila, Philippines
IFTR’s Performance, Religion, and Spirituality Working Group notes that the broad theme for IFTR’s 2024 conference is Our States of Emergency: Theatres and Performances of Tragedy. We think that contemporary examinations of performance and religion might be especially relevant to this conference theme. We are interested in work that engages with ideas of tragedy, particularly in terms that might question the western hegemony surrounding the identification of tragedy as one side of a binary. We are also interested in work that situates performance as a site of memory, of utopia, and of warning. Theatre is always a state of emergency, because of the precarity of the field, and the precarity and mortality of the lives represented and representing in the field.
We are looking for work that engages with ideas of ritual practices that might engage with tragedy and histories of tragedy within their ontological contexts. This could include work that engages with Girard’s notion of violence and the sacred, along with non-western ways of engaging with ritual as both response to and provocation for living with conflict. This could also include work that challenges how ritual time offers opportunities or exploring non-western indigenous notions of temporality. We are looking for work that engages with and challenges binary thinking, where traditional religions, ancestral belief systems, and local systems of faith are living onto-epistemologies rather than ideas relegated to a ‘primordial past’; works that investigates how gender identities and cultural practices might work together to form coalitions of resistance to intolerance, of performance as memory of past tragedy and as balm against future tragedy. We invite work that engages with Diana Taylor’s notions of the archive and the repertoire as ritual memory in the body of the practitioner. We are also looking for work that engages with practices of addressing and resolving conflicts, of social activist performance that engages with bridging gaps between communities who are divided based on religious beliefs.
With this in mind, we invite proposals for conference papers, performance-presentations, participatory activities, examples of practice as research, and other interventions into what a traditional conference paper might look like. Some of our suggestions are:
Performance as intervention
The roots of Greek Tragedy and its relation to the ‘mysteries’
Protest performance
Performance as collective ritual memory
Tragedy in earth-based religious cosmologies
Indigenous ontologies in relation to tragedy
Ritual responses to pandemic
Ritual responses to war and conflict
The Performance, Religion and Spirituality Group (PRS) is an open network of scholars and artists interested in exploring interconnections between forms and impulses of religions, spiritualities, and theatrical performances, and in attending to the ways performance and spiritual life have come into conversation, cooperation, and conflict, both historically and in the present. The working group is affiliated with two peer-reviewed journals. Performance, Religion and Spirituality, which is an open-access journal, can be found at https://openjournals.utoledo.edu/index.php/prs/index. Information about Ecumenica, a publication of Penn State University Press, can be found at www.ecumenicajournal.org
Submission Instructions:
A proposal should not be more than 300 words, plus a 200-word biography.
Proposals must be submitted through IFTR’s own submission process through Cambridge Core; details at iftr.org/conference by 2 February 2024.
During the submission process, individuals should identify the submitted proposal as intended for a working group session, and specify the Performance, Religion, and Spirituality working group.
Any inquiries may be directed to the PRS convenors:
Kit Danowski
University of Portsmouth
Giuliano Campo
Ulster University