Dr Freya Vass, Lecturer in Drama and Theatre in the School of Arts, is guest co-editing an issue of the journal ‘Performance Research’ with Dr Pil Hansen (University of Calgary) with the focus ‘On Perception’, to be published in February 2021.
Performance Research is a specialist journal that aims to promote a dynamic interchange between scholarship and practice in the expanding field of performance, with an emphasis on contemporary performance arts within changing cultures.
On Perception invites artists and scholars to consider how perception is addressed and affected in and through performance.
Performing arts training and performance methods develop perceptual skills that enable performers to direct their attention in extended ways, enabling them to remain present and aware while simultaneously perceiving multiple information sources, making decisions and acting on them. Process strategies and approaches to creation often tax well-trained, automated skills by involving physical or cognitive obstacles and conflicts, with an aim towards enhancing the performer’s ability to bring something new into the world. This work, in turn, invites audiences to also attend and perceive differently—to re-calibrate and re-cognize their sensing and to more fully perceive across sensory modalities. The potential effect of this invitation is to attune audience members’ minds and bodies to a wider range of possibilities than what is perceptible within the pragmatically driven limits of everyday sensory perception. Not only aesthetically but also ideologically and ethically demanding, this perceptual re-calibration is a foundational condition of imagination, of approaching diverse minds and bodies as potentials instead of pathological deviations, and of the ability to register the many ways in which cultural practices and environments are both affected by and constrain human perception and action.
There is a crucial need to study the potential of the performing arts to affect our perceptual range and to re-sensitize us to connections between environment, human (inter)action and creative thinking. Yet this specific dimension of the work performing artists do is difficult to articulate, advance and measure. Unless it takes spectacular forms like perceptual assault, manipulation or theatrical magic, it tends to be addressed in vague terms that remain implicit to artists in training, audiences and funders.
The call for submissions for the issue is open until 29 April 2020 and can be found here:
www.performance-research.org/editorial-callsforsubmissions.php