CFP: PSi #13, NYU

PSi #13 Happening/Performance/Event
8th – 11th November 2007

New York University

PSi #13, Happening/Performance/Event will look to both performance studies’ history and futurity. The invocation of Happening harkens to the performance practices that emerged from the late 1950’s. That mode of Avante-Garde performance and the critical approach developed by Michael Kirby for describing it are key sites for the origins of Performance Studies. The event has been theorized as an occurrence that is ultimately an interruption that represents the not-yet-imagined new. This conference seeks papers, panels, and performances that consider the happening and the event, and their key relationship to the field of performance studies.

Proposals might include:
- The relationship between performance and futurity.
- The new that performance promises:
- new technologies
- new political strategies
- new understanding of self, other, race, gender, sex, ability
- New forms of performance that serve as an interruption in the continuum of the present.
- The history of researching the new that Performance Studies has always undertaken.
- The history and future of the happening.
- Performance and performance studies as interdisciplinary rubrics to consider events that generate possibilities to understand the new.
- Performances of great magnitude and the everyday.
- Theories of eventhood in performance, art and cultural theory.
- Questions of the relation between performance and visual art, dance and performance in everyday life.
- The relationship between the body and the event, the body and a happening.

The conference will be staged in the middle of New York City’s PERFORMA Biennial. PERFORMA is a non-profit interdisciplinary arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world. The organization is directed by the Performance historian and curator Roselee Goldberg and mounted the first Performa Exhibition in 2005, a major new Biennial of Visual Art and Performance. PSi #13 will be developed in collaboration with PERFORMA, sitting inside its schedule and aside its numerous performance events across the city of New York. The conference will be hosted by New York University’s Department of Performance Studies and the conference hub will be the newly renovated departmental facilities. Due to a limited amount of space, please note that this years conference will have fewer concurrent panels than in years past.

Paper and presentation proposals:
Proposals for papers and presentations should include a 250-word abstract including your name, affiliation, mailing address, and email address. In addition, please indicate, in advance, what your spatial and technical (including details such as formats and regions of media, laptop set up, etc.) Full-length papers will not be accepted.

Panel proposals:
All panel proposals should include a 300-word rationale. If you have constituted the members of your panel (usually three speakers), you should include participants' names and contact information.

Proposals should be sent to psinternational13@nyu.edu and are due no later than February 8, 2007.