[1]
From: Paisid Aramphongphan <paisid.aramphongphandmu.ac.uk>
Date: Sep 5, 2018
Subject: Notate, Document, Score: Body culture & visual culture from Laban to Judson and Beyond

Deadline: Nov 5, 2018

This session will examine the intersections of body culture and visual culture across time, encompassing notation, performance and experimental scores, photographic documentation, film, and other archival sources. Rather than focusing on rubrics traditionally understood as dance, such as choreography and performance designed for time-limited showings, we seek papers that examine body and movement as an expanded field of practice, and how that fits within, emerges out of, and/or shapes a particular social and historical context.

Examples include 1920s body culture in Germany and the figure of Rudolf Laban, labanotation as visual culture, and related developments in abstraction, the body in dada, and the Bauhaus. Post-1960, the Judson Dance Theater spawned off new experiments enmeshed in the countercultural ethos, the latter formative for the emergence of contact improvisation and contemporary dance techniques such as release. Like Laban, early release practitioners also made visual work in their own right, exploring the logic of their bodily practice through visual means. We may further link this body of work at the liminal space between notation and creation, art and dance, with work such as Trisha Brown’s drawings and more recent iterations in contemporary practices, such as William Forsythe’s digital experiments.

Along with papers, this session welcomes alternative format proposals such as performance, workshop, re-enactment, oral history, sub-panel with practitioners.

To offer a paper or alternative format proposals, please email your paper or alternative format proposal to Paisid Aramphongphan, paisid.aramphongphandmu.ac.uk and Hyewon Yoon, hyewon.yoonunh.edu

Please include a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 25-minute presentation, your name and institutional affiliation (if any).

Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because it will appear online, in social media and in the printed programme.

You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks from the session convenors.

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[2]
From: Greg Salter <g.j.salterbham.ac.uk>
Date: Sep 5, 2018
Subject: Uneasy Queer Art Histories

Deadline: Nov 5, 2018

In the UK in 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales was marked with celebratory media coverage, academic publications, and high-profile exhibitions (including Tate’s ‘Queer British Art’, ‘Coming Out’ at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the National Trust’s ‘Prejudice and Pride’ programme). The presence of queer art histories and queer histories in major museums was framed as reflecting social progress and the increasing cultural acceptance of LGBTQ identities.

While these gains are notable and worth celebrating, wider work in queer theory has begun to seek to address elements of queer histories that have been ignored or forgotten in more recent years. In response, this session focuses on uneasy queer art histories; queer art histories which may be disturbing, disruptive, difficult, disavowed, or rooted in failure. It seeks uneasy queer art histories in response to queer theorist Kadji Amin’s call for queer scholars to ‘inhabit unease’ rather than seeking to avoid it. In addressing what might be uneasy, this session aims to expand and disrupt queer art histories beyond narratives of progress and beyond purely UK or US contexts, and to reflect on how we do queer art histories and queer histories more widely.

This session seeks papers from any period and location that explore how queer art histories might have uneasy connections with, for example, racism, colonialism, violence, failure, loss, pederasty, fascism, and homonationalism.

To offer a paper: Please email your paper proposal direct to the session convenor, Greg Salter, University of Birmingham g.j.salterbham.ac.uk

Provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 25-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional affiliation (if any).

Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because it will appear online, in social media and in the printed programme.