Call for Proposals: Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance

Volume 2: Creators

Co-edited by Indu Jain, Jill Lane, and Elliot Gordon Mercer

This volume devoted to “Creators” is broadly conceived to include choreographers, playwrights, directors, and dramaturgs, as well as artists who traversed or redefined these categories. We conceptualize creators as those who generate the worlds that are inhabited by performers or materialized by designers and crafters; those who shape such worlds through the realms of texts, bodies, gestures, sounds, scores, frames, communities, ecosystems, archives of feeling, and/or dreamscapes; those who have radically reconsidered the world-building capacities of art.

This volume seeks to engage a feminist historiography across a broad temporal and geographical scope while illuminating the workings of power in the production of history and foregrounding the “intimate” relationality of local and intersectional contexts, both in the Global North and Global South. We eschew canonicity, teleology, and notions of comprehensiveness.

We seek contributions on creative innovations that disrupt or work outside of dominant narratives of feminist/women’s art movements. We aim to situate creators in relation to intersectionality; coloniality or post-coloniality; migrations, diasporas, and transnational circulations; compositional methods and processes; multiplicities and hybridities of genres; genealogies of practice; networks of influence; legacies and lineages; iconoclasm; or ideas of historical sedimentation and amalgamation.

We invite contributions that forward critical engagement with:

• Feminist historiographical approaches to performance, with particular interest in creators who worked prior to the 20th century.

• The contributions of trans, non-binary, cis, femme, queer, and/or gender nonconforming creators who illuminate, rupture, subvert, or otherwise destabilize gender norms.

• Playwriting, performance texts, dances, and dramaturgies that innovate with form, structure, content, and modes of address as practices of feminist/queer world-making.

• Innovative modalities of the body, and works that destabilize or offer alternatives to dialogic communication and linearity of plots.

• Ensemble-based working processes, models for collective creativity, and localized creative communities/ecosystems.

• Multimodal artmaking processes that elude categorization in bounded categories, methods that challenge singularity, and creative practices that traverse rigid disciplinary specificities, including acts of solo experience, quietude, memory, myth, ritual, and dreaming.

• Feminist notions of art that are not object-oriented, or do not circulate as commodities within the art marketplace.

• Historiography grounded in ephemera, absence, disappearance, embodied repertories, and feeling backwards.

Contact Jill Lane (jl24@nyu.edu), Indu Jain (ms.indu@jdm.du.ac.in), and Elliot Mercer (elliotmercer@uchicago.edu) if you have questions.

Abstracts submitted should be 250 words, and include a working title and a description of the methodological approach. Potential contributors should also include a brief (150 word) bio. These should be combined into one MS Word document (Times New Roman, 12-pt, single-spaced) for submission.

New extended deadline for submission of abstracts is April 15, 2023.  Abstracts should be submitted online HERE.