With our wide and continually growing instrumentarium, where any accessible material can be used towards creative ends, contemporary performance practice and performers’ identities are stretching in many directions. We co-create meaning along with things; their particular properties augment our creative process and output. What we use, and how we use it, opens up alternate potentialities for experiencing this world. However, with this expansion of materials contemporary performance faces other challenges. Virtuosity is questioned as performers move frequently between instruments, live-performance alters as virtual platforms proliferate, and actions need ethical consideration as material consumption impacts our global environment. Considering monumental social-cultural shifts are presently occurring, how is contemporary performance dialoguing with the non-human world? What practices are arising from the materials we engage? What meanings are emerging as we form relationships with stuff?

This call for proposals searches for artistic-researchers engaging with varied materials or mediums to discuss their work theoretically and/or through practice-based means. This edition aims to question human-object and human-entity interaction, and consider how we both shape and are shaped by our environments. Considering practice is perpetually in flux, this edition wants to capture a snapshot of ideas, relations, actions, and responses practitioners witness and enact in the world today. It encourages unconventional approaches to the journal format, including co-authorship, autoethnographic accounts, A/V media as research, or otherwise.

Please send a proposal of about 300 words to Colin Frank at U1767479@pgr.hud.ac.uk by February 1st, 2020. He is happy to discuss your application ahead of time. If you want to contribute to this publication in other ways feel free to contact him. Because the journal is a student-run initiative, contributors in post-graduate study or towards the beginning of their career are especially welcome. Editing will occur throughout the process such that you can achieve your best work. Looking forwards to hearing from you!

Timeline:

Proposals due: 1 February 2020
Notification of selection: 15 February 2020
Submissions due: June 2020
Publication: September 2020

More details and past issues can be found at: https://cerenempostgraduates.wordpress.com/cerenem-journal/