Special Issue Editor
“Performance Training and Well-Being”
Special Issue co-edited with Nathalie Gauthard
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Issue 13.2, June 2022.
https:/www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtdp20/13/2/
“Editorial” co-authored with Nathalie Gauthard and Roanna Mitchell, pp. 165-169.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19443927.2022.2074503
The Special Issue features thirty-eight contributors from eleven countries, who critically and reflexively investigate the cultural, social, political, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of performance training modalities that have the potential to foster, enhance, restore, and sustain the well-being of practitioners, audiences, and other/more-than-human participants and collaborators. We are especially honored to feature the work of Indigenous and non-Western artist-scholars responding to the urgent need to acknowledge, value, and engage with multiple ways of knowing so as to decenter, unsettle, and decolonize Eurocentric paradigms that still inform dominant knowledge systems.
We are deeply grateful to Rena Mirecka, Eugenio Barba, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Matthieu Ricard, Thomas DeFrantz, Jill Carter, Floyd Favel & Sabina Sweta Sen Podstawska, Ang Gey Pin & Tay Kai Xin Ranice, Jessica Rajko et al., Sondra Fraleigh & Karen Barbour, Jean-Marie Pradier et al., Roanna Mitchell, Bryony Onciul & Konstantinos Thomaidis et al., Christine Bellerose, Katie Lavers et al., Claire Fogal, Jo Losh & Jeremy Neideck, Marco Balbi Di Palma, and Pauliina Hulkko & Riku Laakkonen for their insightful, thought-provoking, uplifting, and energizing contributions.
“The Transdisciplinary Travels of Ethnography”
Special Issue co-edited with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston for Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies vol. 18, no. 6, 2018.
https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/csc/18/6
“Introduction to Special Issue: The Transdisciplinary Travels of Ethnography”
co-authored by Kazubowski-Houston and Magnat, pp. 379-391.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532708617737100
Abstract:
The theme for this special issue, which examines the transdisciplinary travels of ethnography at the intersections of anthropology, ethnography, cultural studies, performance studies, sport and physical culture studies, as well as theology, features contributions from Thomas F. Carter, Norman K. Denzin, Kass Gibson and Michael Atkinson, Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, Virginie Magnat, Jennie Morgan and Sarah Pink, and Natalie Wigg-Stevenson. Tracing the genealogies of encounters between performance studies and anthropology, this publication explores current convergences and envision future possibilities that might forge new directions for interdisciplinary research, and raises the following questions: What is lost and gained when ethnography “travels” across disciplines? How can ethnography’s transdisciplinary travels contribute to how we might conceptualize, reimagine, and practice ethnography today and in the years to come? What does it mean for ethnography to “travel” within a competitive and profit-driven neoliberal academia, where the pursuit of knowledge is no longer seen as a public good and an end in and of itself? The editors contend that fostering mutually beneficial cross/inter/ trans-disciplinary collaborations is critical to addressing real-world issues that call for ethically sensitive, culturally specific, socially responsible, and politically efficacious alternatives within and beyond the academy.
“Ethnography, Performance and Imagination”
Special Issue co-edited with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston for Anthropologica, vol. 60. no. 2, 2018.
https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/issue/view/6
“Introduction: Ethnography, Performance and Imagination”
co-authored with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, pp. 361-374.
https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/170
Abstract:
This introduction to the thematic section entitled “Ethnography, Performance and Imagination” explores performance as “imaginative ethnography” (Elliott and Culhane 2017), a transdisciplinary, collaborative, embodied, critical and engaged research practice that draws from anthropology and the creative arts. In particular, it focuses on the performativity of performance (an event intentionally staged for an audience) employed as both an ethnographic process (fieldwork) and a mode of ethnographic representation. It asks, can performance help us research and better understand imaginative lifeworlds as they unfold in the present moment? Can performance potentially assist us in re-envisioning what an anthropology of imagination might look like?
It also inquires whether working at the intersections of anthropology, ethnography, performance and imagination could transform how we attend to ethnographic processes and products, questions of reflexivity and representation, ethnographer-participant relations and ethnographic audiences. It considers how performance employed as ethnography might help us reconceptualise public engagement and ethnographic activism, collaborative/participatory ethnography and interdisciplinary research within and beyond the academy. Finally, this introduction provides a brief overview of the contributions to this thematic section, which address these questions from a variety of theoretical, methodological and topical standpoints. The thematic section features an interview with D. Soyini Madison, as well as contributions from Andrew Irving, Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, Virginie Magnat, Denise Nuttall, and Johannes Sjöberg.
“Voicing Belonging: Traditional Singing in a Globalized World”
Special Issue co-edited with Konstantinos Thomaidis for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017.
www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jivs/2017/00000002/00000002
“Voicing Belonging: Traditional Singing in a Globalized World - A Diphonic Editorial”
co-authored with Konstantinos Thomaidis, 97-102.
www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/intellect/jivs/2017/00000002/00000002/art00001
Abstract:
Konstantinos Thomaidis: Why conduct scholarly and artistic research on traditional singing in the global age? Given the dominance of new communication technologies and the unprecedented commodification of world cultures, investigating vocal practices rooted in oral cultures and traditional ways of knowing may seem futile and irrelevant. Yet, traditional singing is a powerful mode of human creativity, and traditional songs comprise a significant part of what UNESCO has designated as ‘our’ shared intangible cultural heritage. Current debates on cultural diversity demonstrate that rethinking regional, national, transnational and global notions of cultural identity is becoming increasingly urgent if we are to acknowledge and value the world’s biocultural diversity beyond borders that separate and delineate nation states, whose sovereignty continues to hinge upon legitimizing constructions of national identity. If, as Caroline Bithell reminds us in Transported by Song, ‘the act of singing with others is clearly about far more than simply producing sound’ (2007: xxx–xxxi), how does engaging in singing practices relate to emergent, unstable and conflicting versions of belonging in times of precarity?
Virginie Magnat: This special issue asks what is at stake today in cultural revitalization initiatives, academic research projects and artistic endeavours that seek to reawaken, restore, preserve, transmit and at times transform specific vocal traditions. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor (2003, 2008, 2016) considers song, dance and music to constitute a vital part of intangible cultural heritage, which she envisions as a repertoire of embodied memory through which cultural knowledge is created, preserved and transmitted. Cross-cultural analyses of orally transmitted vocal music practices corroborate the importance of embodied memory by showing that ‘prescribed series of sound or sound relations [are] specified by an exemplar (such as remembered performance) rather than in written notation’ (Tenzer and Roeder 2011: 11). The vitality and continuity of traditional singing hence crucially depend upon ‘remembered performance’ to transmit the sonic specificity and subtleties of interpretation pertaining to traditional music that are lost when transcribed through the standard western notation system, thereby clearly epitomizing the notion of intangible cultural heritage (Magnat 2017).