2023-10-19

Guest-edited by Torsten Jost

Pamiętnik Teatralny / Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences

Deadline for abstract submission is 31 December 2023.

Deadline for submission of full texts: 30 March 2024

Contact email: pamietnik.teatralny@gmail.com

Pamiętnik Teatralny, a bilingual Polish-English academic quarterly published by the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, invites submissions for a thematic cluster exploring spectatorship in the performing arts as a historically and culturally situated, as well as materially grounded, practice of (re)generating and disseminating knowledge.

This thematic cluster calls for contributions that engage with spectating as a culturally and historically situated “way of knowing,” i.e., as an embodied practice that (re)generates knowledge(s). Practices of spectating not only draw on various forms of knowledge, including cultural, aesthetic, corporeal, and political knowledge, but also actively contribute to the (re)generation and transformation of knowledge that feeds back into artistic practices and can even claim validity and relevance beyond the arts. Moreover, recent theories of knowing stress the active role of objects, material arrangements and instruments (in short, non-human elements) in the activation and generation of knowledge. Against the background of these considerations, we invite contributions that address historical or contemporary practices of spectatorship in the performing arts, with particular attention to their complex material entanglements as well as their epistemic preconditions and effects.

Participants are invited to work with a broad, exploratory understanding of “spectatorial practices.” These can include various forms of preparation for participation in performances, critical-activist interventions in ongoing performances, as well as forms of subsequent engagement with performances that have already taken place. Of interest, for example, are spectatorial practices that consist of traveling to specific performance events, inviting and co-organizing specific performances, or engaging with announcements, reviews, or online ratings of performances. Also of interest are strategic interventions by spectators aimed at disrupting, interrupting, or even completely preventing planned performances to sensitize artists and other spectators to specific problems, i.e., to motivate or even demand them to generate certain knowledge. Last but not least, participatory and immersive forms of performance can also come into focus, raising the question of how spectators are confronted with unfamiliar “ways of knowing,” particularly through their bodily entanglement in certain material arrangements (for example, with the help of digital instruments).

In addition, contributors are asked to think explicitly about the methodological challenges of researching the epistemic dimensions of historical and contemporary spectatorial practices: How can one––as a spectator and researcher––reflect on the necessary situatedness of one’s own knowledge practices, including their histories, ethical dimensions and limits? How is it possible to acknowledge and write about the multiplicity of knowledge(s) that spectators (re)generate and disseminate in their diversity before, during and after performances?

The deadline for abstract submission is 31 December 2023. The authors of provisionally accepted proposals will be asked to submit their full texts by 30 March 2024. Please refer to the journal’s Author Guidelines at: https://czasopisma.ispan.pl/index.php/pt/dlaautora.