The RANEPA School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
The Centre for Studies in History and Culture
invite to participate in the international conference

“Arts Lab in Performative Arts: Between a Metaphor and a Practice”

Since the 1960s the Arts Lab theatre has been widespread in Europe and, in a few decades, became widespread in Russia as well. This format, being new and flexible with regard to time and place, enabled the self-actualization of many a collective perceiving theatre as a space of anthropological experiments, alternative ethics and social utopia. Russian theatre with its extensive history of the “studio” movement was no exception. On the turn of the 1980s and 1990s it appeals to the Arts Lab organizational principles as most suitable for the goals and character of its functioning: “Arts Lab” principles had, in a way, influenced the design and functioning of the School of Dramatic Art under Anatoly Vasiliev, the OKOLO (‘Near Stanislavsky’s house’) theatre under Yuri Pogrebnichko, the 'Chelovek' (‘A Human’) Moscow Drama Theatre under Lyudmila Roshkovan, Boris Ponizovsky’s theatre and many more.
We invite scholars of various research schools and disciplines to focus upon the specificities of interaction structures between participants of art collectives (groups, troupes, laboratories, schools), to address the Arts Lab experience within the context of the history of experimental theater, personal artistic biographies, as a sociology of art, art theory and cultural studies problem.
Presentations might be arranged around various aspects of history and contemporary state of affairs of the Arts Lab movement and Arts Lab work within theatre as well as other artistic practices.
Within the conference a call for papers is open for the following panels:

An “Arts Lab” within the social and cultural context: strategies of self-identification

The history of the Arts Lab movement lists a number of most various options of integrating Arts Lab practices into the contemporary social and cultural context. In some cases Arts Labs may be regarded as counter-culture phenomena; in other instances they assume the role of agents for cultural and social changes. What is the relationship between the Arts Lab work forms within art communities and the context of changes, reform, stagnation and other social transformations? What is becoming the decisive factor in the choosing of scenarios of Arts Labs’ development in various social and economic and cultural situations?

Between an art work and a process: the aesthetics of Arts Lab work

Since the 1960s, Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre experience has served as a model for various studios all over the world that had chosen Arts Lab work as an alternative to commercial theatre. Could that be postulated that with Arts Lab as an organizational structure, a specific Arts Lab aesthetics has emerged and spread worldwide? How do participants of Arts Lab work perceive its “outcomes”? How are the conditions of spectators’ access to Arts Lab work articulated and how is the spectator’s role in various Arts Lab practices perceived?

From studios to Arts Labs? The origins of the studio movement

The 1970s and the 1980s became a heyday of the USSR studio movement, which did change not only the language of theatre, but the work ethics within theatre collectives as well. Could the studios – both amateur and professional – be regarded as Arts Labs’ predecessors? What links did exist there between studio theatres in the USSR and those in Eastern Europe? Is there some common tradition uniting studio theatres of various decades of the 20th and 21st centuries?

“Arts Lab” today: the artistic and institutional contexts

These days, a quarter-century since the collapse of the USSR, the concept of an Arts Lab has firmly established itself in the art community language and is used a lot more often than it was in the 1980s. Why do contemporary artists, directors, curators, art scholars choose the notion of Arts Lab to describe the nature of an artistic activity? How exactly are organizational and artistic principles being sought by contemporary art and experimental theatre? By what means do art communities enshrine their agreements?

Working languages of the conference are Russian and English.
Those wishing to participate in the conference should provide their talking points (500 words max) along with a brief CV at performlabconfgmail.com. Please mention the panel you are applying for in the email subject line. Applicants shall be informed upon the Organizational Committee decision prior to 15 April 2018.
The Organizing Committee maintains a limited payment fund to provide Moscow accommodation for participants from elsewhere.
The conference shall take place at the Russian Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow).
The Organizing Committee of the conference are Elena Gordienko, Valery Zolotukhin, Julia Liderman, Elena Nagaeva, Varvara Sklez.