Deadline: June 1, 2020
American Society for Theatre Research, November 5-8, 2020 (*note this is the same weekend as ASEEES)
Working Session – Disrupted Nationhoods and the Repetition of Change: Theatre and Performance in Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia
Continuing from last year, we invite proposals to our Central and Eastern European focused group that advance our conversation toward dismantling artificial binaries (east/west, national/state, tradition/progress, minority/majority, etc.) based on static notions of repetition and reperformance. We want to further explore performance and theatre as means to disrupt core conceptions of seemingly clear-cut “new nationalisms” and cultural boundaries and identities. With our shared focus on countries reshaped and reconstituted numerous times, we ask: what does reperformance mean in a context where identities have been reformed amidst repeated geographic upheaval and political turbulence? What meanings does repetition create where the most frequent form of repetition is change? What can reperformance mobilize for audiences who have often witnessed it merely perform rearranged, narrativized pasts to serve agenda-laden purposes? How does performance conceptualize “national” and ethnic identities of the region–themselves often transnational–as borders are redrawn around/through them? How does performance offer useful disruptions of localized identities that embrace, integrate, or reject the global and transnational beyond recycling the familiar? Within such a context, does repetition or reperformance inevitably fail? If so, what modes allow us to analyze theatre and performance from this part of the world?
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