2010 Conference

CORD is no longer accepting proposals for this conference.

Call for Proposals:

Theater and dance are fellow travelers. Sometimes they are close friends, sharing lodgings, swapping influences, commenting on the same delights and disturbances, even taking a turn or two on the floor together. Sometimes they are rivals, insisting on their own visions of aesthetic merit, concepts of time, space and body, and relationship to history and culture. And sometimes they take divergent paths, walking at different paces, occupied with their own thoughts and casting barely a glance toward one another. Next year will be a time of reunion for these two embodied arts, a time for exchanging ideas and reflecting on their long relationship.

In order to facilitate this reunion, the 2010 joint conference will revolve around the concept of corporeal power. In physics, power is defined as work divided by the time needed to complete the work, or work over time. We seek to focus on the moving body in performance and examine how power has “worked” on/through/with bodies throughout history (over time). We encourage applicants to consider the generative possibilities of clusters of words such as power, movement, mass, gravity, so as to envision the possibility of a politics that is embodied, as weight in bodies in motion, in which there are collisions, reactions between forces in a kind of 'Newtonian' universe of dance-theatre.  In foregrounding the politics of moving bodies, we hope simultaneously to blur the disciplinary boundaries between dance and theater, and mine the productive relationships between them. Though the focus of the conference is on the intersections of theater and dance, applicants are encouraged to explore the wide variety of embodied, expressive cultural forms (theatre, dance, ritual, fiesta, performance art, international festivals, religious, civil observances, everyday life, etc.). Too, applicants might consider the moving body in theater, theatricality in dance, and genres of performance on and off stage that don’t fit into neat categories.
The deadline for submitting proposals for the plenary sessions and the working sessions has passed.

Working Sessions: We invite proposals for working sessions: this category includes roundtables, seminars, research groups, reading groups, forums, workshops, as well as formats that have yet to be imagined. “Working sessions” is a general category that allows the session leader(s) to convene small groups around a proposed area of inquiry or practice, and to structure a method and format that best suits the goals of the group. No formats will be privileged over others; all proposals will be given equal consideration according to their merit. Proposals include a rationale for the intellectual/scholarly/artistic merits of the session as well as a rationale for its format, and must be accompanied by the “ASTR/TLA/CORD Working Sessions Proposal Form,” attached below. Proposals related to the conference theme are particularly welcome, but not necessary. We strongly encourage working session proposals that would explicitly bring together theatre and dance scholars.  Once the program committee makes its selection of working sessions, each session convener will issue a specialized call for participants for that session; this second round of calls for participants in working sessions will be posted on the ASTR and CORD and TLA websites, with a late May deadline for submission.

For more information about ASTR working sessions see: http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx 

Inquiries are welcome; please contact Nadine George-Graves or Anthea Kraut at astr.2010@gmail.com with program questions or Nancy Erickson (NEricksn@aol.com) with any questions about conference logistics.

Anthea Kraut, University of California, Riverside, Co-chair
Nadine George-Graves, University of California, San Diego, Co-chair
Susan Brady, TLA representative

Stacy Wolf, Princeton University
Juliet McMains, University of Washington
Scott Magelssen, Bowling Green State University
David Saltz, University of Georgia
Patrick Alcedo, York University
Cindy Garcia, University of Minnesota
Deborah Paredez, University of Texas, Austin
Zelma Badu-Younge, Ohio University
Clare Croft, University of Texas, Austin
Helen Thomas, London College of Fashion
James Harding, University of Mary Washington
SanSan Kwan, California State University, Los Angeles
Michelle Granshaw, University of Washington

For more information on the organizations, and their respective honors and awards, see: http://astr.org/, http://tla.library.unt.edu/, and http://www.cordance.org