Revue Performance Paradigm n°10, 2014 (AUS)

Dealine:  30 janvier 2014
http://www.performanceparadigm.net/

Call for Papers Performance Paradigm, No. 10, 2014.
Performances of resistance/resisting performance

In The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012) Jodi Dean argues that the aesthetic focus disconnects politics from the organized struggle of working people, making politics into what spectators see. Artistic products, whether actual commodities or commodified experiences, thereby buttress capital as they circulate political affects while displacing political struggles from the streets to the galleries. Spectators can pay (or donate) to feel radical without having to get their hands dirty. The dominant class retains its position and the contradiction between this class and the rest of us doesn’t make itself felt as such (Dean 2012: 13-14).
In light of this challenge to the value of art in the 21st century, this issue seeks to explore the ways in which performance intervenes in or responds to the status quo. It considers whether or not there are performances of resistance and what these might look like. It seeks to explore works that sit in opposition to Dean’s provocation that art has become a vehicle to ‘buttress capital’ rather than a site of radical intervention, provocation or disruption.

We call for scholarly essays, interviews, performance reviews and other creative and or critical responses that call Dean’s assertion into question. From theatres of shock and awe, to dramaturgical incursions, to online work that aims to immerse or create an interaction, we encourage responses that consider the political and philosophical questions that performances of resistance and the act of resisting performance might evoke. We want to talk about the ways in which performances move beyond generating product for the lazy consumer (as per Dean’s provocation), to opening up affective spaces in which audiences are mobilized. We also want to think about how those modes of resistance might be made manifest. Do performances of resistance encourage us to, fracture the order of the ‘sensible’ as Jacques Rancière (2004) might have it? Do they change us psychically or philosophically? Do they, or should they be asked to do anything at all? Perhaps Dean is right and we should all go home. This issue seeks to test these assumptions by engaging with works that either resist performance or create resistance in response.

Please submit abstracts of 350 words by January 30, 2014 to:
h.grehan@murdoch.edu.au