PERFORMANCE MATTERS
https://performancematters-thejournal.com/

Call for Papers: “On Being There”

In a moment marked by competing and layered modalities of attendance and attention, what does it mean to be there, to be present for and with, to attend an event or attend to a matter of concern? As our attention is rendered as a commodity and our presence can often be fragmented in digital economies, examining when, how, and where we are present, in attendance and attention, in both mind and body, matters profoundly. Something is asked of us when we come together in the shared space of an intentional gathering — whether that be a performance, a protest, an intervention, a waiting room, or an act of bearing witness - and something emerges from these acts of coming together. How does the act of being there, together and apart - as spectators, performers, activists, neighbours, friends, collaborators, citizens, kin, chosen or unchosen - invite or foreclose certain modes of response-ability, vulnerability, attunement, or solidarity? What forms of presence emerge in the shared space and time of encounter? What kinds of co- presence are afforded or disallowed in the layered modalities of presence that emerge in digital spaces?

“Being there” could be understood as a complexly embodied and experienced phenomenon that sits in uneasy relation to the human and the more-than-human at technological, biological, and even planetary scales. In some ways, more bodies are able to be present with the digital - those of us who are disabled, chronically ill, caretakers, or otherwise vulnerable to the microbial presences in live events - are finally able to show up and participate in spaces from which we have often been excluded. In this sense, being there or showing up doesn’t necessitate being in the same physical and microbial space. At the same time, the rise of digital modalities can have an isolating and fragmenting effect, demanding and dividing our attention, calling us into work on our day off, separating us from each other in the real time of encounter. And these same technologies of attention and attendance that we navigate daily are inextricably linked to resource extraction, massive water use, as well as economies of information and abandonment that, too, require our attention and care.

Performance and theatre studies scholars have powerfully theorized the complexities of liveness and co- presence, exploring questions of temporality, mediation, affect, and embodiment across live, recorded, and digitized performance modalities. As we find ourselves in a moment marked by multiply mediated and overlapping forms of attention and attendance, how might we think through the entanglements, epistemologies, and ethics of liveness and co-presence in the space of the event or the encounter? What is at stake in these layered modes of presence and co-presence? What kinds of being and knowing and tending are made possible or impossible in the process? What is the space-time of an event or encounter that is shot through with different technologies and techniques of attention, attending, and tending to, and how does it matter?

This special issue invites articles, interviews, and creative works that speak to the question of what it means to be there, in the broadest sense. We invite works that address the urgency of protest, the intimacy of encounter, the uncontainability of affect, the vulnerability of co-presence, the embodiment of knowing, the fullness of silence, the epistemologies of presence/absence, the layeredness of space-time, or any other exploration of the process of being there, of sharing space, together and apart, across multiple technologies of dis/connection.

Please submit a 300-word abstract of your contribution, which includes a description of the type of work you will be doing (article, artistic reflection, conversation, podcast, video, etc) and the expected length by November 1, 2025 to Coleman Nye (anye@sfu.ca) and Lilian Mengesha (lilian.mengesha@tufts.edu). Full contributions for accepted abstracts will be due February 15, 2026 and go through peer review to be published in the Winter 2026 issue.