PERFORMANCE PARADIGM (# 5) 2009
After Effects: Performing the Ends of Memory
This issue of Performance Paradigm investigates the role of performance in the lived experiences and discourses of trauma and memory. Alongside trauma studies, Performance studies foregrounds models of witnessing, embodiment and rehearsal to examine why and how trauma is represented and what work these representations do in the world. For some, performance provides a social space in which to act out as well as work through personal trauma. For others, performance facilitates processes of surrogacy and substitution, becoming a place to create prosthetic memories and to produce proxy witnesses.
The editors invite papers that consider the connection between trauma, memory and performance across a range of theatrical, cultural, social and political sites. Some of the questions we are interested in include the following: what can performance studies bring to our understandings of trauma? What can trauma and memory studies bring to the dramaturgies and exigencies of performance? How do particular performances illuminate or complicate the ethics of representing trauma? How can social and political concerns connect with the personal and pathological dimensions of memory and trauma studies?
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
• national apologies;
• ceremonies of reparation and public memorials;
• documentary, verbatim, and testimonial theatres;
• false memory, false witness, perjury and performance;
• witnessing in/as/through performance;
• site-specific performance and ‘traumascapes’;
• mediatised witnessing and global performance;
• acts of surrogacy, substitution and displacement;
• the relation between the archive and repertoire;
• new modes of perception and spectatorship;
• human rights theatre, communities of memory;
• postmemory, prosthetic memory and displaced embodiment;
• the contaminated logics of the postdramatic and posttraumatic;
• the parallel fortunes of performance studies and trauma studies.
Please send proposals by email, including a short abstract or description to:
Dr. Bryoni Trezise
School of English, Media and Performing Arts
University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia
(b.trezise@unsw.edu.au)
Caroline Wake
School of English, Media and Performing Arts
University of New South Wales
(cwake@hotmail.com)
The due date for proposals is September 30 2008. Final material will be due by 31 January 2009. Performance Paradigm (#5) will be published in May 2009. Please visit our website for further information and instructions for submission at
Performance Paradigm is a refereed journal published by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW and edited by Helena Grehan, Peter Eckersall and Edward Scheer.
