Theatre and Performance Research Association

The relationships between performance, identity and community are of significant critical concern in theatre and performance studies. This working group explores the ways performance can allow constituencies of interest to be realised and to gain social efficacy.

The group understands that each of our three key terms is complex, and that the terms and consequences of their intersection pose challenges for both critical and political practice. We wish to encourage research that engages the rubric of the group inventively and interrogatively, building on a number of key issues and problems:
• The basis on which performance may be linked with concerns of identity and community
• The ways in which relationships between performance, identity and community are materialised and gain theatrical and social efficacy
• The intersection between performance, civil society and democracy
• The historical and geographical inscription of this relationship
• The challenges and opportunities for critical practice posed by examining this relationship.

Call For Papers 2010: Questioning the Authentic

For TaPRA 2010 we invite contributions that respond to the working group’s statement above. We would also like to develop some of the questions that have come up over the past couple of years around identity and representation by focusing on issues that emerge around conceptions of ‘authenticity’. Critics such as Jean Baudrillard have famously questioned the whole idea of authenticity by presenting a vision of the world as a ‘hyperreal’ series of simulations that have lost touch with any prior ‘original’ referent. Yet, notions of the ‘authentic’ still retain considerable currency within theatre and performance studies whether it is in terms of recording the ‘authentic’ experience; presenting the ‘authentic’ body or engaging in an authentic creative process. We are interested in the conceptual slipperiness and potential tensions posed by notions of the authentic as manifest in various aspects of theatre and performance.

Questions addressed might include:

•    How is the authentic produced in/through representation? In what ways do spectators, participants or performers understand their sense of an experience/performance as being authentic, and by what strategies is that sense created or ‘proved’ in performance?
•    What is the relationship between authenticity and theatricality?
•    What relationships exist between the concepts of performativity and authenticity, and how might an exploration of performativity contribute to an understanding of ‘the authentic’ in performance?
•    What are the paradoxes of the authentic when it comes to questions of identity and representation?
•    What words and/or concepts get associated with or used synonymously with ‘authentic’ (e.g. integrity, real/actual, truthful, genuine, etc), and what can we learn from these assumed and/or habitual connections?  What examples of performance complicate or contest these connections?
•    How does the concept of authenticity connect with/influence ideas about ownership, entitlement, control and/or permission?
•    What creative processes or forms of theatre/performance have a relationship with the authentic and why?
•    What relationships exist or are often assumed between the concepts of authenticity and value?
•    What is the relationship between authenticity and the effect/affect of theatre and performance?
•    What issues are raised by theatre/performance that deliberately disturbs the authentic with an emphasis on artifice, trickery and illusion?

Areas that it might be interesting to consider include (but are not restricted to):
•    Autobiographical performance
•    Heritage and history
•    Museums and/or museum theatre
•    Participatory performance
•    Theatre/performance with primarily commercial aims
•    Documentary/verbatim/tribunal performance
•    Performance tricks and performed trickery
•    Spiritualist and other such performances (mediums, performed séances, hypnotist and mind-reading shows, etc.)
•    Replication, re-enactment, re-playing, recording, recontextualisation
•    Appropriation
•    Spectacle
•    Authenticity and physical presence – bodies, places, objects
•    Performances that deliberately complicate or play with the idea of authenticity

During TaPRA 2010 we will also be hosting a joint session with the Applied and Social Theatre Working group, which will adapt both groups’ 2010 themes.

Joint themed session: The materiality of performance

For the joint session, we invite papers that explore the ways in which performance practices can be considered to be ‘materialised’ as forms of identity, relationship, community and/or event, and the relationship between the materiality of performance and theatrical and social efficacy. Papers might explore the relationship between materiality and authenticity, materiality and evidence, physicality, liveness and the affect or effect of performance, the kinds of ‘communities’ and ‘identities’ materialised through performance and the affects or effects – or remnants and relics - of performance leftover or re-circulated once a performance has finished. The theme of ‘materiality’ opens up a territory of relevance to the Performance, Community and Identity group’s interest in ‘authenticity’ and the Applied and Social Theatre group’s interest in exploring the histories and geographies of applied theatre practices at this year’s conference. The theme is purposefully broad so as to allow for an open exploration of confluences between the interests of the two working groups

Please send a brief (250 word) proposal for either the ‘authenticity’ or ‘materiality of performance’ sessions and a brief biographical statement by Friday 30th April to each of the co-conveners at the addresses below

Co-conveners