CALL FOR PAPERS
Reperformance
An interdisciplinary symposium hosted by the Performing Arts Department of
Washington University in St. Louis
September 14-15, 2012
Deadline for proposals: March 15, 2012
Featured speakers:
Judith Chazin-Bennahum, Professor Emerita, University of New Mexico, awardee
of the CORPS de Ballet International Lifetime Achievement Award, and author
of René Blum & The Ballet Russes
Paul Menzer, Program Director of the Shakespeare and Performance Program,
Mary Baldwin College, and author of The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts
Rebecca Schneider, Chair of Theatre and Performance Studies, Brown
University, and author of Performance Remains, and The Explicit Body in
Performance
Performances created and curated by:
James Jordan, Ballet Master with the Kansas City Ballet, and Répétiteur of
the Tudor Trust, with dancers from the Kansas City Ballet
Mark Tribe, New York City based artist, and author of New Media Art, and
Chelsea Knight, New York City based artist, and 2007 Fulbright Fellow
***
Reperformanceundefinedthe recreation of past performance phenomenaundefinedhas lately taken on new importance in several arenas. In 2010 Marina Abramović declared,
“Reperformance is the new concept, the new idea!” apropos of a major
retrospective of her performance works at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. Posing questions about embodied memory, disappearance, and
representation, Rebecca Schneider has recently situated recreations of works
by Abramović, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, and others in relation to historical
reenactments, such as those undertaken by Civil War enthusiasts. Meanwhile,
experimental theatre companies including The Wooster Group, Les Freres
Corbusier, and the Rude Mechs ensemble have applied reperformance techniques
to the recreation of celebrated avant-garde performances of the 1960s, 70s,
and 80s.
These endeavors have prompted questions of authenticity, intellectual
property, and historical legacy. But reperformance presents challenges to
artists working in many contexts, genres and media. Trusts established to
safeguard ballet masterworks in the late twentieth centuryundefinedespecially works
by choreographers who did not work with one particular companyundefinedhave grappled with similar concerns: what constitutes a “recreation,” or a “restaging?” In
what does the work of the dance répétiteur consist? Theatre artists and
historians have long worked to preserve both living formal traditionsundefinedsuch
as Kutiyattam and Suzuki techniqueundefinedand performance styles rooted in bygone
erasundefinedsuch as Noh, Elizabethan-era, and Restoration acting styles. The
convergence of such creative challenges and possibilities prompts us to ask,
have we arrived at a critical moment for reperformance that spans the broad
spectrum of performance behavior?
The Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis
welcomes proposals for papers that examine reperformance for a symposium to
be hosted September 14-15, 2012. We encourage proposals that engage with:
- Reperformance theory and practice in dance, drama, performance art, and other fields
- The preservation and reproduction of discrete performance techniques such as Suzuki, Commedia dell’arte, etc.
- Choreography and trusts
- Historical re-enactment and living history
- Performance ontology in theory: performance’s disappearance, remains, and recirculations. Performance, memory and history
Please send abstracts for 20 minute presentations, including a 250-300 word
abstract and a short bio text to: ckoneal@wustl.edu and pcamp@wustl.edu.
