Tuesday, March 11, 2008

4th Annual Conference, Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), University of Leeds, September 3-5, 2008.

The TaPRA Theatre, Performance and Philosophy Working Group would like to invite proposals for papers for this conference. Please send abstracts with a brief biographical note to the convenors, Professor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe dmeyerdinkgrafe@lincoln.ac.uk or Dr Dan WattD.P.Watt@lboro.ac.uk by the deadline of 30 June 2008.

Theatre Performance and Philosophy: Mission Statement: Ever since Aristotle's Poetics in the West, and Natyashastra in what is now South Asia, philosophy has played a major role in relation to theatre, both in explaining the phenomena associated with theatre and in influencing theatre practice and theory. Besides examining the often overlooked historical links between philosophy and theatre in the works and plays of given thinkers like Hegel and Sartre, of particular interest to the TaPRA Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group will be the use of theatrical metaphors in philosophy and the notion of the "performative" and performance, from Austin's How To Do Things withWords to Derrida's "Signature, Event, Context". The radical transformations of philosophy undertaken by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bataille, Debord, and Baudrillard offer philosophy itself as a theatre in which its poetic aspect is asserted as irreducible to any political or social agenda that may seek to define it. In examining the links between recent philosophical enquiry and theatre and performance this working group will explore the potential practical and theoretical implications of such a turn.

Working Methods: The TPP working group will meet annually at TaPRA conference and maintain a lively debate in between through an email list and research paper presentations at both Lincoln and Loughborough. An outlet for publications exists for appropriate titles, including conference proceedings, in the Rodopi series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, for which TPP co-convenor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe serves as general editor, as well as through the refereed web journal at http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/index.htm

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