Special Issue on Movement Theatre
Theatre and dance share the same stage space. At times, they even share the same department. And yet, these two practices continue to define and train themselves in separation. This special issue of Theatre Survey calls on scholars to address the implied gap between these two fundamentally related activities. This might take the form of signature movement theatre practitioners such as German choreographer Pina Bausch. It might look more closely at ensembles like Pig Iron Theatre Company who intentionally blur the spaces between dance, mime, and devised theatre. It may compare the melding of these forms in the dance theatre of ballet or musical theatre. It might resemble previous scholarship on embodied acting, turning a new eye to other possible embodied theatrical practices.
There is a challenge at the heart of this call. Large amounts of emotional communication onstage reside in affective gesture, proximity of performers, the physically motivated moments of pure subtext. There is always, if you will, a “dance of words” in any theatrical text. The music behind it can quite simply be their intonation, force of delivery, voiced intention, or even thematic echoes throughout a play. Various directors will compose their own version of a physical score for blocking or textual interpretation, like Robert Wilson's storyboards. The trick is to locate this space between word and action and wrestle with it, chew on it, digest it, and name it in a variety of ways.
Some have called this space Laban. Others name it Lecoq. Those with signification as their deepest concern label it Freud, Jung, or others. It is the dialogue between bodies and thoughts in space that questions if written/spoken language even captures essence, if words really mean what they describe, and if sign-language theatre comes closest to bridging the gap. This is the conversation I want to start with this special issue of Theatre Survey. It may, in its multifarious ways, feel fringe to theatre historians in comparison to the paths they usually travel, and yet, it requires the same scholarly pursuits of researching pictures, texts, digital recordings, and digging through archives to produce answers to the question of what lies between.
And for those who think this call for papers smacks of performance studies, know that this term stretches as far as it does to imagine all possible avenues into this space. I invite a broad spectrum of imaginative writers to submit their explorations, their machinations, their theatricalizations of the space between theatre and dance. It is a space worth naming, but it wears many disguises. Shout them out!
Please follow Theatre Survey Submission Guidelines at www.astr.org/page/ts_submission_guide.
Submit completed articles to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatresurvey.
Deadline: 1 January 2024.
Questions may be addressed to Special Issue Editor Telory D. Arendell at [email protected].
