Call for Statements 2020
Shakespeare-Seminar | CFP Shakespeare-Tage | Bochum 2020
CFP Shakespeare-Seminar 2020
Shakespeare and Dance
Dance is a prevalent art form in early modern culture, and an established part of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. From masques to interludes to comedy endings to courtly entertainments and weddings: dancing is frequently seen as a cross-class and cross-generic form of entertainment. From the early modern period onward, Shakespeare’s poetry and plays have been adapted into different art forms, including dance and music, which offer their own expressive repertoire to interpret Shakespeare’s works. “Adaptation, recreations, replications,
and reductions enrich our understanding not only of current and past dance practices, but of their performative strategies and material conditions,” as Jennifer Nevile asserts in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019, 6). The ‘bodily turn’ in literary and cultural studies, for instance, has offered new frameworks and conceptual approaches to think of the body as integral parts of textual and artistic productions.
This year’s Shakespeare Seminar seeks to address this rich archive of Shakespeare and dance. Topics may include, but are not restricted to
• Companies, actors, venues, repertoires, and their affinity with dance
• Shakespeare and body theories
• Music and dance adaptations
• Comparative approaches to dance in different dramatic genres
• Interludes and post-play entertainments
• Masques
• Witchcraft and dancing
• Textual representation and metaphors of dance
• Sonneteering and dancing
• Gender, race, class in/and dance
• Dance as (transcultural) adaptation
• Jig dancing and dumb shows
Our seminar plans to address these issues with a panel of six papers during the annual conference of the German Shakespeare Association, Shakespeare-Tage (24-26 April 2020 in Bochum, Germany). As critical input for the discussion and provocation for debate, we invite papers of no more than 15 minutes that present concrete case studies, concise examples and strong views on the topic. Please send your proposals (abstracts of 300 words) by 30 November 2019 to the seminar convenors
Lukas Lammers, Free University Berlin: l.lammers@fu-berlin.de
Kirsten Sandrock, University of Göttingen: ksandrock@phil.uni-goettingen.de
The Seminar provides a forum for established as well as young scholars to discuss texts and contexts. Participants of the seminar will subsequently be invited to submit (extended versions of) their papers for publication in Shakespeare Seminar Online (SSO). While we cannot offer travel bursaries, the association will arrange for the accommodation of all participants in a hotel close to the main venues. For more information please contact Kirsten
Sandrock and Lukas Lammers. For more information about the events and publications also see: shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/en.