CALL FOR PAPERS

Cripping Performing Arts

 

       

The Polish open-access journal Didaskalia (https://didaskalia.pl/en) invites submissions that reflect on the actual and potential power of disability to transform performing arts, and theatre and performance studies. We wish to approach this issue from the perspective that sees disability as a generative artistic force and a critical lens. As a creative, academic, and cognitive category, disability has been changing the face of theatre, dance, music, and performance art. We understand the eponymous cripping not only as populating performing arts with non-normative bodyminds, but also as a practice that involves abandoning, or transforming, normative, often ableist, concepts and categories that serve to interpret the world and its diverse inhabitants and build identity hierarchies.  

We would like to probe into the outcomes of this perspectival shift in performing arts. On the one hand, we invite articles that shed new light on the ways in which performances created by artists with disabilities develop new emancipation strategies and comment on the existing discriminatory practices. On the other hand, we acknowledge the urgent need to examine how disability art has been influencing our understandings of the basic elements of a performance, such as: acting, choreography, physical presence, directing, time, space, sound, dramaturgy, the ensemble, the audience, etc. We welcome studies that focus on specific performances and those that seek to analyze creative processes, texts that centre on artistic projects and those that scrutinize their institutional context and the theatrical practices that inform them.

 

Our topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- new stage characters and new perceptions of disability and its role in the world and in individual experience,

- disability aesthetics in performing arts,

- grassroots artivism of people with disabilities (including the impact of new academic concepts and theories on their work),

- new strategies, techniques, and methods in acting, dance, choreography, directing, and stage design, and their relationship with traditional approaches,

- new models of artistic work and production, which value relationality, (inter)dependence, and care (e.g., redefining teamwork; crip time as an alternative to the capitalist regime of efficiency; the process as the artistic goal),

- redefining the relationship with the audience,

- transforming institutions towards greater inclusivity (both with regard to artists and audiences),

- access to theatre, dance, and music schools (can the concept of universal design be applied to theatre and performance school curricula?),

- intersectionality – disability and other minorities and discriminated groups,

- a new vocabulary and new descriptive and analytical strategies in theatre and performance studies,

- revisiting the history of theatre from the perspective of disability studies,

- visions of an accessible and inclusive theatre of the future.

 

We welcome texts in English and Polish. These include:

- academic articles (up to 40,000 characters),

- interviews (up to 30,000 characters),

- essays, manifestos, other textual forms of reflection on your own artistic or/and scholarly practices.

 

Timetable:

- 15 June 2023 – submission of 200-word abstracts to: monika.kwasniewska@gmail.com

- 30 June 2023 – prospective authors are notified of the status of their submission

- 15 October 2023 – full versions of selected papers are due (sent to: monika.kwasniewska@gmail.com)

- November 2023-January 2024 – double-blind reviews and revisions

- February-April 2024 – publication of the texts

 

Theme editors: dr Monika Kwaśniewska, dr Katarzyna Ojrzyńska (guest)

For queries, please contact: Katarzyna Ojrzyńska (katarzyna.ojrzynska@uni.lodz.pl)