We are currently accepting proposals for the next issue of Platform: volume 17, issue 2, Gatherings, co-edited by Milo Harries (University of Cambridge) and Grace Joseph (Goldsmiths, University of London).

The deadline for proposals is 23:59 on Monday 31st July, 2023. 

Proposals should be submitted to platform-submissions@rhul.ac.uk. 

Call for Papers: Platform 17:2, Gatherings (Summer 2024)

The page and the auditorium (or their equivalent) might then be thought of as places where writers and readers and performers and audience members meet, not in order to think the same thoughts or to see and hear the same things, nor in order for change to occur (though – importantly – it might, and often will), but in order to explore the act of gathering itself. (Shah, 49)

This issue of Platform takes interest in how gatherings are formed, on and off page and stage. For Gareth White, division is a core part of the initiation of the aesthetic: ‘[a] social occasion’, White writes, ‘becomes a theatre performance partly through the separation of performers from audiences’ (7). Accordingly, in this issue we call attention to distinctions, seeing distance and difference as potential foundations for encounter, identity, and solidarity. This issue holds space, with Rajni Shah, as with Sara Ahmed, for reflections on the formal politics of encounters in general, and theatre encounters in particular. We are curious about conventions of orientation, and habits and customs of arrival, asking: how do people meet, in theatres, and in discussions about theatre? Who is allowed access, and how are some denied it? When does a performance’s political work begin? Who gets to attend at all? How are people made to meet and held apart from meeting? By whom? On whose terms? For whose ends?

This issue thus engages with theatre as both an expression of and experiment in what Doreen Massey calls ‘the social in the widest sense’: ‘the challenge of our constitutive interrelatedness [...] and the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which that sociability is to be configured’ (195). By extension, we’re also interested in how the relationships between writers, editors, and readers will be structured in this issue, following Petra Kuppers’ play with I/you/we pronouns as ‘a deliberate invitation – not to overidentify but to wonder’ (1); Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s provocation, ‘[h]ow did you and I get to be here, interacting across this page?’ (76); and Salomé Voegelin’s endeavour to ‘find my voice in reading yours aloud’ (xi). As such, we are considering textual, visual, and auditory formats, and invite contributions which engage with the first- and second-person encounter in content and in form. Across these formats, and in addition to the questions above, respondents are invited to consider, especially in light of their intersections with questions of disability, class, gender, sexuality, and race:

• Gatekeeping, prestige, and exclusivity in relation to theatre and theatres
• Behaviour policing, ‘reasonableness’ and disruption (Sedgman)
• Stage-door culture, celebrity casting, and fandom
• Relationships between ideas of artistic ‘quality’ and the provision of access
• Funding, programming, and competing principles of access
• The pragmatics and aesthetics of theatre architecture
• ‘Nonperformative’ commitments to access (Ahmed, ‘Declarations’)
• Relaxed venues and performances
• (Re)imaginations of the academy
• Accessible or embodied pedagogy
• Relationships between text, voice, and sign language
• Theatre’s relationship to other spaces of collective pleasure and group identity (e.g. football matches, religious ceremonies, and gigs)
• Hybrid formats (e.g. for conferences, festivals, and shows)

We are eager for submissions across a range of scales and frames: proposals might, for instance, consider individual works; institutional commitments (e.g. Battersea Arts Centre's configuration as a relaxed venue, or Slung Low's lockdown reinvention as a food bank and community support centre); or dramaturgical explorations of accessible, ‘immersive’ and non-normatively-participatory forms. 

We are inviting abstracts of 300 words, to be submitted to platform-submissions@rhul.ac.uk by 23:59 on Monday 31st July, 2023. Please also include a short biographical note. In the past, Platform has most frequently published academic essays of approximately 4,000 words. All of the pieces for this issue, however, will be produced in audio and text formats, with the ambition of collectively representing neither a ‘text-first’ nor an ‘audio-first’ collection. We are therefore keen to receive proposals that think creatively about this dual format, and are open to abstracts that reflect the proposed work in whichever manner you feel is most suitable; this includes, but is not limited to, conventional essays. As such, we welcome (for example) visual contributions, and encourage the inclusion of image or audio descriptions. We will also gladly collaborate on descriptions after submission, if preferred. Should your abstract be accepted, the deadline for first drafts will be Monday 9th October, 2023.

Please send any enquiries to Grace (gjose003@gold.ac.uk) and Milo (meh57@cam.ac.uk).

References

Ahmed, Sara. ‘Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’. borderlands 3:2, 2004.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.

Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, 2000.

Kuppers, Petra. Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Massey, Doreen B. For Space. SAGE, 2005.

Sedgman, Kirsty. The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Shah, Rajni. Experiments in Listening. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Pluto Press, 2022.

Voegelin, Salomé. Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

White, Gareth. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.