CFP: [Collections] CFP: Performing at the Crossroads: Critical Essays on Performance Studies and Irish Culture

full name / name of organization: 
Sara Brady
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CALL FOR PROPOSALS: EDITED COLLECTION

Performing at the Crossroads:
Critical Essays on Performance Studies and Irish Culture

Co-edited by Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh

In the field of Irish studies, ‘performance’ has been typically engaged in terms of theatre (the
staging of the dramatic text); dance (traditional Irish dance; post-Riverdance commercial forms);
and music (the informal seisiún; traditional music; the ballad tradition). Recent changes in Irish
society (historical revisionism; feminist and queer politics; net migration; multiculturalism;
globalisation) and the Irish arts industry (the growth of the independent theatre sector since the
1980s; the experimentation with artistic form across a range of disciplines, including the growth
in interdisciplinary work) have all prompted the need to think further about the complex and
under-researched area of performance in and of Irish culture. It is increasingly well recognized
that the categories of ‘Irishness’ and ‘Irish culture’ are themselves highly performative, and in
timely need of critical address.

This collection seeks to fill this critical gap by looking to performance studies to inform Irish
studies. The interdisciplinary field of performance studies approaches performance as an object
of study and as a method of analysis. Invigorated by a wide range of theories not associated with
traditional dramatic or theatrical criticism, performance studies considers all forms of live
performance occurring within designated performance spaces, while also analyzing practices
which occur outside conventional theatre spaces, including ritual, play, spectacle, politics,
geography, landscape, architecture, etc. through the frames of history, anthropology, sociology,
ethnography, globalisation theory, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, feminist and queer
theories, among others. Performance studies defines liberally that which can be examined ‘as’
performance.

We seek essays that will draw upon a variety of critical approaches to explore the connection
between performance studies and expressive Irish culture at local, national, and international/
diasporic levels. While we are not opposed to the analysis of performance as a structured
discipline, we are primarily interested in the analysis of acts that either puncture or blend into
the social.

While a wide range of subjects will be considered, topics might include:

• Parades: St. Patrick’s Day (in Ireland and abroad); political parades, etc.
• Sport: Performances of Irish athletes on local, national, and international levels; the Gaelic
games; Irish participation in rugby, soccer, cricket; race, gender, and nationality in sport
performance
• Music: Change and adaptation in traditional Irish musical performance; transmission of
musical styles and traditions over generations
• Language and Orature: Oral traditions; performance and orature; Irish language
performance; translation; storytelling, etc.
• Dance: 'Dancing at the crossroads'; codification and construction of Irish dancing forms; the
relationship between Irish dancing and international forms, e.g., tap; commercialism and
globalisation in Irish dance (Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, etc.)
• Tourism: Performing heritage and the heritage industry; package heritage and other tours
to Ireland; bus tours and spectatorship; touristic sites of 'quintessential' Irishness (from the Cliffs
of Moher to the Guinness Storehouse)
• Theatre: New conceptions of performance; live art; dance-theatre; Irish circus tradition;
site-specific and non-traditional performance spaces; international responses to Irish
productions in Ireland and on tour
• Ruptures of performance: The Abbey riots; Irish audiences abroad; public insurgence and
intervention during (theatrical) performance
• Rituals and Religion: Funerals; wakes; American wakes; weddings; religious processions;
papal visits to Ireland; Croagh Patrick; Lough Derg; The Legion of Mary; Marian apparitions;
moving statues; Station Mass; holy wells; pilgrimages (Knock, Lourdes, Medjugorje, etc.)
• Festivals: Historical and contemporary; national and local; the festivilisation of culture, such
as the Beckett Centenary
• Folklore and spiritualism: Folk villages; folklore performance; the use of spiritualism and
the occult by early Abbey writers
• Ethnic and Cultural Identities: Performances in the Traveller community; Diversity Ireland,
NPAR (National Action Plan Against Racism), and new immigrant performance; religious
identities; community-based performance; theatre-in-education
• Geography and Space: Performance spaces; public monuments; public art projects; murals;
urban development and regeneration; audio-tours; Tara; Newgrange, etc.
• Death and Commemoration: Sites of memory, history, and forgetting (the G.P.O.; Moore
Street; Glasnevin Cemetery; Magdalene laundries; Famine memorials)
• Politics: Performance and politics; parties and leaders; discursive constructions (Fianna Fáil
as a performer’s party, for example); Sinn Féin and the media, etc.

Proposals of 250 words, including a short biographical note, should be sent to the editors by
October 1st, 2007. Completed essays of 4,000-6,000 words will be due in January 2007. Send
proposals and any inquiries to: Sara Brady (bradys1_at_tcd.ie) or Fintan Walsh (walshf_at_tcd.ie).

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Received on Tue Sep 04 2007 - 13:46:20 EDT