{"id":6858,"date":"2025-05-26T14:32:33","date_gmt":"2025-05-26T18:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/?post_type=tribe_events&p=6858"},"modified":"2025-06-06T17:59:20","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T21:59:20","slug":"pfn-submissions-for-inscribe-journal-of-creative-writing-issue-10-theme-journey-are-now-open","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/event\/pfn-submissions-for-inscribe-journal-of-creative-writing-issue-10-theme-journey-are-now-open\/","title":{"rendered":"N – Open Call for Performance Research. Theme: On Musicality"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Current open calls for submissions<\/h1>\n
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Volume 31, Issue 3 – On Musicality<\/h3>\n

Deadline: 25 June 2025<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Issue Editors: George Rodosthenous and Demetris Zavros<\/p>\n

On Musicality<\/em>\u00a0aims 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-sc\u00e8ne 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.<\/p>\n

Musicality is understood here as a relational force \u2013 emerging through the interplay of bodies, technologies and environments \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Musicality in Theatre: Music as model, method and metaphor in theatre-making<\/em>\u00a0(Routledge, 2014), David Roesner explores musicality as a \u2018catalyst\u2019 that enables the \u2018interaction and interplay\u2019 between theatre and music and determines \u2018how they interact and react with each other\u2019 (p. 235).\u202fMusicality is disentangled from \u2018its common use as a descriptor of individual musical ability\u2019 (p. 8) and becomes a heuristic concept that facilitates analysis. This allows Roesner to examine musicality as an aesthetic\u00a0dispositif<\/em>\u00a0(Foucault) that manifests in various ways in the work of theatre (p.10) practitioners historically as well as in contemporary theatre praxis; the musicality\u00a0dispositif<\/em>, Roesner suggests, has been instrumental in re-imagining theatre, while also problematizing the competing and historically predominant\u00a0dispositif<\/em>\u00a0of the separation between art forms, the resulting educational disciplines, aesthetic practices\/processes and associated economic and political implications.<\/p>\n

A tendency towards \u2018musicalisation\u2019 is similarly observed by Hans-Thies Lehmann as one of the stylistic traits he ascribes to postdramatic theatre (2006), alongside Varopoulou\u2019s \u2018theatre as music\u2019 (1998, 2002). Alison Oddey, in Reframing the Theatrical: Interdisciplinary landscapes for performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), also notices a shift \u2018in the director\u2019s 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\u2013composer\u2013collaborator\u2019 (pp. 23\u20134). Thomas Ostermeier postulates that \u2018[t]heatre is the art of processes, of rhythms, and therefore, the art of organising time\u2019 (2016: 172) and Tony Gardner examines how time structures and signatures (2012) can be analysed and used in performance creation alongside \u2018compositional linguistics\u2019, the idea of \u2018speech as music\u2019, 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 \u2013 like the rhythmic architecture of Indian\u00a0Kathakali<\/em>, the cyclical time of Japanese\u00a0Noh<\/em>\u00a0and the time-sculpting pulse of the gamelan in Indonesian\u00a0Wayang Kulit<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 which demonstrate musicality not as accompaniment, but as dramaturgical engine.<\/p>\n

Roesner and Rebstock introduce the term \u2018composed theatre\u2019 (2012) to capture the multifarious ways of approaching \u2018the theatrical stage and its means of expression as musical material \u2026 according to musical principles and compositional techniques and apply musical thinking to a performance as a whole\u2019 (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 \u2018theatricalizing music\u2019 or \u2018musicalizing theatre\u2019.\u202fThe 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\u00a0dispositif<\/em>.\u202f\u202fHeiner 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.<\/p>\n

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 (Radosavljevi\u0107 2023), as well as the expanding role of new technologies and increasingly hybrid forms of performance practice.<\/p>\n

The editors seek to expand, further acknowledge and \u2018musically\u2019 (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 (Radosavljevi\u0107 2018) and decentralized models of authorship (Sidiropoulou 2020). Meanwhile, George Rodosthenous (2023) proposes a framework that integrates musicality and transformative mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, further blurring the lines between traditional directing and composition.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018physiovocality\u2019 (2014), illustrating alternative models of integrating voice and movement in Gardzienice\u2019s practice. Ben Spatz likewise places musicality at the heart of training, framing embodied practice as knowledge (2010, 2015).<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s Practice as Research in \u2018music-centric\u2019 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 \u2018refrain\u2019 and \u2018becoming music\u2019).<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0Aisteach<\/em>\u00a0(2015)). In\u00a0ULTRACHUNK<\/em>\u00a0(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\u00a013 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music<\/em>, she frames this relationship as a \u2018companion species\u2019 (after Donna Haraway), offering a nuanced alternative to dominant tech dystopias.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Kecak<\/em>\u00a0to the relational agency of West African\u00a0Griot<\/em>\u00a0storytelling, from the affective chant of Iranian\u00a0Ta’zieh<\/em>\u00a0to the epistemological rhythms of Aboriginal\u00a0Corroboree<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Indicative themes for contributions to this special issue will include, but are not limited to, the following areas:<\/p>\n