ABSTRACTS: due 1 November 2021
Submit here.
Conference Website here.
The panel (sub-theme) is being organised Matthew Sergi and Jeff Stoyanoff, who invite proposals for their cfp, below.
Medieval drama and music studies continue to be transformed by performance-based research and performance-as-research. Such a methodology, founded on the understanding that medieval performance texts’ power and meaning depended (and still depends) on their live, participatory embodiment by real people, has obvious relevance to this year’s general theme of contact and touch.
Less obvious, however—in fact, rarely spoken aloud—is the crucial role that the participants’ real beliefs may play in medieval texts’ re-embodiment. Rather, when we invite real bodies to inhabit medieval texts, especially at the secular institutions which usually host research productions, we tend implicitly to exclude, occlude, or ignore the idea that some players of medieval performances might still actually believe in some of the religious material that they are reciting, singing, seeing, or touching in performances. Medieval performances work through belief with bodies: the ability to think through belief openly now, we contend, may prove crucial to the efficacy of performance-based research’s body-oriented learning.
We acknowledge that an invitation to participants to speak freely and openly about their faith—as it relates to medieval texts in present-day performance, whether drama, music, recited poetry, or any other performable genre—may make potential participants feel worried about seeming unprofessional, or may make us seem unprofessional for asking in the first place. It is precisely the fraught interrelation of perceived professionalism and perceived secularization of present-day medieval performances that interests us as scholars here. We take seriously, and want to learn from, the perspectives that real belief may grant and, likewise, the perspectives that agnosticism or non-belief may grant.
What happens to medieval play texts’ enactments of faith, which depend on embodiment and in bodily proximity, when they occur under an unspoken assumption that performers do not and could not believe what they are saying? What happens when performers who participate in such productions really do believe, whether or not they make their beliefs known? Can such productions implicitly mute belief—or shun believers? If so, can they also exclude communities—those within which faith-based institutions play central roles? How might such exclusions limit diversity in casting? How are these concerns different when faith-based institutions do the staging? How might differences and diversities of belief among present-day casts play against (or with) medieval texts’ assumption of uniformity—if those texts did assume uniformity at all? What benefits might be yielded for our field, and for the diversity of its knowledge as much as its performers, if the subject of participants’ real faith, during performance-based research, were rendered more speakable and approached more openly?
Premodern Performance Cultures 