CfP: On Civility

[anna balint]

On Civility - Performance Research Vol.9 No.4 (December 2004)

Issue Editor: Alan Read

Call for Contributions

Proposal Deadline: February 27th 2004

Civility might appear the last and least likely term to mobilise attention in 
the non-conformist realm of performance. But this call for contributions, 
prompted by discussions that took place as part of the symposium 'Civic 
Centre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance' recognises an expanded political 
vocabulary in recent work drawing on a set of previously discredited terms 
(http:///www.civiccentre.org). The concept of 'friends and enemies' proposed 
by Carl Schmitt as the founding antithetical relationship of the political, 
'fidelity to the event' in the philosophy and writing on theatre of Alain 
Badiou, agencies of 'welcome and intimacy' in Alphonso Lingis's sensual 
locating of human- animal action, Doreen Massey's conception of the 
'stranger' within and outside the city, and Richard Sennett's engagement with 
terms such as 'respect' and 'civility' since he wrote 'The Fall of Public 
Man' thirty years ago, are part of this register. These writers point, at the 
very least, to an alternative way of conceiving of the much abused and banal 
'Other' of identity theory and its attendant critical concept of 
'difference' that once promised so much but seem to have delivered little 
beyond academic promotion. But do these categories resonate in the 
performance field?

Performance is unlikely to conceive of civility in its essentialist mode of 
'manners' (though a deconstruction of Ancien Regime customs of public formal 
display would be more than welcome) but rather is more likely to detect its 
interest in the term's fruity overtones: the 'sly civility' that Homi Bhabha 
locates at the heart of the modern colonising imagination, the uncivil wars 
inherent in performance interventions that contest the suffocating normative 
frame of civility challenging its whiff of legality, politics of restraint, 
accommodation to difference and rule-following, through to the inherent 
Janus-faced duplicity of the theatrical mode such as Edward Albee's stage 
direction in his Tony award winning play 'The Goat': 'There is chaos behind 
the civility, of course'.

This 'of course' might serve as an invitation to ask why and what is at stake 
in the politics and performance of civility? Is civility, as Sennett once 
proposed, simply the capacity not to make oneself a burden to others? That 
would, at a stroke, characterise theatre as one of the more uncivil arts. Or 
might we expand the implications of the term with Rustom Bharucha who asks: 
'Why should the civility of theatre be immune to the political threats faced 
in the larger public sphere? What makes the theatre so special when other 
sites of social interaction in the public sphere are under attack? Should the 
civil be immunised against the contamination of the political? What if the 
civil is infected in its own right?'

These questions pertaining to the operations of theatre and its institutional 
contexts might be equally addressed to the liberal humanist obsequies of the 
expanded field of performance: the grace notes of musical appreciation, the 
courtesies of choreography, the host and guest niceties of installation and 
site- specific work. It is not that civility always brings with it an 
inevitable dark-side of the intemperate and intolerant (stupid!). Nor that it 
is bound to its 'other' (witness the studied anarchic and rude that groups 
such as the Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment have done so much to 
return to the civil realm, why else do they bow to us after we have endured 
all those apparent insults?). But rather how to hold on to the botched 
concept of civility for long enough to see the myriad ways current 
performance (from the lyrical 'In Yer Face Theatre' to the pestilential 
Gwynneth Paltrow's Oscar acceptance speech, from the charming Stuart Brisley 
to the demonic Forster and Heighes) while protesting its radical 
qualifications continues to construct conditions for its polite perpetuation. 
That might be a question worth exploring (if you please - but if you can't be 
arsed, don't bother!).

To mix with papers developed from ideas originally presented at 'Civic 
Centre' and axioms from artists and academics we are looking for responses to 
the above concerns particularly from performance makers, artists, individuals 
and groups who suspect that performance experience is not sufficiently caught 
in the circulating simplifications of empathy and alienation, investment and 
boredom, nice and nasty and recognise civility as an unlikely circuit- 
breaker.

Deadlines are as follows:
Proposals: February 27th 2004
Draft manuscripts: April 8th 2004
Finalised material: May 14th 2004
Publication Date: December 2004

ALL proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to:

Linden Elmhirst - Administrative Assistant
Performance Research
Dartington College of Arts, Totnes,
Devon TQ9 7RD UK
tel. 0044 1803 861683
fax. 0044 1803 861685
email: performance-research at dartington.ac.uk
web: http://www.performance-research.net

Content specific enquires should be directed to:
Alan Read a.read at roehampton.ac.uk OR E-State at roehampton.ac.uk

Issue specific enquiries should be directed to:
Ric Allsopp transomatic at orange.net OR r.allsopp at dartington.ac.uk

For complete Guidelines for Submissions please see:
http://www.performance-research.net/pages/guidelines.html

Performance Research is MAC based. Proposals will be accepted in hard copy, 
on CD or by e-mail (Apple Works, MS-Word or RTF). Please DO NOT send images 
without prior agreement.

Please note that submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it 
presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication 
elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript, the author(s) agree that the exclusive 
rights to reproduce and distribute the article have been given to Performance 
Research