Signata Annales des sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics n° 11 (2019)

"Le sens de la performance : à partir des arts vivants / The meaning of performance: from arts and beyond"

The next issue of Signata aims to study specifically the artistic declinations of performance from a semiotic perspective, studying thus their regimes of signification, efficacy, and social inscription. A semiotic perspective on artistic performances may consider diverse levels: for instance, it may be conceived as a simple value transformation, as in the case of the performances in greimasian semiotics where an established practice in a specific domain aims to produce certain acts. But artistic performances may also be conceived as practices that by the installation of a tension between diverse spaces of semiotic pertinence (real or fictional), or by a different pertinentization operations modulates the presence and the actions efficacy, produce certain aesthetic effects.

Remaining in the field of the “artistic” performances, a semiotic perspective allows to deepen some aspects as:

- The event nature of performance despite the tension between program and improvisation. This aspect emphasizes the constitution of the scene itself, of the space and time of performance and all the elements that may affect or problematize its recognition and course of action.
- A certain actantial reversibility since the performance provides – or at least does not prevent - multi-stakeholder and distributed initiatives (calling or overturning the role of the audience, but also proving "test" operations towards the audience, particularly in performances with audience activation devices).
- A work in the space of action and on other spaces (enunciation, media, etc.) that can multiply the instances of the artwork, creating new landscapes, scenes or actors that overlap in the development of the performance, especially in cases where there are different types of media or, even when, complete technological environments are realized. In other words, the performative device seems to possess, more than others, the ability to generate tensions and perturbations between spaces (institutional, pertinence, etc.) that contribute to its own identification;
- The repetition - and, more generally, the rhythmic management of the course of action - which, despite of the event dimension of the performance, intervenes mainly in forms of reenactment. The repetition of what has happened in the past (or, on the contrary, the prefiguration of the becoming, as in pre-enactment forms) concerns both the relationship to the past event, the story, and the relationship to the performance event, as the traces and materials through which different temporalities are (re)built. In this way, the repetition of reenactment forms results in specific choices of action in the reconstitution of the singularity of the historical event, reconstitution which sometimes declines in the mode of witnessing, and others as an alternative figuration of the course of history;
- The relationship between the always ephemeral and deictically located event and its archiving on media such as video, photography or texts. This aspect focuses on forms of intersemiotic translation between different signification regimes, and in particular on possible enunciative and mediation strategies capables of reconfiguring an "object" that by its very nature exceeds the limits of the textualization of the presence in atto;
- The complex and multimodal relationships between different corporealities (the bodies of performers, the audience, the objects) and the establishment of inter-bodily communication systems that may have repercussions on somatic and / or passional efficacy and, in general, on different sensory regimes;
- The hybrid forms of reciprocal reconfiguration between digital and corporeal presence in the actual context of performance, in so far as the creation and action in virtual spaces and in digital environments complicates the idea of performance as a space for co-presence.

Theoretical and analytical contributions will be welcomed on the following topics:

- The relationship between backstage practices and performance topics;
- The amplification of bodies (actors and objects) through mediatization of the performance;
- The links between the subjective experience of the performer and the spectator’s reception;
- The links between the singular event and repetition, and between the project (eventually disappeared) and improvisation;
- The role of performances in the institution of values and in the construction of social and cultural identities conceived as acts of claim, of grip of an existential word;
- The relationship between performance and narrative;
- The possible intersections between the performance device and other artistic and / or socio-cultural practices;
- The specific forms of configuration of the political dimension through performance practices, as in the case of different callings of “pubic/audience” in perfomances-trials aiming at reconfiguring justice acts and the stage itself of the trial (cf. De Toledo, Imhoff, Quirós 2016).

Important dates:

Proposals (max 300 words) should be submitted in an anonymized format by May 1st 2018, to the following addresses:

v.deluca.83gmail.com, contreras.mariajosegmail.com.

Supplementary information (full name, email, academic affiliation, short bio-bibliographical note) should be supplied as a separate Word file.

Once the proposal is accepted, the paper has to be sent by September 1st 2018.

Submission guidelines: http://journals.openedition.org/signata/1163
Full CFP (in French and English):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O33bVq2UMkhEmLx3MvkcEWmge2YYSDOu/view