Volume 31, Issue 3 – On Musicality

Deadline: 25 June 2025

Issue Editors: George Rodosthenous and Demetris Zavros

On Musicality aims to operate at the intersection of multiple disciplinary boundaries, emerging research areas and evolving creative paradigms. We invite proposals that explore the evolving relationships between musicality and various elements of the mise-en-scène in contemporary performance. This includes investigations into how musicality interacts with creative processes, influences genre formation or redefinition and contributes to the subversion or development of theatrical conventions. Our aim is to trace and analyze this expanding tessitura of connections, revealing new insights into the role of musicality in theatre-making today.

Musicality is understood here as a relational force – emerging through the interplay of bodies, technologies and environments – with the capacity to reshape how we experience time, presence and agency in performance. This issue focuses on practices that place musicality at the centre of the creative process, exploring its generative potential as a source of material, rather than treating it as merely a complementary or incidental layer of performance.

In Musicality in Theatre: Music as model, method and metaphor in theatre-making (Routledge, 2014), David Roesner explores musicality as a ‘catalyst’ that enables the ‘interaction and interplay’ between theatre and music and determines ‘how they interact and react with each other’ (p. 235). Musicality is disentangled from ‘its common use as a descriptor of individual musical ability’ (p. 8) and becomes a heuristic concept that facilitates analysis. This allows Roesner to examine musicality as an aesthetic dispositif (Foucault) that manifests in various ways in the work of theatre (p.10) practitioners historically as well as in contemporary theatre praxis; the musicality dispositif, Roesner suggests, has been instrumental in re-imagining theatre, while also problematizing the competing and historically predominant dispositif of the separation between art forms, the resulting educational disciplines, aesthetic practices/processes and associated economic and political implications.

A tendency towards ‘musicalisation’ is similarly observed by Hans-Thies Lehmann as one of the stylistic traits he ascribes to postdramatic theatre (2006), alongside Varopoulou’s ‘theatre as music’ (1998, 2002). Alison Oddey, in Reframing the Theatrical: Interdisciplinary landscapes for performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), also notices a shift ‘in the director’s compositional skills, in the creating, composing and editing of a textual score, in a musical theatricality to be conducted, in a role of director that might be described as being a conductor–composer–collaborator’ (pp. 23–4). Thomas Ostermeier postulates that ‘[t]heatre is the art of processes, of rhythms, and therefore, the art of organising time’ (2016: 172) and Tony Gardner examines how time structures and signatures (2012) can be analysed and used in performance creation alongside ‘compositional linguistics’, the idea of ‘speech as music’, extending Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints system and exploring examples from film and theatre to develop a semiotic approach to time in performance. Such ideas resonate in global traditions – like the rhythmic architecture of Indian Kathakali, the cyclical time of Japanese Noh and the time-sculpting pulse of the gamelan in Indonesian Wayang Kulit – which demonstrate musicality not as accompaniment, but as dramaturgical engine.

Roesner and Rebstock introduce the term ‘composed theatre’ (2012) to capture the multifarious ways of approaching ‘the theatrical stage and its means of expression as musical material … according to musical principles and compositional techniques and apply musical thinking to a performance as a whole’ (p. 9). The diverse (and even productively contradictory) approaches employed by practitioners associated with the analytical term are discussed as contemporary extensions/interrogations of lineages that connect to practices of ‘theatricalizing music’ or ‘musicalizing theatre’. The term, which is useful in recognizing the growing tendency towards interart and hybrid genres in contemporary theatre practice, can also be viewed as a further extension of examining musicality as a dispositif.  Heiner Goebbels’ work exemplifies this shift, resisting traditional narrative structures and embracing multisensory experiences that encourage audiences to make individual connections between performance elements. Goebbels’ concept of theatrical polyphony extends musical de-hierarchization to all elements of theatre, including lighting, sound design and video, creating new possibilities for audience engagement and reception.

Building on existing work in music-theatre and composed theatre practices, the editors invite contributions that respond to newly emerging understandings of musicality and musicalization, within a (post)postdramatic theatre context and beyond. The issue also responds to the turn towards orality/aurality in theatre-making of the digital age (Radosavljević 2023), as well as the expanding role of new technologies and increasingly hybrid forms of performance practice.

The editors seek to expand, further acknowledge and ‘musically’ (re)frame the discourse on directorial approaches that embrace alternative hierarchies, by questioning the traditional, centralized role of the director as sole auteur, instead promoting more collaborative (Radosavljević 2018) and decentralized models of authorship (Sidiropoulou 2020). Meanwhile, George Rodosthenous (2023) proposes a framework that integrates musicality and transformative mise-en-scène, further blurring the lines between traditional directing and composition.

The issue also invites contributions that explore examples of the growing centrality of musicality in contemporary actor training pedagogies. For example, Konstantinos Thomaidis maps recent developments in voice pedagogy (2019), highlighting a shift towards more integrated, relational and embodied approaches, some of which foreground musicality as a central mode of enquiry. Thomaidis also explores musicality in relation to ‘physiovocality’ (2014), illustrating alternative models of integrating voice and movement in Gardzienice’s practice. Ben Spatz likewise places musicality at the heart of training, framing embodied practice as knowledge (2010, 2015).

We are also particularly interested in emergent research methodologies in which musicality, as introduced at the outset of this call for papers, operates not merely as content but as a generative principle – a way of knowing, structuring and sharing that challenges conventional scholarly formats and opens up novel epistemic and performative potentials. Projects exploring polyphonic and multimodal research designs, such as Anna Helena McLean’s recontextualization of Polish theatre training techniques (2019) and Spatz’s multimedia citation of Gardzienice’s work (2014), showcase the potential for musicality to drive new forms of knowledge generation and transmission. Demetris Zavros’s Practice as Research in ‘music-centric’ theatre (2009, 2012) also examines approaches to creative practice in relation to musical conceptual models and searching for productive conjectures in the field of performance philosophy (for example, Deleuzian ‘refrain’ and ‘becoming music’).

The politics of musicality, both in relation to aesthetic practice and process, form a significant part of the investigation here. We are particularly interested in how the musicality dispositif can be productive in re-invigorating feminist and postcolonial modes of resistance in theatre making. Jennifer Walshe, among others, uses musicality as a deeply political tool by constantly re-defining music and its place in how cultural narratives are constructed and documented (for example, Aisteach (2015)). In ULTRACHUNK (2018), created with Memo Akten, Walshe performs alongside an AI-generated version of herself, forming a live dialogue between human and machine. In her essay 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music, she frames this relationship as a ‘companion species’ (after Donna Haraway), offering a nuanced alternative to dominant tech dystopias.

This call for papers invites contributions that expand the discourse on musicality in contemporary theatre, and approaches that challenge Eurocentric frameworks. We encourage innovative perspectives that reframe artistic hierarchies, collaborative authorship and the intersections of embodied practices, technologies and transformative research methodologies. From the collective polyphony of Balinese Kecak to the relational agency of West African Griot storytelling, from the affective chant of Iranian Ta’zieh to the epistemological rhythms of Aboriginal Corroboree, diverse global practices challenge dominant modes of authorship and production. We are especially interested in work that engages with these and other musical traditions, performance practices and aesthetic philosophies from across the globe, addressing how they shape the aesthetic, epistemic, and political dimensions of performance-making today.

Indicative themes for contributions to this special issue will include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Musicality and Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics
• Musicality and Composed Theatre
• Musicality and Collaboration/Re-imagination of Hierarchies
• Musicality, Feminist and Postcolonial Modes of Resistance
• Musicality and Internationalization/Cross-cultural Collaboration
• Musicality and Approaches to Actor Training, Directing and Rehearsal Methods
• Musicality and the Dramaturgy of the Mise-en-scène
• Musicality in Research Methodology Design and Documenting/Archiving Performance Praxis
• Musicalization and Writing: Writing as Composition
• Musicality and Polyphony/Chorality in Performance
• Musicality and Aurality/Orality, Sound (Design) and Soundscapes
• Musicality in Digital, Intermedial and Posthuman Performance Contexts
• Musicalization as a conduit between Semiosis and Materiality; Meaning and Affect
• Musicality and notions/experiences of Collectivity, Community and Memory
• Musicality and Accessibility, Disability and Inclusive practices

Format

Authors are invited to submit 300- to 400-word abstracts (with a 100-word author bio) for articles (6,000 words), critical essays and provocations (3,000 words), including short essais (3,000 words), interviews, practice-research essays, poetic interventions and other contributions that attend to (but are not limited to) any aspect(s) of the above. Non-standard formats such as artist pages, highly illustrated articles and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies are welcome.

The editors are committed to diversity and inclusion, and warmly encourage contributions from all sections of the academic and artistic community, including those who are likely to be under-represented in scholarship.

Issue Contacts:

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:
Email:  George Rodosthenous: g.rodosthenous@leeds.ac.uk; Demetris Zavros; d.zavros@ljmu.ac.uk

Schedule:

Proposals: 25 June 2025

Outcomes: July 2025

First drafts: October 2025

Final drafts: March 2026

General Guidelines for Submissions:

• Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website – www.performance-research.org – and familiarize yourself with the journal.
• Proposals should be created in Word – this can be standard Microsoft Word .doc or .docx via alternative word processing packages. Proposals should not be sent as PDFs unless they contain complex designs re artist pages.
• The text for proposals should not exceed one page, circa 500 words.
• A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text.
• Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that there is a maximum of five images. If practical, images should be included on additional pages within the Word document.
• Proposals should be sent by email to info@performance-research.org
• Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.
• Please include the issue title and number in the subject line of your email.
• Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
• If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On final acceptance of a completed article, you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.